Rad. Valerianæ

Rad. Valerianæ

1846

Victor Eremita’s Admirers

One spring day in 1843, Meïr Aron Goldschmidt took the initiative to arrange a not entirely ordinary symposium, sending written invitations to two people. Only one of them reacted, namely P. L. Møller; the other did not even bother to reply to the invitation. This was all the more lamentable because he was the real occasion of the symposium and the point of the party. No one could reasonably blame him for his silence, however, because this absent person was none other than Victor Eremita, the pseudonymous author of Either/Or.

Despite the absence of the guest of honor, Goldschmidt’s dinner party was nevertheless an unforgettable success. P. L. Møller showed up as prescribed in the invitation, “crowned with laurels in the Greek manner and in a festive spirit,” and Goldschmidt, who was well aware that “symposium” meant a drinking party, opened a bottle of fine Italian wine, which is well-known to help promote the emergence of truth. The truth about Victor Eremita’s marvelous genius had indeed already emerged—in print, in fact, and thanks to Goldschmidt himself. In the March 10, 1843, issue of his popular journal The Corsair Goldschmidt had reviewed Either/Or enthusiastically, praising its author to the skies: “This author is a powerful intellect. He is an intellectual aristocrat. He scoffs at the entire human race, demonstrating its wretchedness. But he is entitled to do so; he is an extraordinary intellect.” Even if these were pretty grandiose words to have been uttered as early as March 1843, Møller could not but declare his assent. He, too, Goldschmidt later remembered, had believed that “Victor Eremita was the most intellectually gifted Hellene resurrected in modern times. There was a wealth of ideas, wit, irony, superiority—especially this latter. He stood superior to everything else and—if not by means of his personality, then by means of his ideas—he could himself be Either/Or, Both/And.” Victor Eremita, or rather his literary backer, with whose legal name the two men of course were quite familiar, was nothing less than “the chief spokesman for the aesthetic view of life.”

There was a heady atmosphere that spring evening, and as Goldschmidt writes, invoking a Mediterranean scenario, “Never, before or since, did we ever converse like that—as though beneath sun-dappled grape leaves by the shore of the Ionian Sea.” The gathering, in every other respect so pleasant, was disturbed only momentarily by a single little reservation on Møller’s part. For it was Møller’s view that while Either/Or was certainly an excellent work, it nonetheless consisted more of “the gossamer of thought than of flesh and blood.” At the time, this objection appeared to be little more than a negligible bagatelle, however, and Møller stood up and made the following proclamation: “Now I will make a pact with you: We must both remain in the service of literary truth, and if it is ever necessary, we will blindly oppose anyone whomever, including each other, … and as a reward we will remain imperishably young.” Goldschmidt continues, “We shook hands on this pact, both of us apparently in full seriousness, and I, at any rate, was deeply moved.” Møller, the ironist, was perhaps deeply moved as well, but if so, it was for completely different reasons than those that moved Goldschmidt, who did not have the imaginative capacity to guess what was on Møller’s mind when he spoke of total war in the service of literature.

Three years later, in 1846, Goldschmidt felt obliged to rid himself of The Corsair. The reason was Kierkegaard. That same year, Kierkegaard also became the reason, if somewhat more indirectly, that Møller was definitively expelled from the literary elite. Deeply disappointed, Møller left Denmark a couple of years later and moved to France, where he subsequently died in Dieppe. Kierkegaard noted his tactical victory with satisfaction, but at the same time he acknowledged with great bitterness what the pair, Goldschmidt and Møller, had accomplished together: They had altered his life so radically that it could be divided into pre-Corsair and post-Corsair periods. Goldschmidt was not in doubt about the matter, either. In his memoirs, written more than thirty years later, he called the events “a drama and a catastrophe for three people, of whom I am the only survivor.”

We hardly have to be Sherlock Holmes to sense that this involves events more complex than what Watson would consider elementary, and we may certainly ask how it was that things got to a point so unintended.

The Corsair—“A Devil of a Paper”

On October 8, 1840, exactly one month after Kierkegaard proposed to Miss Olsen, the first issue of The Corsair appeared. It was founded by Goldschmidt, who wrote most of the material, displaying great diligence, much bravery, and excellent spirits. As a young man he was an enthusiastic supporter of the French Revolution, and in Copenhagen he found four like-minded souls, the writers Poul Chievitz and Arboe Mahler, a clerk named Bisserup, and a revolutionary watchmaker known as Danton. In the end, this fellow, Danton, was not included on the editorial committee; he was just a bit too revolutionary for that. But it was he who gave the journal its name. When he heard that there were plans for a witty and political weekly he immediately rushed to the barricades, exclaiming enthusiastically, “That’s it! A new paper, a Devil of a paper, a real ‘Corsair-Devil’ like they have in Paris!”

In addition to a bit of satanic satire, the first issue contained two articles of a programmatic nature. The first of these—“A Toast That Can Serve as a Program”—states that it is the intention that the journal remain in opposition both to conservatives and to liberals, holding the middle ground between both parties. In a slogan borrowed from the French bourgeois monarch, the moderate Louis Philippe, this was called the juste-milieu, which the journal later illustrated in striking fashion: “When you see two people fighting and a third person comes along and fights with both of them, what do you call this third person? A rowdy? That may certainly be true, but you ought to say that he is the juste-milieu. Because he sides neither with the one nor with the other; he fights with both of them in unpartisan fashion, and this is precisely what is called the juste-milieu when it is most salutary.” In the other program article—“The Real Program”—Goldschmidt maintains further that The Corsair will not function as a political journal in the narrow sense of the term but will be an organ for “public opinion” and will thus be of “interest to all classes of readers.” In this same article we learn that “most of us are university students,” who therefore naturally view it as a duty “to fulfill to the best of our ability the obligation most closely connected with being a citizen of the academy: the maintenance and defense of the purity and dignity of literature.” In conclusion, “The Real Program” includes a few words about the name of the journal “because there might perhaps be some who would argue as follows: ‘A corsair is a pirate ship or not much better than a pirate ship. Consequently this paper will not be much better than a pirate paper, and if it doesn’t plunder people, it will at any rate flay them.’ ” To the relief of all, the editors could provide assurances that there were quite different, indeed noble, visions behind the paper: “We have imagined a ship manned by courageous young men who, in the thick of battle and headed out to sea under full sail, are determined to fight under their own banner for right, loyalty, and honor.” In other words, The Corsair was not to be a chatty little rag like the others of period, Politvennen [Danish: “The Policeman’s Friend”] and Raketten, for example.

There was a good deal of unconscious irony embedded in these programmatic declarations, because they charted a course from which The Corsair deviated right from the start. In fact the journal never navigated between the conservatives and the liberals but was clearly to the left of both groups. And from that vantage point it soon spread fear and dread with reckless attacks that brought it into constant conflict with the censors. Various police chiefs, primarily Reiersen, a well-known figure of the day, were kept busy pronouncing judgments and meting out jail time that was served by the various straw-man editors whose names appeared on the front page in rapid succession. A fellow named Lind, a rather alcoholic ex-greengrocer, who could probably neither read nor write, served as editor of the first three issues. Next came Buch, a wretched old sailor, whom Goldschmidt had met by chance one evening on Højbro; for a few kind words and a bit of money he assumed the post of editor. And so on. In the course of the first six months, The Corsair had no fewer than six straw editors of this sort, while the name of the actual editor, Goldschmidt, was glaringly absent for the first three years of the journal’s existence, appearing only in issue no. 161, when his name appeared at the bottom of the back page, where he was merely listed as the paper’s publisher. So when Kierkegaard subsequently referred to “an editorial staff of scoundrels” he was not so far off the mark.

The changing editors led to spicy (and circulation-increasing) rumors about a committee consisting of fifteen university students, sworn to secrecy, who held clandestine editorial meetings at various places around town. The truth, however, was nearer the opposite of this. For when Lind was sentenced to jail on bread and water, Chievitz, Bisserup, and Mahler had such serious misgivings that they completely forgot about their revolutionary tendencies. They withdrew from the paper, leaving Goldschmidt to deal with both kinds of sentences, the judicial and the journalistic, from then on. Quite literally. As a result of the so-called great Corsair case of 1842, Goldschmidt was sentenced to twenty-four days’ imprisonment plus a fine of two hundred rixdollars, and was furthermore to be subjected to lifelong prior censorship. All these difficulties only strengthened Goldschmidt, however, and starting with issue number 95 he signaled his rebellious stubbornness by ornamenting the front page of The Corsair with a pirate ship sporting the tricolor, the Jolly Roger, and a fluttering stern pennant bearing the slogan of the French Revolution—“Ça ira, ça ira!”—a motto chosen with care, which roughly translates as “Things will surely succeed!”

If The Corsair slipped past “Cape Reiersen,” it came out every Friday in a press run of three thousand. It was available at all booksellers in Denmark, Sweden, and Norway, and for only five marks every three months a person could have the time of his life—until it was his turn to be ridiculed in its satirical columns. This happened, for example, to J. L. Heiberg, who eighteen years before his death had the opportunity to read his own obituary, where it was stated with great emotion that his reign as the supreme judge of literary taste had now come to an end. The paper was read by everyone, from plebeian to aristocrat. Indeed, it even found its way into the royal chambers, where the little gray hairs on King Christian VIII’s head must have stood on end—he can hardly have been enamored of the paper’s republican zeal. Hans Christian Andersen, who also got his share of the paper’s attention, wrote quite accurately about the sort of traffic to which trashy magazines often give rise: “In the finer homes only the porter or the coachman subscribes, but it is read to pieces by the gentlefolk.”

The November 14, 1845, issue of The Corsair contained a review of Carsten Hauch’s novel The Castle on the Rhine in which Kierkegaard, in an aside, was praised at the expense of Orla Lehmann, “for Lehmann will die and be forgotten, but Victor Eremita will never die.” The following day Kierkegaard composed a lengthy “Plea to The Corsair” which among other things, contains the following: “Sing sang resches Tubalcain, which translates as Cruel, bloodthirsty Corsair, almighty Sultan, you who hold the lives of men like a toy in your mighty hand and like a whim in the fury of your disapproval, oh, permit yourself to be moved to pity, put an end to these torments—kill me, but do not make me immortal!” The plea, which is signed “Victor Eremita,” remained in Kierkegaard’s desk drawer, but it demonstrated that Kierkegaard could hit the right note and that he was inclined toward engaging in an intellectual cockfight with The Corsair, thus proving that he, too—he, if anyone—knew the art of being witty, and had a university degree to prove it! So in early June of 1845, when he mentions The Corsair in his journals for the first time, not merely does he reveal a quite thoroughgoing knowledge of the magazine’s habits, but he also makes it clear that he is among those still laughing, those who want to keep on amusing themselves—that is, at the expense of others: “It is curious that The Corsair has never hit upon portraying people in the style of classical antiquity, naked and with a fig leaf. A drawing in that style of Hercules or someone similar, for example, and then, underneath: Pastor Grundtvig.”

Comic Composition and Goldschmidt’s Flashy Jacket

Kierkegaard joined in the fun, approved of the format, and may very well have supplied some good, wicked ideas to Goldschmidt when they ran into each other on the streets of Copenhagen. And this happened frequently. They became acquainted with each other as early as the summer of 1838, when they met at a party at the home of the Rørdams out in Frederiksberg. “I was certainly not a calm, attentive observer, but I still have a mental photograph of him,” wrote Goldschmidt, who remembered Kierkegaard as a thin man, whose shoulders hunched forward a bit. His face had a healthy color and his eyes had a superior look, reflecting equal portions of good nature and malice. Goldschmidt and Kierkegaard both had to walk back to town, and as they strolled together along Gammel Kongevej, Kierkegaard asked Goldschmidt whether he had read his book From the Papers of One Still Living, which had just been published. Goldschmidt had indeed read the book, but without having caught the finer nuances, and in fact the only thing he could remember was that the book had been rather harsh on Hans Christian Andersen. This was not nearly enough for Kierkegaard, who discoursed on the book as they walked toward town, and to Goldschmidt’s amazement he seemed to grow larger and larger as he talked. And Goldschmidt remembered: “There was a long pause, and he suddenly took a little hop and struck himself on the leg with his thin cane. There was something jaunty about it, although it was completely different from the sort of jauntiness one usually sees in the world. The movement was peculiar and seemed almost painful. I am very much aware that I am in danger of remembering that scene with an admixture of knowledge from a later period, but I am sure that there was something painful in it, something of the following sort: It was the fact that this learned, thin man wanted to be a part of the joys of life, but felt himself either unable or not permitted to do so.” Goldschmidt is being overly modest, for he was in fact an excellent observer, and his mental photograph is the best picture we have of the young Kierkegaard. As with all good descriptions, we see it right in front of us.

For Goldschmidt, who according to his own testimony had the “instinctive need to be number one” and who never overcame his grief at not having done particularly well on his university entrance examinations, the encounter with Kierkegaard (who was no less ambitious, notably more talented, and seven years his senior) naturally summoned up equal parts of admiration and envy. These mixed feelings were also expressed in September 1841 when Kierkegaard published On the Concept of Irony, which was reviewed by a staff reviewer at The Corsair whose assessment was generally positive but who ironized a bit at Kierkegaard’s stilted language. Goldschmidt, however, felt that the reviewer had treated the contents of the dissertation a little superficially, so he added the following postscript: “If we go on to acknowledge that, despite this surprising language, Mr. Kierkegaard’s dissertation is of interest to those who have the patience to read it, this admission—of course, when it is put in the context of what has been said above—presumably grants Mr. Kierkegaard the justice that is his due.”

Shortly after this, the satanic editor and the ironic magister met on the street. Kierkegaard noted that he had now appeared in The Corsair, concerning which he had no objections. On the other hand, he complained that “the article was lacking in composition” and therefore called upon Goldschmidt to apply himself to “comic composition.” Goldschmidt’s immediate reaction was a sense of being flattered by the show of concern, but on further reflection he nonetheless felt humiliated because with his apparently well-intentioned advice Kierkegaard had in fact denied that Goldschmidt possessed “seriousness, respect, or reverence.” And the humiliation was not made any more bearable by the fact that Goldschmidt, lacking any education in aesthetics, had no idea whatever of what might be meant by the concept of “comic composition.” In the course of their subsequent conversations, Goldschmidt felt terribly tempted to interrogate Kierkegaard about the nature of this thing called comic composition, but on every occasion his courage faltered: “The moment one encountered him, one was under pressure, one was being examined, while he himself was somewhat reserved.” As Goldschmidt noted many years later, this much had been certain, however: In giving this ambiguous advice Kierkegaard had sharpened “the point upon which he himself was later impaled.”

For the time being, however, it was primarily Kierkegaard who jabbed at Goldschmidt. Thus Goldschmidt had purchased a coat at the most fashionable tailor of the day, Fahrner, who had promised that he would sew him a coat that would be so fine that its like had never before been seen in Copenhagen. And the coat was indeed unique—dark blue with a fur collar and with black braid on the breast, which gave it a military touch that appealed to Goldschmidt’s fantasies about weaponry. Goldschmidt, however, had the very understandable concern that the coat would attract too much attention. “Nonsense,” Fahrner had said, Goldschmidt should just go out and promenade down Østergade, which was then, as now, at the heart of fashionable Copenhagen. Goldschmidt thought that this was too daring, so he instead attempted Købmagergade, where to his great relief no one seemed to take any notice of the fabulously overdone coat. Passing through Amagertorv he went to Vimmelskaftet, and there stood Kierkegaard. He went over to Goldschmidt, spoke at first of various minor matters, but then suddenly said in an oddly hushed tone: “Don’t walk around in a coat like that. You are not a riding instructor. One ought to dress like other people.” Goldschmidt was so embarrassed that he was simply unable to say that he himself had had his doubts about the coat, that it had only been a trial run. He immediately returned home and had the coat sent back to Fahrner with orders that both the fur collar and the braid were to be removed. Goldschmidt ended his account on the following note: “The only thing that caused me pain was that Kierkegaard had thought that I was really pleased with the coat.”

Kierkegaard also hurt Goldschmidt’s feelings on a later occasion, when he pumped him about the origins of The Corsair and wanted to know how he could be so well informed about what was going on all over town. Goldschmidt answered modestly that he in fact was no better informed than many others who did a bit of reading in the newspapers. “But don’t you receive a lot of anonymous contributions?” Yes, he did, Goldschmidt explained, but most of them were unusable. “Why so?” Kierkegaard asked. Because, Goldschmidt replied, they revealed the most intimate sorts of family relationships; indeed the editors had even had a case in which a man and his wife informed against one another. “I don’t want to hear about it!” Kierkegaard shouted in order to make Goldschmidt stop, who did so immediately, though not without pain. “It hurt me, as if he were accusing me of having intended to betray some secret to him, as if I were of a coarser nature than he.”

Goldschmidt’s psychological sense was very keen. Thus in 1846, when Kierkegaard first mentions “Mr. Goldschmidt, university student” in his journals, the words exuded a grand condescension and surely reflected the attitude with which the seasoned author addressed the self-appointed editor while on his rounds through the streets of Copenhagen. In Kierkegaard’s journals Goldschmidt is referred to as a “bright fellow without ideas, without an education, without a point of view, without self-control, but not without a certain talent and a certain desperate aesthetic power.” The sketch is not particularly flattering, but neither here nor in his later journal entries was Kierkegaard blind to Goldschmidt’s talent, a talent he was wasting in the service of The Corsair, “the tool of vulgarity.” And Kierkegaard had repeatedly said this to Goldschmidt, all the while telling him to work on comic composition. Not surprisingly, the self-respecting editor was made uncomfortable by this sort of treatment. And indeed many years later Goldschmidt wrote: “He could make one feel very small.”

“I Am a Jew. What Am I Doing among You?”

For the time being, Goldschmidt’s sense of discomfort was held in check by his enthusiasm for Kierkegaard’s literary genius, which Goldschmidt and Møller had in fact celebrated with their symbolic symposium shortly after the publication of Either/Or. When Goldschmidt and Møller had met that evening, they had not known each other for much more than six months. Goldschmidt was never really able to grasp what it was that had led Møller to look him up, but it was, he writes, as though he had been sitting in his editorial offices unconsciously awaiting Møller’s arrival. The blond fellow entered, clad in a blue coat with shiny buttons and a pair of light-colored trousers, looking every bit the dandy. Goldschmidt knew that he had been the man behind a number of polemical articles in the journals Portefeuille and Figaro; that he had been awarded the university’s gold medal for his prize essay answering the question “Have taste and the sense for poetry in France progressed or regressed in recent times, and for what reason?”; and finally that Møller was said to be not merely satirical but also malicious, a feature that was further emphasized, Goldschmidt noted, by his splendid white teeth, which were revealed by even the slightest smile, and which in turn were a reminder that a man can bite.

Møller had just returned to Denmark from a trip to Norway, where he had been asked to convey greetings to Goldschmidt from the Norwegian author Henrik Wergeland. He could also report that The Corsair was so highly regarded in Norway that people thought it ought to be Norwegian! Naturally, Goldschmidt was almost bursting with pride and joy when Møller informed him that the Norwegians’ enthusiasm was not due so much to its political line as to its literary qualities, or its “high standing in the category of the aesthetic,” as Møller so elegantly formulated it. “I thus was granted, even if somewhat uncertainly, a place in the world, a new raison d’être. I was lifted out of obscurity and self-enclosedness to the border of something bright, wide open, and extraordinary. All aesthetic and poetic instincts had awakened within me, but they were fettered. Møller seemed to me to have the key to open them, the key to myself. I needed him as a deliverer.” Apparently it is not only woman who can quicken the poetic instincts: The encounter with Møller became an initiation into a life of poetry, and it was understandable that Goldschmidt wrote that Møller had worked “magic on me.”

Goldschmidt’s deliverance took place in early February 1843, when he had published a novel in the style of James Fenimore Cooper in The Corsair and was called upon by Møller, who in his characteristic fashion confided the following: “I have read your Cooperesque novel while at my barber’s. It fit in well with the application of the lukewarm shaving soap and it almost fit in with the shave, until just before the end, when my nose was cut as I made a leap because of what I will now tell you: In its final lines your story also makes a leap. It springs right into comic composition.” Goldschmidt had not told Møller of his struggles with Kierkegaard’s advice, so these words made Goldschmidt feel as though he had attained the unattainable and that, “like a sleepwalker, I had solved the Kierkegaardian problem and had produced comic composition! ‘God be praised!’ I exclaimed.”

Even though Møller’s praise strengthened their relationship, it never developed into a friendship in the deeper sense. Møller was too distant, aloof, and sarcastic for that, and they never came to be on a familiar footing. Møller believed that people of intellect should not get too close to one another; that sort of camaraderie should be left to the sort of people who go bowling. But if Møller’s attitude lacked “intimacy,” Goldschmidt, for his part, felt “a sort of infatuation.” Nothing less. Describing this bold and bantering dandy-cum-deliverer who had so suddenly appeared, Goldschmidt wrote that it was because of “his imagination and idealism, his sensually firm grasp on existence, his sharp, ironic good sense, that [Møller] was so convincing as well as so alluringly piquant.” It is therefore hardly any wonder that something like one-fifth of Goldschmidt’s memoirs are devoted almost exclusively to Møller.

Møller was not only the deliverer, he was also the seducer who had mastered the coy arts of evasion and retreat, something Goldschmidt would soon come to feel. Møller quite naturally took charge of Goldschmidt’s literary and aesthetic upbringing. He literally showed him the way to the university library, where the ignorant Goldschmidt had never set foot; he did not even know where the library was located, up in the enormous loft above Trinity Church, accessible from the spiral ramp of the Round Tower. But all the while Møller held his inquisitive pupil at arm’s length and, like Kierkegaard, gave him to understand that his destiny was to be “a creator of comic composition,” while for Møller himself was reserved the much more important work of speaking “the language of the gods in golden verse.” And this had strange consequences: “When he employed ruthless satire in rooting out every sign of ignorance, thereby helping to make me more knowledgeable, he was also working against himself or against those unique characteristics in me with which he enjoyed associating. In this way our relationship took on a strange, somewhat self-contradictory aspect, inasmuch as he also tried to restrain my acquisition of knowledge. This should not be understood to mean that he was predisposed to being jealous or afraid of me as a possible rival, but like a gardener he wanted to see me grow slowly, as slowly as possible.”

Møller himself was growing in wild and luxuriant fashion. He wanted to set fruit in the form of a series of public lectures on aesthetic and literary subjects that would fascinate the elite. No one was to know of his plan before he put it into effect, not even Goldschmidt. Indeed, Møller actually forbade Goldschmidt to read the articles he had published in various journals. Reluctantly, Goldschmidt obeyed the order and thus only became acquainted with Møller as a literary critic when Møller published his Critical Sketches in 1847.

Goldschmidt, however, was more than simply an obedient apprentice. He was also the editor of The Corsair and far more influential than Møller. And Goldschmidt was also a Jew. In the summer of 1844 he spoke up for the Jewish cause quite vehemently at the Danish nationalist gathering at Skamlingsbanken, where, after being provoked by a baptized Jew, he shouted from the podium to the many thousands gathered there: “I am a Jew. What am I doing among you?”

Later, over a bit of French bread and a glass of wine, Goldschmidt poured out his heart to Møller, sharing with him the sufferings connected with being a Jew, the unending snubs, the hostility, the mistrust, the hatred. Møller listened, speechless. Then he stood up, took his hat and his cane, and on his way out the door he said, “With feelings like that, one writes a novel.” And that was what Goldschmidt did. That very evening he composed the chapter that would form the conclusion of his novel, A Jew, published on November 6, 1845, under the pseudonym Adolf Meyer.

The book attracted a great deal of attention. It was the subject of a very positive review in Fædrelandet by Carl Ploug; and six years later it appeared in an English language translation and was subsequently sold as bookstall literature in America. Kierkegaard read it right away and found it in general very good—apart from “the abominably botched ending, that is certainly a sign of great immaturity.” When he met the proud debutant author on the street one day, he asked which of the book’s characters the author thought he had portrayed best. Goldschmidt had no doubt about this, it had to be the principal character, Jacob Bendixen. No, replied Kierkegaard, it is the mother. This caught Goldschmidt completely by surprise; he hadn’t given her a thought when he wrote the book. “I thought so!” was Kierkegaard’s knowing and pointed reply. And there were more kind words where these came from. Kierkegaard next asked whether Goldschmidt had read all the positive reviews and, in that case, whether he had considered their significance. Goldschmidt had done so, and he believed that the point of the reviews had been quite simply to praise the book. “No,” Kierkegaard replied, “the point is that there are people who want to see you as the author of A Jew, but not as the editor of The Corsair; The Corsair is P. L. Møller.”

When Goldschmidt heard this he was seized with panic on behalf of Møller because he realized that being identified with The Corsair would ruin Møller’s reputation and his future career. Goldschmidt therefore protested, reminding Kierkegaard that The Corsair had been founded long before Goldschmidt had met Møller, but Kierkegaard merely smiled, shook his head, and went on his way. Møller became despondent when he heard about it and pleaded with Goldschmidt to point out to Kierkegaard again, and yet again, the true state of affairs. Goldschmidt did so at the earliest opportunity, but in vain: “The philosopher was unyielding and merely said that there are reports in the world that are more accurate than any police report. I asked, ‘How can you have any report in this matter that is more reliable than mine?’ Then he laughed in his odd way, and I was tempted to treat the entire matter as a joke. But when I reported to Møller about my unsuccessful mission he took the matter more seriously and said that it would be a great problem for him just now if that opinion became general. He said it would therefore be preferable for us to break off our association for a while, which he then did, though not entirely.”

Malice in a Macintosh: Peder Ludvig Møller

Goldschmidt’s memoirs were written down in the 1870s, and of course his retrospective view of events from the mid-1840s is characterized by more than a few ex post rationalizations, but the fact that Kierkegaard wanted to identify Møller with The Corsair is not one of them. When Kierkegaard changed his relationship with Goldschmidt late in 1845, it was not merely because of The Corsair’s rampant satire, to which Kierkegaard always referred in justifying his protest; it was also, and perhaps especially, because of a powerful distaste for Møller, whom Kierkegaard wanted to damage to the maximum extent possible.

But who was he, then, this Peder Ludvig Møller, whom the Swedish writer O. P. Sturzen-Becker—a man familiar with the Copenhagen intellectual milieu of the 1840s—called “malice in a macintosh?” The son of a penniless merchant, Møller was born in 1814 in Aalborg, and it was there he passed his university entrance examinations in 1832, after which he set out for the capital. The next year, 1833, Møller passed the so-called second examinations with top marks in all subjects, but he never went any further at the university. He was enrolled in the theological faculty but his principal studies were medicine, languages, and theater criticism. In general, like Kierkegaard, he spent his youth on varied aesthetic and philosophical studies. Like Kierkegaard, he attended Martensen’s lectures during the 1838–39 academic year, when Martensen had set out in earnest to introduce Hegelianism into Danish intellectual life. And, like Kierkegaard, Møller chose to attend the lectures of Sibbern and of Poul Martin Møller. He offered homage to the latter in a loving memorial poem, which might indicate that, like Kierkegaard, he viewed himself as Poul Martin Møller’s pupil. He admired and imitated the revolutionary poets of the romantic era—Byron, Hugo, Musset, Heine, Rückert, Börne, and Pushkin—and the models Møller chose from the Danish literary scene were Adam Oehlenschläger, full of pathos; Steen Steensen Blicher, marked by an acute sense of melancholia; the sensualist Christian Winther; and the forthrightly erotic Emil Aarestrup.

Møller also had a keen appreciation—quite far-sighted, when viewed from the vantage of a later age—particularly of the merits of Hans Christian Andersen, whose biography Møller included in his Danish Pantheon and whose fairy tales he defended against Heiberg and Heiberg’s gossipy, denigrating consortium, or “the family,” as Møller called that clique in his correspondence with Andersen. It was certainly understandable that the two literary parvenus, Møller and Andersen, would be allies in the battle against the intellectually snobby Heibergians, who had rebuffed their uncultivated advances early on. And of course the circumstance that Møller was also a supporter of Scandinavian nationalism and had been an enthusiastic attendee at Grundtvig’s 1838 lecture series “The Memory of Man” only caused “the family” to wrinkle its collective nose even more.

Nor was Møller’s record exactly a spotless one. He had a remarkably flexible notion of the truth. For example, Møller had written an unusually nasty piece about H. P. Holst in The Corsair, but when Holst ran into Møller on the street and complained about it, Møller flatly denied having had anything whatever to do with the matter and told Holst that Goldschmidt could corroborate his innocence. Møller then rushed over to Goldschmidt and asked him to lie to Holst if the latter were to pay a visit to the editorial offices. Goldschmidt tried to get out of it, but he could have spared himself the trouble, not because Holst failed to show up but also because a bit later Møller sent Holst a letter in which—in Goldschmidt’s words—“in a bitter and gloating fashion, portraying himself as an embattled proletarian in contrast to Holst’s more fortunate social position, [Møller] acknowledged having written the article.” Heiberg was subjected to similar treatment. When he and his wife spent the summer of 1842 at Bakkehus, their suburban residence in Frederiksberg, Møller dropped by uninvited to offer his assurance that the anonymously authored critical articles against Heiberg that someone was attributing to Møller had absolutely not been written by him. Heiberg brushed off the whole matter, but Møller repeatedly protested his innocence, proclaiming in the most flattering terms how much he respected Heiberg, both as an author and as a person. And then, indeed, “Six months later this same P. L. Møller declared that the articles had been written by him.” Hans Christian Andersen, who defended Møller to the last, related what he had once heard Mrs. Gyllembourg, Heiberg’s mother, exclaim: “What sort of a dreadful person is this Møller, who dares to go around attacking my Ludvig!”—whereupon all the Heibergian fellow travelers went around saying exactly the same thing. In 1843 Møller vainly attempted to improve his reputation by publishing a little periodical entitled Arena in which he lashed out at the “rag merchants” of the day, as he called Heiberg and company.

What was worst of all, however, were the rumors, including one that was truly bizarre. Møller was not only a bel esprit who sang the praises of naked sensuality, he was also a bel homme who practiced what he poetized about. Møller actually engaged in what so many others merely practiced platonically on paper, and he was thus the target of much condemnation and of a great deal more envy. And if he could not brag, like Don Giovanni, about the 1,003 women in Spain, he had at any rate scored several score in Copenhagen. This was an expensive pastime for Møller, who was always short of funds, and who had therefore (according to the rumor) sold the skeleton of one of his sweethearts, a poor seamstress who had apparently not been made of stern-enough stuff. In a letter to a friend, Hans Christian Andersen indignantly reported that even reasonable people believed in this “fable.” It is not likely that Kierkegaard was among the believers, but it is certain that, filled with fearful fascination, he followed the best Copenhagen could offer in the way of a genuine Don Juan and as an example of sexual realization—a subject concerning which Kierkegaard himself had such a buttoned-up attitude.

Gossip and his own untrustworthiness thus threatened to block Møller’s academic career. He harbored the ambition of filling the professorial chair in aesthetics recently vacated by Oehlenschläger, a post for which he was decidedly not unqualified. True, he had not finished his university degree, but in 1841 he had demonstrated his merits with a gold-medal-winning essay on French poetry, and since then he had published a series of topflight critical studies on theater and literature which, taken together, might almost resemble a dissertation.

It is difficult to say how well the two men, Møller and Kierkegaard, knew each other personally. In his journals, Kierkegaard never mentions Møller even once prior to his collision with The Corsair. Møller’s literary remains do not mention Kierkegaard at all. And finally, in his memoirs Goldschmidt rather seems to assume that the two scarcely knew each other personally. Nonetheless, there were quite a few places where their paths must have crossed: at the university, as already mentioned, but also at the Student Association, which Kierkegaard frequented in his youth and where Møller was known as an argumentative sort. Nor could these two aesthetic loners have avoided encountering one another in Copenhagen’s cafés and watering holes. And then, as almost always in the Danish romantic period, there was Regensen College, where Kierkegaard was at times a frequent guest and could hardly have avoided meeting or at least hearing about this Møller, who was a resident there from 1834 to 1837. As a part of the Shrove Tuesday festivities in 1835, Møller wore a placard on his back, bearing the following words: “We, the King of Greenland and neighboring islands, et cetera, do proclaim that we alone know what best serves the well-being of our subjects.” This was patent mockery of King Frederick VI’s well-known rebuff, in February of that year, to the many liberal politicians and academics who had petitioned for freedom of the press, and it earned Møller a stiff reprimand. And several years later, when he applied for membership in a newly established student group, the Academicum, his application was rejected by the association’s twelve-person executive committee. Møller had been accused of shady economic transactions, abusive refutation of his opponents, and dubious sexual morals. One of the twelve men on the committee that gave him the thumbs-down was Peter Christian Kierkegaard.

If Peder Ludvig and Søren Aabye did not know each other personally, each was at any rate able to follow the other’s literary careers from quite early on. And this was not always a pleasant business for Kierkegaard, because Møller was an elegant polemicist with a perfectly perfidious pen. As previously noted, in 1836 Kierkegaard was able to read the following in the Humoristiske Intelligensblade: “It goes without saying that an author’s literary physiognomy has nothing to do with his corporeal physiognomy, which is of no interest to us in this context.” The article was anonymous, so that it can only be a hunch that it was Møller who stabbed Kierkegaard in the back. But the style is the man, of course, and the style was unmistakably Møller’s. And the mere possibility that it might have been him was enough to kindle Kierkegaard’s hatred. There were more kindly remarks of this sort. In Møller’s 1840 Lyric Poems, there is a section entitled “Moral Silhouettes” that includes a poem called “A Mocker,” which draws a stark contrast between straightforward zest for life and the self-tormenting reflections of a loner. In 1847, when the poem was reprinted in Images and Songs, Møller had changed the title to “A Wandering Philosopher,” which enabled even the more slow-witted to recognize the peripatetic Kierkegaard. Lyric Poems also included a “Nature Calendar” that had a poem for every month of the year. Of these monthly poems, only “June” had a parenthetical subtitle—“(Copenhagen’s Ramparts)”—which because of Lovers’ Lane, was one of Kierkegaard’s favorite places to stroll. Møller’s poem reads as follows:

You, modest and chaste, who desire ideas only,

Trust me that here, under branches green,

Here you can walk alone and lonely,

Borne aloft by sprites unseen.

You, of course, with no body of your own—

You see no lovely breasts, no saucy rumps,

No dainty ankles in patten pumps—

It’s merely grist for three more tomes!

Møller’s poetry—most of it—is neither great art nor mere amateurism, but in any case it is clear that here he is accusing Kierkegaard of slinking about on Lovers’ Lane like some kind of castrated voyeur, transforming his sensuality into philosophical reflection. Once again, by chance or by design, Møller has struck Kierkegaard at the point where the thorn in the flesh was perhaps most deeply embedded.

There can thus be scarcely any doubt that Kierkegaard hated Møller because he, Møller, had precisely the body that Kierkegaard lacked. But why did Møller hate Kierkegaard? Because Kierkegaard had precisely the writing that Møller lacked! Ironically enough, Kierkegaard’s sublimation, which Møller was so quick to ridicule, in fact made possible the enormous productivity—including “The Seducer’s Diary”—that left Møller utterly breathless, literally and literarily reducing Møller’s erotic praxis to a bit of banal biology. While Møller had wasted his substance on the many bedsheets of Copenhagen, Kierkegaard gathered his own into his trusty silver pen, which released its contents with bold virtuosity onto sheets of paper that will survive even the forgetfulness of history.

Møller’s papers from the period make it clear how very humiliating he found the spectacular success of Kierkegaard’s “Seducer’s Diary.” Among his papers is a piece dated March 1843, just a month after the publication of “The Seducer’s Diary,” that includes a number of sketches for “From (another) Courtier’s Diary” in which he attempts with bitter sarcasm to rewrite Kierkegaard’s diary, only to end up with an embarrassing literary pastiche. Nonetheless—or perhaps for this very reason—Møller could also maintain that “The Seducer’s Diary” was Kierkegaard’s “greatest achievement.” Indeed, Møller claimed that “The Seducer’s Diary” was “central to the entire canon”—which Kierkegaard mentioned angrily in a final footnote in The Point of View for My Work as an Author, where he assaulted Møller and defended his religious writings. In The Point of View, Kierkegaard ascribed a theological function to his diary (and textbook) of seduction—but surely Kierkegaard had also wanted to teach Møller and the other bungling dilettante lovers of the day a thing or two about how a genuine seducer, a lover of strategy, could transform sexuality into sublime aesthetics?

“A Visit to Sorø”

That Møller wanted to write as Kierkegaard wrote and that Kierkegaard wanted to seduce as Møller seduced is perhaps a rather oversimplified way to formulate the conflict, but we may reasonably assume that the conflict involved, respectively, unrealized desires that were textual for the one and sexual for the other. And this assumption is strengthened when we peruse Gæa, an aesthetic yearbook that Møller published on December 22, 1845, contributing an eighty-eight-page “principal article” titled “A Visit to Sorø.” The story was set in Carsten Hauch’s parlor in Sorø, where Møller and various literary notables had assembled for an evening gathering in order to discuss the books of the day, including some by Kierkegaard.

The conversation turned first to Either/Or, and Møller praised the aesthetic portion highly, while the ethical portion seemed to him to be more a collection of material than genuine literature—a judgment that must have annoyed Kierkegaard but which was not, in fact, entirely off the mark. In this connection, Møller complained that the author was not the master of his material from the very beginning “but had only developed his ethical self—while writing,” which made the work formless and chaotic, “constantly darting off in every direction.” One of those present chimed in, declaring his agreement: “Yes, that’s exactly it…. What I have against all these works (the form and contents of which betray their common origin) is that every time one feels ready to surrender to a purely literary enjoyment, the author gets in one’s way, bringing in his own ethical and religious development, which no one really has asked about, which privately might be entirely respectable but which has not paid its dues to stroll upon the commons of objective literature. He commits the same error for which people have faulted the poet [Hans Christian] Andersen—he permits the entire development of his inner life to take place in the public eye.”

Here Møller was informing Kierkegaard that he had nothing on Andersen when it came to life views and his private sphere. But these objections were polite and seemly compared with the comments Møller made about Stages on Life’s Way: “When I took hold of his most recent big book, Stages on Life’s Way, it was with an almost sinister feeling. Such exaggerated, indeed, such unnatural productivity might perhaps be healthful for the author, but for literature and for the reader—never. Literary productivity seems to have become a physical need for him, or he uses it as a medicine, just as in certain illnesses one uses bloodletting, cupping, steam baths, emetics, and the like. While a healthy person rests by sleeping, he seems to rest by letting his pen run on. Instead of eating and drinking, he satiates himself by writing. In place of normal human nature, which produces one fetus each year, he seems to have the nature of a fish and to spawn. As chance would have it, I began with the ‘psychological experiment’ ‘ “Guilty?”/“Not Guilty?” ’ which takes up the final two hundred forty-two closely printed pages. Here, as I feared, he goes astray. Here there are repetitions, self-excavations, brilliant flashes of genius, and the beginnings of madness; in the end, what had previously been fulfillment has now become mere facility, and method has become stock mannerism, a trick obvious to everyone. He is not concerned about the reader, because he writes only for his own enjoyment, nor about making his name as a classical author, because he writes without form. He moves through the language like an English clown, walking on his hands and making somersaults with the language, but he has no style. For he uses superfluous words and says whatever occurs to him. The contents of this Danaides’ vessel of reflection is a story of falling in love, of engagement, of breaking off, cast in the form of a diary. Every section has the stylized beginning ‘A year ago today.’ Here one encounters a male individual who has lost everything that constitutes personality. Feeling, understanding, will, resolution, action, backbone, nerves, muscle—everything has been dissolved into dialectics, sterile dialectics that rotate around an uncertain center, uncertain of whether it is the result of centrifugal or centripetal force, until in the end it gradually vanishes…. And of course, in the book, the female being who is placed on the experimenter’s rack also turns into dialectics and vanishes. But in real life she would necessarily have had to go mad or jump into Peblinge Lake. The exposition can be briefly summarized as follows:

“A year ago today. So! Now I have got engaged, then. She is truly delightful, but a little maid like this is full of bother. She cannot comprehend that I both want to be engaged and also want to break off, that I both want to break off and also not to break off, both to marry and not to marry. She cannot comprehend that my engagement is dialectical—that is, that it signifies both love and a lack of love, that I intend both to be done with it and also to remain forever upon the pinnacle of desire.—A year ago today. The method does not work. It must be changed. She lacks a religious background, so we are not suited for each other. And if she comes closer to religion, she is also lost to me. She must be set free because only then will she belong to me, and then she can become engaged and married to whomever she wants. But she is nonetheless married to me and so on ad infinitum.

“If sound common sense, in all its unsophisticated immediacy, might be permitted to intervene here, it would perhaps say: ‘If you want to regard life as a dissecting room and yourself as a cadaver, then go ahead and tear yourself to bits as much as you like. As long as you do no injury to others, the police will not interfere with your activities. But to spin another being into your spiderweb, to dissect it alive, or to torture the soul out of it drop by drop through experimentation—this, after all, is not permitted except with insects, and does not the mere thought of it contain something appalling, something revolting, to healthy human nature?”

It is clear that this was not so much literary criticism as it was a criticism of Kierkegaard’s character, the weak, eccentric, and unhealthy aspects of which were not merely exhibited with Møller’s perfidious talent for indelicate comparisons, but also with the disturbing intuitive sense that was, Goldschmidt tells us, typical of Møller when he was in an ill humor, took up his pen, and dipped it in poison: “He had … a remarkable ability to see all the dark possibilities in a person’s nature and to bring them forth as if they had either been actualized or were very close to being so. I believe that he could have written to a good-natured, upstanding burgher in such a way that, after reading it, the man would have felt as though he had sold his father and betrayed his mother, and would be unable to free himself from those thoughts without conceiving a furious hatred of the writer.”

Møller kindled this sort of hatred here as well. It was almost as though he had clandestinely rifled through a carefully chosen selection of Kierkegaard’s journals and had twisted into grotesquely reversed form the intimate confessions they contained. The passion for writing, which Kierkegaard himself viewed as the gift of Governance, was interpreted by Møller as a compulsive activity designed to compensate for a number of biologically determined defects in Kierkegaard’s daily rhythm and in his instinctual life. Kierkegaard’s love of dialectics was portrayed as morbid reflectiveness that led to feminine indecisiveness, and the woman, Regine, was nothing but an innocent victim in the hands of a perverse experimenter. If Kierkegaard was going to lose his head, it would probably happen here.

“Would Only That I Might Soon Appear in The Corsair”

It soon became clear that Møller’s overkill was in fact a suicidal undertaking. On December 27, 1845, only five days after the publication of Gæa, Kierkegaard—alias Frater Taciturnus—published a stinging rejoinder, a fivecolumn article in Fædrelandet titled “The Activity of a Traveling Aesthetician and How He Nonetheless Came to Pay for Dinner.” Kierkegaard, whose thoroughly polemical character reacted instantaneously when it was provoked, made it abundantly clear how cynically deft he could be in destroying his opponent. Like Møller, Kierkegaard, too, had mastered the art of refining salacious gossip and rumors of every sort into a gnawing rhetorical disquiet that could be read between the lines. Thus the fact that Møller had perennial financial problems was one of the first things that Kierkegaard let slip. Indeed, he more than implied that the expedition that “our active and enterprising literary man Mr. P. L. Møller” had undertaken to Sorø had been motivated by simple lack of money, which mirrored his lack of ideas: “[O]ne helps oneself to the dishes served, and though very miserly people do tend to tuck away a bit of the victuals—a piece of steak in the pocket, some cake in the hat—Mr. P.L.M. is so voracious that he takes the entire conversation home with him and has it printed.”

So dinner was served. But Møller was granted some real tidbits. Kierkegaard indeed conceded that “ ‘Guilty?’/‘Not Guilty?’ ” does border on madness, but that was precisely the point and thus was not, as Møller—ambitious as he was for a professorial appointment—would have it, the problem. In a detailed footnote Kierkegaard explained that the book was an experiment, neither more nor less than that, and the book itself makes this so unmistakably clear that no one who is even reasonably capable of reading ought to have even a second’s doubt about it. After this solid drubbing and a series of sarcastic remarks of the most slanderous sort, Kierkegaard ended by exclaiming, “Would only that I might soon appear in The Corsair. It is really difficult for a poor author to be singled out like this on the Danish literary scene, so that he (assuming that we pseudonyms are all one) is the only one who is not abused there. If I am not mistaken, my superior, Hilarius Bookbinder, has been flattered in The Corsair. Victor Eremita even had to endure the disgrace of being immortalized—in The Corsair! And yet I have of course already been there, because ubi spiritus, ibi ecclesia: ubi P. L. Møller, ibi ‘The Corsair.’ ”

With the clever Latin expression—“Where the Spirit is, there is the Church: Where P. L. Møller is, there is The Corsair”—Kierkegaard went beyond the pale in more ways than one. In literary circles it was certainly an open secret that Møller was involved with The Corsair, but to trumpet this fact so bluntly in Fædrelandet was in the view of many a major breach of etiquette. The great wave of indignation on Møller’s behalf also took Kierkegaard by surprise: He had only added the Latin slogan more or less in passing—it was penciled in as a marginal addition to the manuscript. Thank goodness that Møller had been foolish enough to have informed T. H. Erslew’s Encyclopedia of Authors that he had been (as Kierkegaard puts it) “both … lyrically and satyrically active on The Corsair,” so passing on this information to a larger audience could hardly be called an indiscretion. Nonetheless Kierkegaard had had to curb his emotions quite firmly. Indeed, he had to summon up powerful religious motives to justify the assassination of Møller: “The article against P. L. Møller was written with much fear and trembling. I wrote it on religious holidays and as a regulating check, I neglected neither to attend church nor to read my sermon.” This was Kierkegaard at his worst.

At first the tactic looked as though it was succeeding. Perceptibly shaken by Kierkegaard’s reaction, Møller replied in Fædrelandet two days later, December 29, 1845, writing in conciliatory tones that he had discussed a number of literary works in Gæa and thus did not wish to single out any individual work for debate. He absolutely denied that Hauch’s house in Sorø was supposed to be the location where the literary conversations had taken place. At the same time he pointed out that everyone who publishes a book risks being reviewed in a less than complimentary manner. And he added: “You will scarcely find any other way of disarming criticism with complete certainty than that of refraining from letting your writings appear in print—thereby achieving what you seem to value so highly, having only ‘one reader.’ ” The reply is signed, “Your most respectful, P. L. Møller.”

This respect certainly did not amount to much, and Goldschmidt was surely correct when he wrote that Møller’s hopes of a professorial appointment had been destroyed by his run-in with Kierkegaard: “Kierkegaard pounced on him with such vehemence, used such peculiar words, had, or seemed to have, such an effect on the public that the professorship, instead of having been brought closer by Gæa, was placed at an immeasurable distance.” Kierkegaard himself noted with a bit of malicious glee that it was amusing and extremely instructive from a psychological point of view to see how quickly Møller had taken note of his request and had obeyed orders: “He came forward, bowed respectfully, and then departed to the place where he belongs.”

The Corsair’s Salvo

Shortly after the publication of Gæa, Goldschmidt and Kierkegaard again encountered each other on the street. Kierkegaard was more reserved than usual, and Goldschmidt remembered: “He held strictly to anonymity. Just as I, of course, could neither know nor say that he was Frater Taciturnus, he was equally unwilling to admit any knowledge that I was connected with the editorship of The Corsair. We could talk about Frater Taciturnus, P. L. Møller, and The Corsair as though these were things that had absolutely nothing to do with us, and the fact that he sided with Frater Taciturnus and I took the other side had absolutely nothing to do with personal preferences. This tone was immediately established by the manner in which he initiated our conversations. I understood this and followed along; it was as if we were playing a light little comedy. But the consequence of this impersonal situation was that I could not go to him and say: ‘I told you thus and such. Why, despite this, have you made this accusation against Møller?’ On the other hand, I could and did say, with respect to Frater Taciturnus, that, however right he might be with respect to other matters, on this point he [Frater Taciturnus] had committed an injustice and an injury. Kierkegaard replied to this that Frater Taciturnus’s right must be judged from a higher point of view. I said that I could not see this higher point of view, and then we spoke for a moment about other things.” The situation was bizarre and is an excellent illustration of Golden Age Copenhagen, when the greater and lesser intellectual lights of the day continually chanced upon one another in the street and were often compelled to limit their conversations to polite greetings or to a bow displaying feigned respect—because their desks at home were covered with scurrilous manuscripts about one another, or they were just returning from the printer’s where the proliferation of their venomous views was in full swing.

This was also true in this case. A couple of days later, January 2, 1846, the latest issue of The Corsair appeared. It included a lengthy article by Goldschmidt that had a correspondingly lengthy title, to wit, “How the Wandering Philosopher Discovered the Wandering Actual Editor of The Corsair.” The article provided an account, untruthful down to the least detail, of how The Corsair’s editor, Coronato the Terrible, a famous Venetian bandit, for whom the police had long been searching, had now been taken into custody. The article explained the specific circumstances: “The remarkable coincidence through which everything came to light is this: Here in the city there dwells a great and famous hermit and philosopher called Frater Taciturnus, or the Silent Brother. This is only his hermit name, however; he has another name under which he strolls the streets every day, but it would be indiscreet to reveal it.” One evening Coronato the Terrible had confided in this philosophical hermit under a pledge of secrecy, but when Gæa was published it was too much for the philosopher, so he immediately paid a visit to Fædrelandet, whose editor was made acquainted with these very peculiar complications. The editor (who in reality was named J. F. Giødwad and was Kierkegaard’s friend and literary confidant) was at first reluctant, but he gradually came to approve of the strategy: “If you now declare that The Corsair is a disgusting magazine, we will kill two birds with one stone. Because naturally people will believe everything that is said by you—Fædrelandet bows respectfully—Denmark’s greatest philosopher, Denmark’s most brilliant intellect, author of Denmark’s thickest books.” After Fædrelandet and Frater Taciturnus had showered each other with unctuous praise like this for some time, the latter seized his pen and sat down to write. “ ‘The pen does write rather powerfully,’ said Frater Taciturnus, ‘but I am also terribly hot-tempered. Now I have declared P. L. Møller to be editor of The Corsair, and I have done it so emphatically that tomorrow the government will have to seize him.’

Fædrelandet: ‘Yes, that is certainly good, o great genius of a philosopher, but The Corsair itself! Don’t forget The Corsair! For God’s sake don’t mince your words.’

The Silent Brother (dipping his pen once again into the ink): ‘Relax, now I am going to kill it! You may certainly make arrangements for the funeral…. See, there! Now it’s done! Now you will also see a little proof of how clever I am. That damned paper might get the idea of including something about me and thereby making me immortal, immortal in The Corsair, my friend! I won’t have it. Do you know what I have said in order to prevent it?’

Fædrelandet: ‘No, o indescribably great intellect!’

The Silent Brother: ‘You can say that again—you would never have thought of this. I have added “Would that I might now appear in The Corsair.” The thought experiment is this: Either I will now appear in The Corsair, or I will not appear there. If I appear there, then it is something I myself have requested, and thus The Corsair is doing me a service. If I don’t appear there—then, hurrah! so I don’t appear there—that is of course exactly what I want.’

Fædrelandet (with tears in its eyes): ‘Great, great man!’

The Silent Brother: ‘Sensible, tasteful journal!’

Fædrelandet (with a start): ‘But it occurs to me that you don’t need the thought experiment! You have killed The Corsair just now.’

The Silent Brother: ‘Dammit, that’s right! In my haste I had almost forgotten it.’

Fædrelandet: ‘This business makes me as happy as I would be if the whole world were to eat horse meat this year on January 13th.’ The Silent Brother: ‘And I am as happy as I would be if Heiberg had got one of my books stuck in his throat.’

Fædrelandet: ‘I think I will celebrate the occasion by taking a ride on a provincial judge’s back.’

The Silent Brother: ‘I will do something for the poor. I will entertain the idea of a thought experiment in which I have given a rixdollar to a poor woman with five small children. Think of her happiness! Think of the innocent little ones looking at a rixdollar!’

Fædrelandet: ‘You are a noble man!’

The Silent Brother: ‘I am in a good mood and therefore I am charitable. I am happy. You are happy. We are happy.’

Both: ‘Hurrah!’ ”

No sooner had Goldschmidt left the printer’s than fate—or the small size of Copenhagen—willed that Goldschmidt and Kierkegaard would run into one another. The editor wanted to know if The Corsair had finally achieved comic composition, but Kierkegaard replied with a long, drawn-out Noo-o. The paper lacked respect, he said. “Respect for what?” Goldschmidt asked. “For Frater Taciturnus’s higher right” replied Kierkegaard, after which they parted in astonishment. It would be years before they again spoke to one another.

In the next issue of The Corsair, Kierkegaard was named by his real name for the first time. This was in an article titled “The New Planet” in which there was a conversation among The Corsair, Kierkegaard, Heiberg, and a professor of astronomy named Olufsen. They comment on a mysterious planet that had suddenly appeared in the vault of heaven. Kierkegaard believes that it must be a case of a “tramp, a bothersome fellow, a vagrant.” Invoking his special status in the city, Kierkegaard says he will contact the police, and he finally threatens to write nineteen edifying discourses to drive the shameless planet away! Heiberg, on the other hand, bids the planet welcome and takes it as visible proof of the efficacy of his powers as an astronomical prophet, which he immediately takes the opportunity to demonstrate:

Then it is Olufsen’s turn, and no one can fool him, the astral phenomenon is a comet, neither more nor less, period. That can’t be, exclaims Kierkegaard, it has no tail. “It has no tail?” Olufsen inquires harshly, “You have no tail either, and yet you are a comet.” What, in fact, is a comet? “It is,” Kierkegaard replies, like some sort of schoolboy, “an eccentric, illuminated body which exhibits itself to us mortals at irregular intervals….” “Well, aren’t you a comet, then?” replies Olufsen. “Aren’t you also an illuminated body, a light?” Kierkegaard has to grant him the point: he is a light. But also eccentric, remarks Olufsen, who suddenly abandons the starry heavens and asks about Kierkegaard’s tailor. It turns out that the tailor is named Ibsen. “Are you telling me that Ibsen has followed his own head in sewing your trousers?” Olufsen asks in unbelief. “No, he followed my legs,” Kierkegaard replies, repeating an old joke. But it doesn’t help him, and Olufsen counters with an astronomically brilliant bit of wit: “No, little man, I also have Ibsen for my tailor. But dammit, the one trouser leg is always just as long as the other one unless I expressly request it otherwise in order to look like a genius. Of course you are a comet.”

At this point, about halfway through the article, Heiberg finds that Olufsen has become altogether too personal, and he therefore redirects attention upwards, toward the distant planet, and there is no more talk of trousers. But there were other people who continued to speak of the trousers, not least because the caricaturist Peter Klæstrup had depicted the philosopher with one trouser leg a little longer than the other—or a little shorter, if you will, it all amounts to the same thing. At the sight of himself in Klæstrup’s wicked depiction, it would have been difficult for Kierkegaard to avoid recalling episodes from the traumatic times when the boys at the Borgerdyd School taunted him for his unusual attire, calling him “Søren Sock.” It is not very far from socks to trousers, and if Møller, who was a close friend of Klæstrup’s, had known of the schoolyard gibes, it would have been typical of him to have made use of them. Nor had Goldschmidt forgotten that day on Vimmelskaftet when Kierkegaard had teased him about his elegant new coat and had told him to dress like other people. There was a lot of gloating in the editorial offices of The Corsair.

Already the very next day, January 10, Fædrelandet ran a contribution by Kierkegaard, who continued to sign himself “Frater Taciturnus.” The rejoinder, entitled “The Dialectical Result of a Literary Police Investigation,” was his second and final public reply in the conflict. In the piece, which fairly trembles with moral indignation, Kierkegaard ironically noted that one could apparently “hire The Corsair to abuse someone, just as one hires an organ-grinder to make music.” The paper ought to be ignored, just as one politely walks past a “prostitute”—a remark that was repeated on the next page and was apparently intended to imply that editor Møller in fact walked home with prostitutes more frequently than he walked past them. Kierkegaard ended his contribution by repeating, “may I request that I be abused. It is just too terrible to experience the insult of being immortalized by The Corsair.”

These lines had an instantaneous effect on the two editors. Goldschmidt burst into laughter, but Møller went white as a sheet: “You can laugh at what you please! I would never have had this disastrous business, this mixing of my Gæa with The Corsair, if I had not got involved with you.”

The Corsair continued its attacks on Kierkegaard unabated, however. The issue dated January 16 carried a letter to “Mr. Michael Leonard Nathanson, Horse Dealer,” a half-mad person who had fumed against The Corsair in his own mediocre news organ. This Nathanson was a well-known figure who had purchased the failing weekly Politivennen, which he rechristened The Corvette and used as a platform for attacking the editor of Berlingske Tidende, who was also named Nathanson. Kierkegaard and mad Nathanson had no connection whatever with each other and were united only in the pages of The Corsair because Nathanson was a notoriously half-mad person. The letter The Corsair addressed to Nathanson begged a thousand pardons because the editorial staff had failed to recognize Nathanson under the name Frater Taciturnus, but had erroneously assumed that it was a cover name for Søren Kierkegaard.

Klæstrup was kept very busy. In addition to his caricature of Nathanson, he had also been supplied with a number of short passages from Kierkegaard’s works, on the basis of which he was to supply a good many distorted portraits of the impossible magister with the appropriate accoutrements: first, as a bent-over little fellow spraddled across a young woman’s shoulders; next, wearing a pair of much-too-large boots; and on horseback, where he sits as crooked as the Devil, wearing a top hat, looking totally out of balance; and another, fantastic indeed, in which he appears in the form of a stork who is giving a wide berth to a cobblestone rammer [Danish, brolæggerjomfru: “paver’s maid”], accompanied by the caption “How the Frater Walks Past a Prostitute.” This was Møller’s tit for tat. And if all this were not enough, we next see Kierkegaard on his way through the doorway leading into The Corsair’s offices, and then back out again, impotent and bedraggled, with all his deformities. In addition, this same issue of The Corsair included a letter to Frater Taciturnus from a certain Frater Observantissimus, who with feigned respect—but also in fact with some justification—asks Frater Taciturnus why he did not attack The Corsair when the paper praised him, but only after he had been attacked in Møller’s Gæa. And last, the back cover of the journal carried “Advertisements from Frater Taciturnus’s Dialectically Licensed Experimentation Office,” ten fictional classified advertisements, including a notice from the Copenhagen city government to the effect that Frater Taciturnus had now been granted permission to establish residence as “irony here in the city.”

The following week, in the issue of January 23, there were two more drawings. One depicted “Frater Taciturnus the Terrible,” viewed from behind, marshaling his surviving comrades-in-arms in a back alley, where they are celebrating the fact that The Corsair has now been beaten and crippled. In the other drawing Frater Taciturnus, terrified, encounters The Corsair in the form of Goldschmidt, who has the misfortune to say “Good day, great man.” Frater Taciturnus emphatically refuses to accept this sort of praise, so Goldschmidt tries out the salutation “Tiny little man,” which Frater Taciturnus views as a villainous insult. “Good Lord,” Goldschmidt then exclaims, “You will neither be great nor little! Well, mediocre man, how are you?”

The impudence continued in the January 30 issue, in which Kierkegaard and Nathanson were once again confused with each other in a rather chaotic account in which Kierkegaard, several times, shouts—in a double entendre—“I have no organ.” After this there was a pause in the humor, which by then had worn quite thin. Still, on February 20 The Corsair could report in its “Logbook” that the author of Either/Or had won a prize from the Industry Association for an essay on clothing manufacture in Denmark. The following week there was more news, this time occasioned by the recent publication of Kierkegaard’s Concluding Unscientific Postscript, which was singled out for its good ideas, its fitting observations, and unexceptionable language: “We once again bid the honored author welcome to the world of literature and permit ourselves to express the hope that the book will sell many copies and have many readers.” This mention was slightly subdued in tone, but Kierkegaard smelled a rat and immediately took stock of the situation: “[The Corsair] did not want to abuse me, because it does, after all, have a notion of what is unseemly. It did not want to utter high praise because, after all, it has the notion that in my view this would in fact be an insult. So it has chosen a third alternative: an appreciative, businesslike approach. But it won’t work, I want to be on bad terms with it.”

Shortly after this Kierkegaard and Goldschmidt ran into one another in Møntergade where, according to Goldschmidt, Kierkegaard “walked past me with an intense and extremely embittered look, without wanting either to greet me or to be greeted…. I felt accused and oppressed: The Corsair had triumphed in the battle, yet I myself had acquired a false number one. But my spirit felt yet another protest arise at that burden-filled moment: I was not the sort of person to be looked down upon, and I could prove it. Walking through the streets, and before I reached home, I arrived at a firm decision to give up The Corsair. When I announced it at home they said, ‘Thank God!’—so happy, but only a little surprised, as if they had known about the matter before I did.”

Even though the conflict with Kierkegaard obviously contributed to Goldschmidt’s decision to get rid of The Corsair, it did not take place until half a year later, probably sometime in October, when he transferred the satanic enterprise to the xylographer Flinch for fifteen hundred rixdollars. On March 6, under the heading “The Great Philosopher,” one could read an apology to the aforementioned Nathanson, whom the editors had erroneously assumed to be the man behind the pseudonymous works. With tiresome relentlessness the article ironizes about Kierkegaard’s refusal to be either criticized or praised by anyone—with the exception of Bishop Mynster, who on the other hand had been granted “a monopoly on praising him.” The text is accompanied by two caricatures. One of these shows Kierkegaard in the act of presenting a book to a thankful, kneeling man. The other caricature depicts him as a round-shouldered yet rather upright figure, situated on a cloud and surrounded by a heavenly nimbus; he is located at the center of the universe and around him orbit the Round Tower, the Church of Our Lady, boots, bottles, pipes, books, the sun, moon, stars, and many other things. The April 3 issue included a couple of comic drawings of a dogged reader, who is attempting in vain to read the Postscript, plus a catalog of “ornamental dahlias,” in which the third of the nine flowers described offers “ ‘Beauty of Kierkegaard,’ biscuit-colored, excellent structure with two unequal stems beneath, brilliant and impressive bearing; unexcelled in every respect; the play of colors on the stem is particularly fine.”

Even though The Corsair sporadically directed barbed words and images at Kierkegaard until as late as 1855, the most offensive material culminated in 1846. The wit (or perhaps the lack of same) petered out that summer, with Kierkegaard mentioned in an article entitled “Hercules” that appeared in the issue of July 17. The wheel had come full circle. In 1845 it had of course been that very title, “Hercules,” under which Kierkegaard had imagined that Grundtvig might be portrayed—ironically enough.

Møller’s Postscript to Kierkegaard’s Postscript

Another, slightly smaller, though no less significant wheel had also come full circle. Just as the fracas began with Møller’s review of “ ‘Guilty?’/‘Not Guilty?,’ ” it ended with yet another review, also by Møller. In two issues of Kjøbenhavnsposten that came out in the latter part of March 1846, Møller, under the pseudonym “Prosper naturalis de molinasky,” reviewed the Postscript, which had been published a month earlier. If his first review had been suicidal overkill, this review is best seen as a broken man’s farewell not merely to Kierkegaard, but also to any hope of academic respectability. It is no wonder that hatred practically oozes from his pen.

The review consists of more or less parodic paraphrases and bizarrely juxtaposed passages from the Postscript, which Møller misreads shamelessly, producing a version that bears the marks of his masterful talent for imitation. Just when he seems to be trying hard to produce an objective exposition of the book’s presentation of the dialectic between the historical and nonhistorical elements in Christianity, Møller can suddenly rush to the reader’s rescue with an overly pedagogical explanation that includes a vile allusion to Kierkegaard’s rather notorious style of walking: “For the person who does not understand the words ‘dialectical’ and ‘dialectic,’ the meaning can be specified as a zigzag movement—what sailors call ‘tacking’—toward an end point that undialectical people could reach by following a straight line.”

Møller was vile, but he was more than that. He was also an expert critic whose ability to caricature was attributable to an ear perfectly attuned to the text and to any false notes the text might contain. He was the first to notice Kierkegaard’s unfortunate tendency to lump together the most impossibly varied sorts of things under the label “aesthetic”: “The person who aspires to dialectical bliss must be concerned only for himself, must emancipate himself from all so-called civic and human obligations, all personal feelings, et cetera, which are nothing but the ‘aesthetic.’ ” Møller was perhaps only a bit off the mark when he more than implied that the Postscript—with its swarm of chapters, sections, divisions, subdivisions, interpolations, exclamations, departures, digressions, revisions, interpretations, discussions, appendices, supplements, §§’s, footnotes, and quite a bit else—had in a sense become an impossible book that had not been “worked through organically” with sufficient care, and therefore even in the best of circumstances it would only “find its place under the rubric of ‘chaotic literature.’ ” Any reader who has ever attempted to find his or her way into, around, and out of the Postscript cannot but grant that Møller is onto something here.

This is also true of Møller’s description of Kierkegaard’s style. Here again, Møller demonstrated that he was just about as fine as an observer as he was coarse in the manner in which he presented his observations. “His dialectic continually produces steam, his pen runs on like a locomotive on a railroad track,” Møller noted, employing a modern metaphor. Very quickly, however, the metaphor jumps the track, for on the same page Kierkegaard is also described as carrying out “acrobatic and sleight-of-hand maneuvers” and cutting “capers.” These were mere platitudes, but Møller could also hit the mark: “In his discourse one hears tattling gossips at one moment, biblical simplicity and cadences at the next moment, Copenhagen café chatter at another moment.” For all the caricature, this emphasis on the polyphony in Kierkegaardian texts is admirably accurate because it was precisely by employing a unique mixture of genres and a remarkable thematic range that Kierkegaard’s works broke with philosophy’s traditional form of argumentation and became endowed with a sort of perennial relevance.

As an experienced polemicist and trained parodist, Møller was of course also aware of the devices Kierkegaard employed when he criticized those who had not understood the point in his program of subjective thinking. So with carefully calculated precision Møller collected a series of the verbal caricatures that abound in Kierkegaard’s text: “ ‘assistant professors,’ ‘speculators,’ ‘private tutors,’ ‘cataloguers,’ ‘bonded and guaranteed pastors,’ ‘organized, esteemed, Mssrs. Professors,’ ‘astronomers and veterinarians,’ ‘precious thinkers,’ ‘Chinese,’ ‘world-historically concerned assistant barbers and undertakers,’ ‘walking sticks,’ ‘office clerks,’ ‘rubbish mongers,’ ‘bellows blowers,’ ‘money changers in the forecourts,’ and ‘tiny little gewgaws.’ ”

When Møller put forth a parody of a parody like this, it was to serve a definite purpose. He had noticed that Kierkegaard’s work had a peculiar characteristic, namely an “absorption in dialectical antitheses.” In fact, Kierkegaard had merely “described nothing but a dialectical circularity,” and Møller artfully backed up his assertion with the following argument: In the days when Kierkegaard wrote (here it comes) “really spicy Corsair articles” against Kjøbenhavnsposten, things went badly for philosophy, as can be seen in the book about Hans Christian Andersen; now, on the other hand, when things are going better for philosophy, Kierkegaard is writing (here it comes again) “bad Corsair articles,” as witnessed by his two pieces against Møller in Fædrelandet. Thus in his activities as a critic Kierkegaard was not a hair better—indeed, an entire wig worse—than the crew on board The Corsair. Møller continued, “Sometimes the author himself goes so far in his ‘passion for the absurd’—for example, in the story about Doctor Stagleap (Heiberg)—that if Frater Taciturnus read it he would view it as a ‘revolting Corsair attack on peaceable, respectable men, each of whom serve their country, doing their jobs in honorable obscurity.’”

Møller’s tactics approach sheer genius. First, he maintains that Kierkegaard had always written in the style of The Corsair. Then, by citing the indignant conclusion of Kierkegaard’s first Fædrelandet article, he employs a deft backhand, playing Kierkegaard (alias Frater Taciturnus) off against Kierkegaard (alias Climacus). And finally, he refers to the Postscript story about a certain Doctor Stagleap, whom he quite correctly identifies with Heiberg. Møller thus demonstrated the incredible naïveté of Kierkegaard’s tacit hope of forming an alliance with Heiberg—whom, despite everything, Kierkegaard continued to regard as “the legitimate ruler of Danish literature.” But Møller went even further, making a similar move with respect to Mynster, from whom Kierkegaard—once again, naively—had expected some sort of official protest against the depraved conduct of The Corsair. Møller wrote: “Next, we cannot approve of the grudge which the author seems to harbor against the Honorable Very Reverend, now His Excellency, Bishop Mynster. On the final page of the book Mr. Kierkegaard thanks the bishop with much warmth because his ‘firm’ has praised him, and he takes the opportunity to imply unmistakably that he, for his part, admires the bishop.” Møller had been able to sense the coolness that lay just beneath the surface of the great warmth with which Mynster had been thanked. And it was precisely in the Postscript that the word admire had again and again been defined negatively as a merely aesthetic relation to something aesthetic, a disinterested satisfaction indicative of a certain lack of genuine commitment between the admirer and the person admired, and thus, as the Postscript put it, “admiration is a deceptive relation, or can easily become that.” Thus Kierkegaard was also being deceptive when he declared his admiration for Mynster, and Møller made his point with such agility that the dialectical daring with which Kierkegaard had wanted to communicate indirectly to Mynster fell to earth like a lead balloon. Quite understandably, Mynster did not feel the least bit tempted to launch any torpedoes at the nuisance represented by The Corsair.

Nor were many other people tempted to do so, either. For example J. F. Giødwad, the legally responsible editor of Fædrelandet, had had enough. Earlier, full of concern about the favorable reception The Corsair was enjoying, he had encouraged Kierkegaard to give the gutter journal a broadside, the sooner the better. When he had been working on his piece about Møller—as Kierkegaard recalled in a bitter retrospective journal entry from 1855—Giødwad had indeed come “hurrying over to me in order to get hold of the article, standing there while I wrote the final portion.” But no sooner had the article been published than Giødwad turned on a dime and clammed up totally. He had no desire to rub the reading public the wrong way, and therefore refrained from lending public support to Kierkegaard, who had now become the object of scorn. Kierkegaard viewed this as unforgivable desertion, and in 1846 he felt obligated to break off the connection with Giødwad, whom he had seen every week for years and who was one of the very few people (perhaps the only person besides Emil Boesen) Kierkegaard called “my personal friend,” which he surely was. At any rate, Giødwad flatly refused to comment on Kierkegaard after Kierkegaard’s death.

Admiration and Envy: When One Word Leads to Another

From the vantage point afforded us by history it might seem both peculiar and embarrassing that Kierkegaard, who by 1846 had produced more than half of his entire literary output, would even bother to pay attention to the sophomoric pranks of The Corsair, which, though of course not entirely harmless, were nonetheless the sort of thing that ought to be assigned to the category of “amusement” (a category that, according to Constantin Constantius, included woman). And, indeed, it is not unusual to treat the Corsair episode as a little parenthesis on the margin of the great text constituted by Kierkegaard’s literary output, or to point to it as an example of Kierkegaard acting as an ethical corrective to his immoral times. The episode was, however, something other and more than that; it was, as Goldschmidt quite accurately put it, a drama, a dramatic triangle, replete with all the baggage that accompanies such triangles.

As noted, Møller had had enough when he read Kierkegaard’s piece at the beginning of January. The same applied to Goldschmidt at the end of February, when he decided to get rid of The Corsair. And Kierkegaard himself also had nothing further to say publicly after his second article in early February. In a journal entry, undated but presumably from March or April 1846, he wrote: “I do not read The Corsair. I would not even order my servant to read it, because I do not believe that a master has the authority to order his servant to go to a place of ill repute.”

If all three of them nevertheless continued their guerilla war of attrition, it was because a crafty and perfidious logic was at work behind their backs. The logic went something like this: If one admires something, one naturally seeks to resemble it. But if one is unable to resemble it, a double reversal comes into play. The admiration is transformed into envy, while the original desire for resemblance is transformed into a desire to caricature. It goes without saying that this presumes both a certain likeness and a certain difference between the persons who participate in the game. Naturally, an absolute resemblance would abolish admiration, just as absolute difference would of course render impossible an identification with the object of admiration.

The triangle was characterized by the presence of precisely this relative likeness and relative difference: Kierkegaard was the eccentric and the genius who admired and envied Møller for his erotic audacity; Møller was the eroticist and child of the proletariat who admired and envied Kierkegaard for his genius and his financial independence; Goldschmidt was the ambitious Jew who also admired and envied Kierkegaard, but who hated his arrogance and his patronizing manner. Goldschmidt and Møller were allies for a time, but of course they also had their own mutual rivalry, and each had to go his own way. It is certainly true that people say that you should stick with your own kind, but when your “own kind” are just as ambitious as you are, the rule does not work at all.

The rivalry between Møller and Kierkegaard is easiest to discern. First, Møller tried to rewrite “The Seducer’s Diary” but failed. Then he managed, with more success, to produce a pastiche based on “ ‘Guilty?’/’Not Guilty?’ ” And finally he caricatured the Postscript. Møller’s three attempts succeeded only in being poor or twisted copies of the original, but Klæstrup’s caricatures had copied the original—Kierkegaard—perfectly. There was a vicious symmetry in this: Just as Kierkegaard, for his part, had succeeded in identifying Møller with The Corsair, Møller had now succeeded in identifying Kierkegaard with a caricature in The Corsair.

And this identification had consequences. In no time at all Kierkegaard, who had previously been a natural part of the urban scene, became a walking caricature in the city. Now he was no longer seen as the thinker whose very eccentricity managed to compel the respect of the multitude, but on the contrary, he became a ludicrous advertisement for The Corsair, a mad icon. People who had once looked up to him, perhaps without really understanding what it was they were looking up to, now spent lots of time looking down on him—down, in fact, at his trousers to see if they really were as uneven as The Corsair had depicted. And so everyone could see for himself or herself that the man was indeed as odd as they had always suspected. Things even got to the point that Kierkegaard’s tailor, C. M. Künitzer of Vimmelskaftet, informed Kierkegaard in desperation that all the talk about the trousers, which had been his handiwork, could damage the reputation of his business, so if Kierkegaard found himself another tailor, Künitzer would be the last person to complain.

Despite their amateurish qualities, the caricature drawings of Kierkegaard in his uneven trousers can thus be said to have been a veritable stroke of genius, and even though the idea behind them was clearly a blow below the belt (indeed, as far below as could be imagined) the caricatures had a remarkable durability. This was especially so because they had an elemental polemical power that was doubly disarming. For one thing, they emphasized and exaggerated a chance detail it would have been ludicrous for Kierkegaard to defend himself against—one does not, after all, run announcements in the newspaper, denying allegations about one’s trousers. And for another, in a more general sense the caricatures directed attention to Kierkegaard’s physical appearance, his body, which was not his strong point.

When Kierkegaard launched his attack on Møller he felt sure of victory, writing “I will catch Mr. P.L.M. in his own trap,” but we are tempted to ask whether the result was not exactly the opposite—that is, whether Møller had not caught Kierkegaard in a leghold trap. Significantly, it was not The Corsair’s text, but Klæstrup’s caricature drawings on which Kierkegaard commented in his journals, where he again and again attempted to escape from his humiliation by making light of the matter. “I am accustomed to terrors other than the childish one of being drawn with … the alarmingly thin legs of a less-than-obscure philosopher,” he wrote repeatedly, displaying his uniquely vulnerable heroism. And that was certainly true, the part about the other terrors, but it only made a bad situation worse. “I commit myself to writing a much different sort of witty articles about myself and my legs than Goldschmidt is capable of,” Kierkegaard announced later, but in the same stroke of the pen he himself realized precisely that if the articles featured a different sort of wit, “the mob would not be able to understand them.” Thus it was of no help that in the company of an intellectual like Carl Weis he “could laugh heartily” at the entire crazy situation: “Indeed, when he and I laugh at my thin legs, I presume that we have a common basis in essential intellectual cultivation. If I were to laugh at them together with the mob, it would imply that I acknowledge having a common basis with it.” And that was simply not the case.

Kierkegaard was at his wits’ end, and this becomes clear when we inspect the large number of unpublished attacks and rejoinders—some of them testily aristocratic, others venomous and hairsplitting, some in the low-comic style that was The Corsair’s special province, others in various other styles—all of them groping in vain for an appropriately wry face and a fitting pose. If the controversy had been “a purely aesthetic controversy about who was the wittiest and that sort of thing, then of course the matter would have been easily settled,” he noted rather objectively, but unfortunately that was not what the controversy was about. Thus, in a piece that was repeatedly rewritten and that became increasingly unfocused and embittered, Kierkegaard felt obliged to insist that he was not “in competition with The Corsair”: “I hope that no clever soul busies himself with saying ‘that was really not a witty article.’ No, in fact, that is not what it is supposed to be.” All the same, several pages later he made the attempt: “Petrarch believed he would be immortalized by his Latin writings, and it was his erotic poetry that did it. Fate treats me even more ironically. Despite all my diligence and my efforts, I have not been able to fathom what it was the times required—and yet it was so close at hand. It is inconceivable that I did not discover it by myself, that someone else had to say it: It was my trousers…. Were they red with a green stripe or green with a red stripe!” In a way it was not without humor. It was just all too intellectual, and therefore it was simply ineffectual when the people to whom one was speaking were “Jew businessmen, shop clerks, prostitutes, schoolboys, butcher boys, et cetera.”

It was only too human. A growing sense of defeat put Kierkegaard in an aggressive and disorganized state of mind in which he reacted to the absence of evenhandedness with increasing unevenhandedness: “The Corsair is of course a Jewish rebellion against the Christians (the opposite of a pogrom) and against other Jews if they will not accept The Corsair’s notion of respect…. Because, look over there in the cellar entrance, there he sits, the idea of The Corsair, the dominator, he himself, the enforcer, the bookkeeper, the cellarman, the vagabond prince, the usurer Jew or whatever you want to call him…. So let us get these talents out into the open and see what they can do. Let them write on the same terms on which other authors write, one on one, using their real names without hiding in the cellar—then I will fritter away even more hours on a polemic of this sort.”

The Squint-Eyed Hunchback

Kierkegaard came to fritter away more than a few hours. Indeed, he frittered away days, weeks, months on this polemic against Goldschmidt and his “office of literary garbage collection,” which he threatened with fire and the sword and a good sound drubbing and much other unpleasantness, but all the nasty plans stayed in his writing desk. In that same desk was also to be found a striking and in many respects atypical journal entry, a little tale labeled “a fantasy” and titled “The Squint-Eyed Hunchback.” The tale begins: “Many years ago in the city of F. there lived a man who was known by everyone, though only very few had seen him because he almost never left his home…. He was slight of build, squint-eyed and hunchbacked, and he viewed squint-eyed hunchbacked people as the only truly unhappy people, and himself as the unhappiest of all. Because, said he, if I had merely been squint-eyed, I could go out in the evening and no one would see it, but then I am also hunchbacked. He hated all people and had sympathy only with those who were either hunchbacked or squint-eyed or both, but only those who refused to bear their fate patiently, loving God and men—because he viewed that as cowardice. He had been engaged, but he broke it off because of the taunts he thought he heard.”

We are almost tempted to believe that Kierkegaard had got a splinter from a troll’s magic mirror in his eye and had drawn his own self-portrait. For he indeed emphasized details that people of the day—viciously encouraged by The Corsair—tended to associate with him, namely his oddly hunched back and his broken engagement. And when in addition he brooded gloomily on the defiance and self-contempt that are typical of the isolated person, this most definitely does not diminish the impression that this is a demonic self-portrait. But it is not a self-portrait in any straightforward sense, because the tale continues: “He was the publisher of a paper and sowed discord among people. Defiance and pride and avarice. At home, he lived in splendor. He had large mirrors in which he would look at himself, and then he would say in delight, ‘Actually, you look like Caesar, apart from the fact that you are squint-eyed—and apart from the fact that you are hunchbacked, but people can’t see that when they look at you headon.’ He published a book titled The Squint-Eyed Hunchback, revealing his innermost self, something other writers never do. He imagined that he needed the paper in order to express his life view, but he didn’t have one at all. The paper carried only grumbling and banter, and his life view was ill temper and despair. To his confidant he said, ‘Why must I be squint-eyed and hunchbacked and therefore excluded from becoming, for example, a pastor or an actor?’ When the confidant said that this was also the case with blind people, with the one-eyed, the lame, the knock-kneed, with people whose legs were formed like the curved legs of a stool, then the little man said, ‘Well, all that is nothing compared with being squint-eyed and hunchbacked.’ ”

What looks at first like a self-portrait thus turns out to be a portrait of the journalist Goldschmidt, who valued profitable counterfeiting more highly than common literary decency. Kierkegaard continues: “The confidant went away. And then the little man put on a quilted silk damask robe, put a genuine diamond brooch on the robe, and underneath wore a silk vest bearing the Great Cross of the Order of the Lion. Then he sat on a throne in front of a mirror and said ‘Actually, you look like Caesar, apart from the fact that you are squint-eyed—and apart from the hump.’ And then he wept again until his old housekeeper came and bore him off to bed.” Burdened down by all these crazy emblems that merely symbolize imagined power, the little fellow is borne out of the tale, which was now just about over. But only just about. For almost as an afterthought it continues, “He once saw an old pantomime in which Pierrot played a hunchback, and he thought that the piece had been written in order to tease him and that Pierrot was imitating him—so Pierrot was abused in the paper for an entire year.”

With these lines, Kierkegaard returns to the ambiguity present at the beginning of the tale where it was uncertain whether it was himself or Goldschmidt who was being caricatured. Of the two figures, the hunchback can only be Goldschmidt, while Pierrot, who is not hunchbacked at all but only plays a hunchback, must be Kierkegaard whose presumptuousness is punished by abuse in “the paper.” But if anyone was actually a hunchback, it was not Goldschmidt, it was Kierkegaard! The ill-starred hump thus changes places and, so to speak, possesses the wrong man; thus Kierkegaard transferred his own infirmity to Goldschmidt. The point in this lonely document is the phenomenon of transference itself, and the hump is not some sort of actual, physical growth, but is another name for the infirmities and failings one attributes to others because one refuses to acknowledge them in oneself.

It is in a way both tragic and instructive that these three people, each of whom tried to assume a central position in Copenhagen intellectual circles, were all rebuffed. All three received, to use Goldschmidt’s expression, “a false number one.” Møller’s expulsion was probably the least symbolic. As early as 1845 he had been awarded a state-supported traveling fellowship, which long infuriated Kierkegaard, because “to allow such a person to receive a state subsidy is to compromise the nation.” The fact that Møller did not leave Denmark until the beginning of 1848 did not makes things any better. He went first to Germany, where he supported himself as a man of letters, a translator, and a journalist. Three years later he continued on to France, and after a number of restless years marked by ever greater poverty, he died of syphilitic encephalitis in 1865.

Fate was a little kinder to Goldschmidt. After he got rid of The Corsair, he traveled south “in order to be done with witticisms and to learn something,” as he himself put it. Kierkegaard, incidentally, viewed this as his personal victory.

Kierkegaard’s defeat consisted of his exclusion from the social fabric, his loss of a frank and open relationship with the common man. In spite of all his strategic calculations, he had not taken into account the most important thing, namely the world, where a crafty logic sometimes holds sway. And it made Kierkegaard its victim.

Many years later, Goldschmidt summed things up in a piece with the heading “P.L.M. and S.K.”: “Both were so unhappy that, when one considers their fates, the anxiety one feels when confronted with the enormous gravity of life sometimes becomes intensified into terror.”

The Great Reversal

1846 was an annus horribilis, a dreadful year, but Kierkegaard would not be Kierkegaard if he merely attributed all the misfortunes to the open-ended possibilities of mere chance. On the contrary, Kierkegaard was Kierkegaard—or, rather, Kierkegaard became Kierkegaard—because he saw his fate spelled out amid all the adversity. What had happened had not been a matter of chance, but something meaningful, it had taken place with the collusion and consent of Governance.

In Kierkegaard’s consciousness, the episode with The Corsair marked a new beginning, and this is attested to quite tangibly by the fact that he began to organize his journal entries in a different fashion. Since 1833, he had used notebooks, twenty-six in all, but in 1846 he began using what he called his “NB Journals,” large (quarto-size) blank books, writing on the first page of each journal the date he started using it. The various journals are numbered in chronological order, although dates for individual journal entries are more the exception than the rule.

During the last ten years of his life, Kierkegaard used a total of thirty-six consecutive volumes of these “NB Journals,” the first of which he dated March 9, 1846, which was of course the period during which he was coming closer and closer to sinking beneath the wake of The Corsair. He summarized the events in a “report,” which he began by noting matter-of-factly that the Postscript, in which he acknowledged his pseudonymous works, had now been published and that A Literary Review was about to go to press. “Everything is in order. All I have to do now is to remain calm and silent, relying on The Corsair to support the entire enterprise negatively, exactly as I wish…. Taken by itself it was surely the most fortunate of ideas that I broke with The Corsair at the very moment I was finished with my literary production in order to hinder every sort of direct approach—at a time when, precisely by having taken ownership of all the pseudonyms, I ran the risk of becoming a sort of authority.” Thus the attack on The Corsair had not been occasioned by moral indignation alone, it had also been strategically motivated and would endow Kierkegaard with an indefinable ambivalence, inasmuch as “all possible lies and distortions and nonsense and slander are employed in order to confuse the reader, thus helping him to become active on his own and hindering him from entering into a straightforward relationship.” Much more markedly than before, it has now become true that “to be an author is a deed.”

With this, another deed, the deed of being a pastor, seems to have been postponed indefinitely yet again. A month earlier Kierkegaard’s idea of becoming a pastor had been alive and well. He had even gone up to call on Bishop Mynster, who listened patiently and recommended that he become “a country pastor,” which Kierkegaard thought was a little too little, but on February 7, 1846, he wrote the following in his journal: “It is now my idea to be trained to become a pastor. For a number of months I have prayed to God for further help, for it has long been clear to me that I ought not be an author any more, which is something I want to be either wholly or not at all. For this reason, I have not started on anything new while reading the proofs [of the Postscript], only a little review of Two Ages which again is a concluding piece.” Scarcely had the Postscript been published, however, before doubts surfaced: “If only I could make myself become a pastor. After all, however much my present life has gratified me, out there, in quiet activity, granting myself a bit of literary productivity in my free moments, I would breath more easily.”

So Kierkegaard still wanted to be a pastor. Out in the country he could use his free time to write, which in itself was innocent enough, but by his own calculations it was a bad sign. Thus, on November 5, 1846, after he had had a conversation with Mynster, he plainly admitted that the prospect “of living in complete seclusion and tranquillity out in the country, for example, has now become a difficult one for me, for I have become rather embittered and I need the magic of literary productivity in order to forget all of life’s mean-spirited pettiness.” Twenty days into the following year, these thoughts returned with renewed intensity: Kierkegaard granted that a parsonage out in rural surroundings had always appealed to him as an “idyllic wish in contrast to a strenuous existence,” but the situation in Copenhagen had gradually become one that called for “an extraordinary person.” He went on, not without a certain sense of self-esteem, to assert that “as far as intellectual gifts, abilities, and mental constitution are concerned, there can be no doubt that I am absolutely well-fitted, and that I would bear a great responsibility were I to refuse a task of this sort…. Humanly speaking, from now on I may be said not to be merely running aimlessly, but to be going toward certain defeat—trusting in God that precisely this is victory. I understood existence in this way when I was ten years old, and this is the source of the enormous polemic in my soul. This was how I understood it when I was twenty-five years old. And this is how I understand it now that I am thirty-four years old. This is why Poul Møller called me the most thoroughly polemical person.” On January 24, 1847, the decision to remain in the city had become definitive: “Praise God that I was assaulted by all the vulgarities of the rabble. Now I have really had the time to learn inwardly and to convince myself that it had in fact been a melancholy idea to want to live out in a rural parsonage, doing penance in seclusion and oblivion. Now I am standing my ground more decisively than I have ever done.”

We might think that in the wake of the attack by The Corsair, Kierkegaard still had good reasons to leave the city, but he himself in fact drew just the opposite conclusion. Whatever other motivating factors there were, Kierkegaard also seems to have used the episode with The Corsair straightforwardly as a pretext for remaining in town, and indeed a pattern seemed to be emerging: Just as he had needed the break with Regine in order to become an author, he needed the collision with The Corsair in order to continue as one! Simply put, Kierkegaard had a need for opposition, harassment, and suffering as the stimuli for his writing. “Abuse that would have made another person unproductive only made me more productive,” Kierkegaard wrote in a heroic journal entry from 1849, where he avoided asking himself the rather obvious question of whether in reality he actually sought out such “abuse” in order to keep himself productive. Despite the fact that—as, for example, in the journal entry from 1846 cited above—he could label a pastoral call an “idyllic wish,” he knew very well that such an idyll had its costs: “The moment one merely mentions a rural pastor, one automatically thinks of a frugal, but calm and contented life out in a quiet landscape where the mill goes ‘click-clack, click-clack’; where the stork stands on the roof during the long summer days; where in the evening the pastor sits in the arbor with his spouse, so ‘paternally happy,’ happy with life, happy with his modest but meaningful work.” Thus it was not merely the hollyhocks along the walls of the parsonage that could go to seed. The pastor himself was also in danger, “because it is certain that fixed ideas can easily develop in a parsonage.” Kierkegaard concluded: “Even if one says that life in the big city stifles what is highest, it nonetheless also has its good side—it contains a continual corrective that hinders extravagances.”

The extravagance of being eccentric, for example.

“The School of Abuse”

So Kierkegaard remained in Copenhagen in the expectation that his literary productivity must now become “identical with being at the mercy of mockery and scorn.” His expectations were more than fulfilled. Copenhagen had previously offered him a daily “people bath,” a diverting mental health measure that provided him with positive psychological side effects. Now Copenhagen was no longer the capital of Denmark but “a closed-in little hole par excellence, a rotting swamp” populated by a howling mob whose stupid stares and giddy giggles followed Kierkegaard everywhere he went. He was “deprived of ordinary human rights, was abused with indignities every day,” and felt himself to be a “wretched plaything for the amusement even of schoolchildren.” He could no longer breathe in the streets but took the air in his journals, which teem with little reports of various predicaments: “Every butcher boy believes that he is almost entitled to insult me on orders issued by The Corsair; the young university students grin and giggle and are happy that a prominent person is trampled down; the professors are envious and secretly sympathize with the attacks, repeating them, though of course they add that it is a shame. The least thing I do, even if I merely pay a visit to someone, is mendaciously distorted and repeated everywhere. If The Corsair learns of it, it prints it, and it is read by the entire population.” The consequences were terrible: “The man I have visited is thus put in an embarrassing situation. He almost becomes angry with me, and he really cannot be blamed for this. In the end I will have to withdraw and associate only with people I don’t like, for it’s almost a sin to associate with the others.” It was not just the city that had shrunk, the entire nation seemed to have been reduced: “Denmark is a very small and petty country where everyone knows one another, where fear of man is the highest God, where being seen as ridiculous (whether justifiably or not) is what is most feared. These ratios spell the country’s ruin: Denmark is subsumed under Copenhagen; Copenhagen becomes a provincial town.” That was probably the way things always will be, but Kierkegaard dreamed back to days of yore, forgetful both of historical and geographical proportions: “Poor Denmark, from having had a great name as a European state, you have now sunk into insignificance, finally to being a provincial town—that’s all.” Or, in sum: “Oh, how vile to live in a tiny, little, silly country whose character consists only of want of character.”

To be a freelance intellectual, much less a humorist, under these conditions required almost more than Kierkegaard could manage: “They have poisoned the atmosphere for me. With my melancholia and my enormous burden of work, what I needed in order to relax was to be alone in the crowd…. I can no longer have this. Inquisitiveness surrounds me everywhere.” If he left the city and took a carriage out to the middle of nowhere in the hope of finding some simple solitude in the forest, hardly could he open the door before prying eyes would set upon the tormented aristocrat. Indeed, “there have been times when I have been received by a mocking assembly,” which takes a notion “to insult the coachman, so that he almost becomes afraid because he cannot figure out what is going on.” Then, when he finally seemed to have succeeded: “I take a long walk on quiet paths, lost in thought, and then suddenly encounter three or four louts out there, where I am quite alone, and these fellows take to calling me names: It has an enormously powerful effect on my physical well-being.” And when he sat in his regular place in church, a pair of overfed oafs would sit in the same pew and immediately begin staring at his trousers, mocking him in a “conversation so loud that every word can be heard.” For reasons unknown to Kierkegaard, nursemaids had also begun to send little children over to him “one after the other, in order to ask me what time it is, something that is also shouted after me in the street (God knows what this is really about or who has thought it up).”

His walks therefore became shorter and shorter. His contemporaries became increasingly insufferable to be contemporary with, and at the same time he himself became more and more alienated from his times. And the humor with which he had previously been able to reconcile himself with the foolishness of the world now became pointed to the point of becoming sarcastic—“because I cannot and will not joke under these conditions.” As a defense he distanced himself from his surroundings. He had to make himself a “distinguished” person, but being distinguished was precisely what he had always hated in Heiberg, Martensen, and Mynster: “Why must I be forced to be a distinguished person? Strange. I have quite specifically wanted not to be distinguished, and I have earned the disapproval of the distinguished by the entire manner in which I live, precisely by having been willing to associate with every person.”

In his comings and goings in the Copenhagen that had been so transformed for him, Kierkegaard was, however, still capable of making minor but wide-ranging psychological studies such as this: “One day I met three young gentlemen outside the city gate, and as soon as they saw me they began to grin and to carry on with all the impudence that is de rigueur here in this provincial town. What happens? When I had come close enough to make eye contact with them and I discovered that they all smoked cigars, I turned to one of them and asked him for a light for my cigar. Then all three of them hurriedly removed their hats and it was as if I had done them a service by lighting my cigar with them. Ergo: The same people who would delightedly cry ‘bravo’ for me if I merely let slip a friendly word, much less a flattering one, now cry ‘pereat’ [Latin: ‘put him to death’] and menace me. What Goldschmidt and P. L. Møller practice on a grand scale every individual here does on a lesser scale…. And I, who have always been the very soul of politeness, especially to the humbler class of people! Now the whole business is a comedy. But it is inestimably interesting to have one’s knowledge of human nature enriched in this way.”

The enriched knowledge of human nature consisted, among other things, of the social-psychological insight that popularity is not only the positive counterpart of exclusion, but it is also its prerequisite: Outside the city gate that day, when he experienced the rapid reversal from “bravo” to “pereat,” Kierkegaard understood the relationship between idol and scapegoat, between hero and outcast. In modern society violence is no less effective than in earlier times, but it has been transformed and has taken on a more symbolic character by which it has been civilized, so to speak. People are no longer crucified, they are made fun of. “In ancient times it was an entertainment to have human beings do battle with wild animals. The villainy of our times is more refined,” Kierkegaard writes, letting the violence express itself in his metaphors, which mime or imitate situations from the days when violence really was violence: The Corsair had made him into an “object for the assaults of ridicule” and had exposed him to “abuse by ridicule and to persecution by foolishness” as well as “scornful vulgarities.” Indeed, in a journal entry from 1854 he was capable of describing his situation simply as an “analogy to the gladiatorial animal combat of pagan times.” Nor did he shrink from arguing that if “Christ now [returned] to the world he would perhaps not be put to death, but would be ridiculed. This is martyrdom in the age of reason. In the age of feeling and passion, people were put to death.” In brief: “A martyrdom of ridicule is what I have really suffered.”

If Kierkegaard had garnered psychological insight, he had certainly not had the last laugh. Being a permanent object of ridicule certainly is the modern form of martyrdom, but for Kierkegaard it was also worse than death: “In the age of reason, ‘ridicule’ is the most feared danger of all; in our times a person can more easily bear everything else but being made a laughingstock, not to mention being exposed to daily ridicule—people shrink more from this danger than from the most torture-filled death.” The martyrdom of ridicule is the most unbearable because, as a “long-term martyrdom,” it is just like “that slow death, being trampled to death by a flock of geese,” and therefore Kierkegaard would definitely prefer “to be executed.”

Hans Brøchner had a clear sense of the increasingly disproportionate nature of Kierkegaard’s reactions: “In relation to a particular phenomenon, Kierkegaard did not possess a sense of reality—if I may use this expression—that was capable of counterbalancing his immensely well-developed powers of reflection. He could reflect on a trifle until it assumed world-historical significance, as it were. This is evidently what happened to him with The Corsair.” In a letter to Hans Christian Andersen dating from February 1846, Henriette Collin discussed “The Corsair’s sustained attack on Søren Kierkegaard,” reporting that “the poor victim is not enough of a philosopher to ignore this annoyance, but is preoccupied with it day and night and talks about it with everyone.”

So it is hardly too much to say that Kierkegaard had The Corsair on the brain. And if he already had certain paranoid tendencies, The Corsair gave him something to be paranoid about: “They have all laughed at me, some good-naturedly, some maliciously—in brief, in the most various ways, but all have laughed,” he wrote in 1854. When he had been at Mini’s café a few years earlier and had asked for a copy of The Corsair, he discovered to his surprise and chagrin that they had wanted to hide the paper from him. Something similar had happened at Päthau’s bar, but at both places Kierkegaard had insisted on having The Corsair and had then read it “in the presence of others, had spoken with them—and I succeeded as always in managing a light conversational tone.” So he was all the more surprised by people’s reaction: “What happens? Giødwad comes by one day and tells me that people are saying that this is the only thing I talk about, et cetera—that is, that this is supposed to prove that I have been affected by it.” And he hadn’t been, he hadn’t been affected by it, of course. “I have never been a Diogenes, I have never bordered upon cynicism. I have been properly and respectably dressed—so it is not my fault that an entire country is a madhouse,” he wrote in the summer of 1848. And he went on: “Oh, if there is a time and a place for jokes in Eternity, I am convinced that the idea of my thin legs and my trousers, which have been the object of ridicule, will be my most blessed amusement.” In eternity—but, mind you, not a second before. His nephew Troels Frederik Lund [who subsequently had his name legally changed to Frederik Troels-Lund] remembered how he had once seen his Uncle Søren on Gammeltorv and had wanted to run after him to say hello: “But just at that moment I heard some passersby say something mocking about him and saw a couple of people on the other side of the street stop, turn around to look at him, and laugh. His one trouser leg really was shorter than the other, and I could now see for myself that he was oddlooking. I instinctively stopped, was embarrassed, and suddenly remembered that I had to go down another street.”

Kierkegaard’s dearly bought lessons in “the school of abuse” meant that his eyes had been opened to an aspect of Christianity to which he previously had had only an academic relation. “Truly, I would never have succeeded in illuminating Christianity in the way that has been granted me, had all this not happened to me,” he wrote in a journal entry from June 1848, and fifty or so journal entries later the position has been radicalized: “All this, God be praised, has not made me unproductive, but precisely the reverse; and it has truly developed me so that I might illuminate Christianity. It has indeed developed my literary productivity, and yet it has permitted me to experience the sort of isolation without which one does not discover Christianity…. No, no, one must in fact be acquainted with it from the ground up, one must be educated in the school of abuse.” Kierkegaard, in sum, was doing something he had derided in other contexts: He was having “Christian experiences.”

After 1846 he was a dead man, socially speaking. True, the violence to which he was subjected was only symbolic, but this made it all the clearer to him that the times must get beyond these symbolic forms: “Only a dead man can stop and avenge such infamy in which an entire nation is more or less implicated. But all you who have suffered will be avenged! And I feel indescribably satisfied that I, if anyone, have found just the task for my life that is perfectly suited to all the conditions of my life…. Retribution is coming!”

The Neighbors across the Way

Kierkegaard had done everything to avoid being identified with his pseudonyms, but after The Corsair the mob would single him out and shout “Either/Or” and “Søren” after him on the street: “With the help of the organ of vulgarity, the signal had been given to call me only by my first name, so that it has become a nickname that was shouted at me. Now the better sort of people are using it. Indeed, it has now become something of a rarity to see a new Danish play without a character in it named Søren.”

This latter point was something of a misrepresentation, but there was something to it. The name Søren was used by a number of writers, including Carit Etlar, who assigned it to a common peasant in his one-act play Tony Goes to War. There was also a Søren in Johanne Luise Heiberg’s vaudeville A Sunday on Amager, which became a hit. Most of all, however, it was the young theologian in The Neighbors across the Way, Jens Christian Hostrup’s wild comedy, originally written for university students, that Kierkegaard had in mind. Hostrup had become a student at the university in 1837 and was granted a three-year residency at Regensen College in May 1841. In the autumn of 1843 the pale little undergraduate with the melancholy gaze hid himself in his room to study for his final examinations, which he passed laudabilis on November 3 of that year. Since he still had the right to remain resident at Regensen for another six months and had also been incautious enough to have promised to write a comedy for the amusement of the members of the Student Association, the recent graduate set to work on The Neighbors across the Way without really knowing what the play would be about. And in fact Hostrup was still writing the two final acts when the first act was in rehearsal, but with “most gracious royal permission” the piece had its premiere on Tuesday, February 20, 1844, at the Court Theater (now the Theater Museum). The cast of characters included a Regensen resident with the quite transparent name of Søren Kirk.

He was played by Hans Brøchner, who met the real Søren Kierkegaard on Højbro Plads one evening as he was on his way to try out for the piece. “Well, you are going to play me, then?” said Kierkegaard in a joking tone, to which Brøchner, trying to smooth things over, replied that he of course was not exactly going to play him. According to Brøchner, with this character Hostrup had “apparently had in mind principally the sort of dialectics that flourished among young students after Martensen had stimulated a very superficial interest in philosophy.” Brøchner had therefore found it completely defensible to accept the role, and when they parted on Højbro Plads he had not had the impression that Kierkegaard had been particularly affected by Hostrup’s “joke.” Brøchner would never have dreamt of copying Kierkegaard or of “presenting him in a comic light”: “I was too devoted to him for that—and much too poor an actor.”

Like the author of the play, the Søren Kirk in The Neighbors across the Way was both a theology student and a Regensen resident. In the fifth scene of the first act there is a general meeting in one of the rooms at Regensen, where the young people discuss to what use they should put their large cash balance, and Søren Kirk comes forward with the following suggestion: “Gentlemen, there are two ways in which we could use our wealth. Either we could be noble-spirited and make other people happy, or we could be ignoble-spirited and make ourselves happy. If we want to be noble-spirited and make others happy, we could either send money to the Swedes who have been burned or to the Jutlanders who have been drowned. Here enters an either/or; these two suggestions are really related to each other like fire and water. With one alternative, we cast the money into the fire, with the other, we cast it into the water.” The suggestion generates great interest, so the next time he speaks Kirk continues in an edifying tone: “If we want to make others happy, what is it we want to create in them? Happiness, and not sadness. But in whom could we create happiness, in those who are happy or in the sorrowful? Only in the sorrowful, not in the happy. We cannot create happiness in the Swedes who have been burned, for they cannot be happy because they have been burned. We cannot create happiness in the Swedes who have not been burned, for they are all happy because they have not been burned. We cannot create happiness in the Jutlanders who have been drowned, for they cannot be happy because they have been drowned. We cannot create happiness in the Jutlanders who have not been drowned, for they are all happy because they have not been drowned. But if we cannot create happiness in them, then we cannot make them happy, and if we do not make them happy with our gift, then we make them sad. Therefore, if we are noble-spirited and make others happy, we make them sad. But we do not want to make them sad because we want to make them happy. Therefore, we do not want to be noble-spirited and make others happy; rather, we want to be ignoble-spirited and make ourselves happy.”

The 1840s were not only characterized by Hegelian jargon, but as time went on, by Kierkegaardian jargon as well. As Hostrup later readily admitted, he had amused himself by parodying the so-called ecstatic discourse in the first part of Either/Or—which famously begins “Marry, and you will regret it. Do not marry, and you will also regret it”—on which everyone, according to his or her temperament and ideas, can play variations by substituting different elements in the pseudological mechanism, making everything equally (in)significant. Hostrup was parodying a parody, as it were. In the final scene Søren Kirk again attempts to speak, but is pulled off the chair on which he had assumed an oratorical posture.

It surely ought to be forgivable to parody a parody, but Kierkegaard was by no means so unaffected by it as Brøchner had assumed: “Someone writes a comedy for university students. Someone exploits the freedom that exists among comrades in order to present actual persons on stage. Well, of course, it would be uncomradely if anyone objected to it. But then the play prowls around in the provinces, where it is certainly not being performed for university students.”

The play prowled around in the provinces quite notoriously. In Odense it was presented a number of times between December 1845 and March 1846, and at about the same time it was presented at the Sorø Academy, where Carsten Hauch thus had a chance to have a cheap laugh. What was done was done, but on June 27, 1846, a couple of years after it had been performed for university students, The Neighbors across the Way was revived—on top of it all in a fund-raising performance for charity!—at the Royal Theater, where, however, the role of Søren Kirk had been changed to “Søren Torp, theologian,” as it said in the program. The Neighbors across the Way now became a smash hit, with a number of performances in June and July, and all summer long no one spoke of anything else. Everyone was amused, with the single exception of Kierkegaard, who thought the play sacrilege, not only because his personal vanity was wounded but also because Poul Martin Møller was held up to ridicule. The comic climax of the piece was indeed a merciless deconstruction of Møller’s splendid patriotic poem “Roses Already Blush in Denmark’s Garden,” which the flustered Lieutenant von Pudding attempts to quote during a party game, but instead becomes entangled in world-class gibberish and spoonerisms.

The situation was not improved when The Neighbors across the Way left the Danish stage and traveled north, up to Kristiania in Norway. On December 6, 1847 Kierkegaard read about the play in Flyve-Posten, which cited Norsk Rigstidenden, giving the following account: “Mr. Smith was somewhat absent-minded yesterday and got totally mixed up in Søren Kierkegaardian syllogisms.” The real Kierkegaard became furious, called Hostrup “a coward of a poet,” and, seizing hold of the newspaper, he produced an irate summary of the course of events under the heading “Despicable Lack of Character”: “Mr. Hostrup writes a comedy for university students…. The play tours all over the country, is finally presented at the Royal Theater—and now, as I see today in Flyve-Posten—in Norway, where someone in Rigs-Tidenden as a matter of course simply calls the character who is supposed to be me ‘Søren Kierkegaard.’ I have no doubt that in order to make the play more interesting they even put my name right on the posters. Now, that’s a university student comedy! And the Danish stage has thus been degraded into being The Corsair! … It is really disgusting how the Danes dishonor themselves, bending every effort so that neighboring peoples might witness our scandal.” Despite the fact that the Norwegian “Mr. Smith” apparently “got totally mixed up in Søren Kierkegaardian syllogisms,” he was nonetheless “greeted with acclamation.” Kierkegaard detected a certain inconsistency in this, “for had it been myself, I would hardly have been greeted with acclamation, but probably with a little pereat.”

Kierkegaard’s largesse in this matter was rather small. Thin-skinned as he was, he viewed this ignominious exposure to ridicule as the latest addition to his series of humiliations, drawing a mental line directly from The Corsair to The Neighbors across the Way. It never occurred to him that his great exemplar, Socrates, had stood up when Aristophanes’ The Clouds was being performed in the theater in Athens so that the public could make sure that it really was him, Socrates, who was being parodied on the stage. Nor did it occur to Kierkegaard that in the days when he himself had been a theology student he had in fact written The Battle between the Old and the New Soap-Cellars in which, among others, Martensen had been exposed to derision. Instead, Kierkegaard became angry that he was unable to defend himself, for if he invoked the law against using his name, the response would simply be that, after all, Søren was a common name. It was not in fact that common, Kierkegaard objected in one of his many monologues on the matter, but he did not take any action—the affair of the trousers had taught him about this sort of thing: “If I made a fuss about my name, it would be new material for ridicule.”

Kierkegaard never learned that he had a sympathizer in B. S. Ingemann, who wrote to Hostrup on December 14, 1847, after having seen the students perform the comedy at Sorø Academy: “The Aristophanean presentation of well-known personalities (namely Søren K.) conflicts with my principle of poetic freedom, and I believe that what you gain in immediate effect is offset by a loss in the higher artistic sphere. All of my complaints on this score would disappear if you would simply omit allusions to names and to the accidental externalities of personal peculiarities.”

Kierkegaard would surely have given his full support to this point of view, but of course the damage had been done, and from then on people would always link Søren Kirk with Søren Kierkegaard, however much they said they didn’t. And the desire to “obtain justice against the public” was and remained an “impossibility, just as impossible as catching a fart.”

“S. Kjerkegaard and His Reviewers”

It was certainly irritating. The enormous amount of talk generated by his person was exceeded only by the silence with which his writings were greeted. “For five, going on six, years, I have labored as an author. From a literary point of view practically not one single word has been said about me. Everyone remains silent…. This is how I live, in fact deprived of the most ordinary human rights to which anyone is entitled in a state. The humblest office clerk, every broom maker, has a sense of the seriousness of his existence, and in the eye of the state it is taken seriously. Only my existence is nonsense. If I gambled, and whored, and drank all day long, it would be forgiven me—but what a crime it is to use one’s leisure well.” Since his work as an author was “zero, less than zero,” Kierkegaard considered—in order that he might do some good for the country and qualify as a proper patriot—offering Fædrelandet his “services as a newspaper boy, by delivering the paper.”

If his writings had not been reviewed, Kierkegaard to some extent had himself to thank for that. In May 1845, when he negotiated with the book dealer P. G. Philipsen about the remaining copies of the eighteen edifying discourses, he made the nonnegotiable demand that Philipsen must not “make available any free copies to editors or in any way cause the discourses to become the object of critical review or discussion in the newspapers.” This sort of stipulation does not exactly promote ordinary marketing, but it was actually not necessary. In reality, the great silence with which—according to Kierkegaard—his writings were greeted, was broken quite noisily by the historical facts: In the year 1846 alone, the year Kierkegaard began his complaining, he was reviewed in the daily press and in periodicals no fewer than five times, and he was also made the object of detailed examination in an entire book that unambiguously took his side against a talent such as Martensen.

The amount of attention he had managed to attract is made clear by a piece fittingly titled “S. Kjerkegaard and his Reviewers,” which appeared on Tuesday, May 19, 1846, in Claudius Rosenhoff’s journal Den Frisindede. “There are scarcely any authors in recent years,” it was stated with respect to Kierkegaard, “who have been judged more wrongly, more one-sidedly, and in a more immature fashion than precisely this writer. Even though it would certainly be difficult to point out any really thorough or even moderately detailed study of his writings, there has not been any shortage of attempts.” The author of the piece, who signed himself “… h,” was indignant at the superficiality which the daily press, in particular, had displayed in its pandering to the general public, which merely gaped and grinned, while none of these “noisemakers really know what it is all about”—indeed, “the whole crowd lives in the most perfect ignorance about what it is that Kierkegaard wants.”

Editor Rosenhoff attempted to mollify … h’s indignation in a constructive fashion. He, too, had found the situation outrageous, but on the other hand he could readily understand it: In reality, Kierkegaard’s writings cannot in fact be reviewed at all. “The peculiar nature of those writings,” he explained, “renders any ‘thorough’ judgment impossible. To use the contributor’s own expression (though in another sense) the author is himself a literary ‘noisemaker,’ and we believe that the one person who could write any ‘thorough’ evaluation of his writings would have to be himself—if only he weren’t so ‘thorough.’ ”

This little—perhaps fictional—dialogue makes it clear that even in his own times Kierkegaard had established himself as a literature that contained a certain will to ambiguity within its very materials. Rosenhoff continued: “It does seem to us, however, that he sometimes makes himself sufficiently intelligible, and no well-spiced Christmas cake is more full of raisins than the majority of his works are full of very popular ingredients. But if he has mastered the popular language, comprehensible by ‘all the masses’ (and it must be admitted that he has), where it is a matter of witticisms, cellarman jokes, comic comparisons, and other tidbits, then if he is not understood, he has only his own ironic vanity to blame…. One certainly cannot require that every literary work be of the sort that can be published in a monthly magazine for children or have the appeal of Andersen’s fairy tales.”

It is true that Rosenhoff was critical (and the comparison with Andersen was annoying), but in any case Kierkegaard could not complain that people had not had a quite good sense of the character of his literary production. And not only were his writings reviewed, the reviewers of his writings were reviewed, as was the case in late March 1846 when two issues of Nyt Aftenblad carried a discursive review titled “Kjøbenhavnspostens Review of Concluding Unscientific Postscript and Concluding Unscientific Postscript.”

The printing presses of Copenhagen continued to run, attracting varying degrees of attention, and the wheels hummed, not always with words of praise, it is true, but when we consider the heartlessness, indeed, the bestial character that was generally typical of reviews of the time, Kierkegaard got off rather easily indeed. On May 7, the Theological Journal carried an eight-page review of Philosophical Fragments written by the theologian J. F. Hagen, who signed himself “80” for the occasion. As Hagen reminded his readers in the introduction to this review, he had earlier written a detailed examination of Fear and Trembling, just as, even earlier, he had published a review of Either/Or that had taken up all of thirty-two newspaper columns. Despite the fact that Hagen was generally positive, and that in reading the Postscript’s critique of the Hegelian spirit of the day he found “the author’s sharp and penetrating investigation entirely justified,” Hagen was and remained Hagen, and Hagen was a nobody. And it was simply the case that Kierkegaard was so snobby that it was not nearly as important what had been written about him as who had written it.

Therefore, what his former secretary P. W. Christensen—the fellow who some years earlier had been “scribbling in the newspapers,” to borrow Kierkegaard’s phrase—had to say was a matter of indifference to Kierkegaard. On two occasions Christensen had in fact gone to a great deal of trouble to enter the lists against his former employer. On March 29, 1846, he published a lengthy article in the Danish Church Times titled “Faith and Dialectic: Against S. Kierkegaard,” and on September 20 of the same year he published “The Dialectic of Faith” in the same journal. In a markedly undergraduate style that was almost the inverse of Kierkegaard’s, he mounted an attack on the Concluding Unscientific Postscript, insisting with a peculiar energy that if he himself were a pastor he would consign the humorist Johannes Climacus to Satan so that he, Christensen, might thereby once again “be able truly to love Magister Kierkegaard, whom I can never stop loving.” The point of Christensen’s remark was that the pseudonyms had put Kierkegaard in the shade, but in his typical manner Kierkegaard had now come up with his rejoinder and blithely ignored the rest of the matter. “An Unhappy Lover in the Danish Church Times” was the title of the article in which Kierkegaard, full of caustic delight, discussed Christensen’s unhappy love. Kierkegaard noted, rather unlovingly, that “next to smoke and drafts and bedbugs, I know of nothing more calamitous than to be the object of someone’s mental fixation.” “If I were to say, ‘Mr. Christensen, take hold of yourself. For your own sake (because you mustn’t do anything for my sake), but for your own sake consider what an unhappy passion of this sort can lead to. Consider that it is also unfaithfulness on your part to run after me like this—you who, as a Grundtvigian, are engaged to someone else’—if I were to say this, it probably would not help.” What was at stake here was certainly not the matter itself, but Christensen the person, whom Kierkegaard a couple of years later would call “a raving mad Grundtvigian.”

Kierkegaard did in fact become the object of something as calamitous as a mental fixation when the Icelander Magnus Eiriksson pledged him his unconditional allegiance. On November 19, 1846, Eiriksson, a rather eccentric theologian, a bachelor, and a sort of patriarch of the Icelandic community in Copenhagen, published a book with a title long enough to be in the record books: The Confused, Idealistic-Metaphysical, Fantastical-Speculative, Religion- and Christianity-Subverting, Fatalistic, Pantheistic, and Self-Deifying Essence of Dr. H. Martensen’s Published Moral Laws, or the So-Called “Outline of the System of Moral Philosophy of Dr. Hans Martensen.” As we can sense, Eiriksson, who was not one to soften his views, was utterly opposed to Martensen, but, alas, all the more in favor of Kierkegaard. In one of a number of lengthy articles, Kierkegaard replied to this “raging Roland, the combative Magnus Eiriksson, who in frightful fashion fondles me in the most obliging and appreciative terms.” When he first saw the book advertised in Adresseavisen with its grotesquely long title, Kierkegaard thought it was a “trick,” the purpose of which was merely “to get this terror-inducing, outrageous, nonsensical-martial, self-infatuated public notice printed and read by as many people as possible.” “Of course I have not read the book,” Kierkegaard continued, but he had at any rate gathered that Eiriksson’s intention was to get Martensen fired, and that in furtherance of this goal he had invoked the Postscript. “This is the sort of admiring recognition that I call a literary assault.” No, in fact it was worse than this, it was an “attack upon my amatory absorption in the problems,” which was especially horrible when one wished to remain “at a distance of 100,000 miles—or, better, at the distance of the idea—from the moment.” The volume of Kierkegaard’s displeasure intensified when he learned that Eiriksson supported his critique of Martensen by citing a conversation with several university students who interpreted the Postscript as an indirect polemic against the speculative Martensen. “It is abominable to print this sort of gossip,” Kierkegaard raged, “abominable to give the impression that my Concluding Postscript has deprived him [Martensen] of any adherents, for no university student can have found one word about Prof. Martensen anywhere in my entire book.”

We are tempted to ask whether it was the students or Kierkegaard who had understood the Postscript better. Indeed, the undeniable fact was that the entire Postscript contained a critique of Hegelian speculation, and even though it was true that Martensen was nowhere mentioned by name, one would have to be an extraordinarily poor reader not to discern the tendency of the critique. And the loophole through which Kierkegaard attempted to escape the embarrassing situation was thus characterized by such hairsplitting subtlety that no one could take it seriously: “Insofar as my writings at times contain polemics against Hegel, insofar as they continually target the excessive amount of pompous lecturing, the entire project has been carried out in such a manner—with diligence and I dare say with artistic propriety as well—that it could just as well have been written in Germany as in Copenhagen. Indeed, the typical figure of which I have repeatedly made use—if not nearly with the same success as Holberg’s use of the Magister, then at any rate in a similar fashion—is the Privatdocent, which actually does not exist here in Denmark at all.” The students of whom Eiriksson wrote had thus forced Kierkegaard to speak directly concerning the polemic against Martensen that Kierkegaard, alias Climacus, had been able to carry on indirectly in the Postscript. Kierkegaard’s refusal to acknowledge his polemic publicly was probably due less to his respect for Martensen than to his lack of respect for Eiriksson, whose clumsy conduct was certainly not going to be permitted to serve as the occasion for a more official confrontation.

It does look rather deliberate that, shortly after writing this white lie in which he dissociated himself from Climacus’s polemic, Kierkegaard changed both his subject matter and his writing style, suddenly proposing this maxim about serving the truth: “If it were the case that the proof that a person has served the truth is the advantages the person gained by doing so, the amount of money he made, the number of honors and distinctions a person has collected from those above or below him—oh, then I have never served the truth!” It was as though Kierkegaard’s involvement with Martensen, who had been appointed court chaplain on May 16, 1845, had forced him to reflect upon his own position (or lack thereof): painful, marginal, exposed. And as though curiously presaging the use of exactly the words “witness to the truth” that would create a polemical connection between Kierkegaard and Martensen nine years later, the piece continued: “There is an old book that has a list of witnesses to the truth…. One reads the list of the rules governing rank and precedence at court and notes in quiet exaltation how a person of rank ascends the many steps to the pinnacle of honor. In this same way, one reads that book in quiet exaltation, noting how the witness to the truth descends, step by step, into the small group with which he belongs, until he stands entirely alone, rejected…. The crescendo states: I partook of the honor of being greeted with jubilation and crowned by the people. The decrescendo: I partook of the honor of being hooted off the stage.—Except there is the difference that the arched vault under which the person of rank is speaking is not nearly so well constructed acoustically as that under which the witness to the truth is speaking, for only the latter gives the reverberation of eternity.”

Kierkegaard delighted in calling himself a freelance humorist, but when we read lines like those cited above, it would be at least as appropriate to call him a freelance prophet. With a profound sensitivity to what would be his own future role, he refrained from publishing his objections to Eiriksson. He justified his decision in a “confession” in which he took a couple of pages to explain why he had “not protested against M. Eiriksson’s stupid appreciation.” Eiriksson was generally recognized to be a “fool,” so of course Kierkegaard would only have been “damaged by [Eiriksson’s] appreciation,” on the one hand, and would have gained an “advantage by protesting against it,” on the other. But it was precisely for this reason that Kierkegaard did not wish to make an official protest. Behind his resignation lay an ethical-religious motive: “Pride is humility before God, and humility before God is pride. What human beings call pride is a mean-spirited combination of modesty and vanity. See, that is why I have not rebuffed M. Eiriksson’s stupid appreciation.”

The argument is dialectical to the point of weirdness. And as so often happens, the reader is left with a mild sense of amazement at the incredibly fine line that, in Kierkegaard’s case, separated uncompromisingly following the consequences of an argument from an equally consistent self-deception. In any event, it would not be long before Kierkegaard elevated his negative experiences into a positive principle that would serve as his rule from then on: “Thus, the person who wants the approval of the crowd must always be shrewd in amassing sensational effects, in half-hour performances—because the mass of mankind has no notion of greatness that lasts any longer than this, it cannot endure longer than this…. But my entire life as an author is an operation that has been systematically carried out—indeed, with perhaps ten times as much shrewdness as possessed by the shrewd—systematically carried out in the opposite direction. I always take the wrong approach. I never appear at the time of year when there is excitement in the literary world. I always appear in huge volumes, never in such a manner as to provide the reader with a chance to show off by reading it aloud or that sort of thing, et cetera, et cetera. And this runs through everything, down to the most insignificant detail…. For up to now I have always been in the minority, and I want to be in the minority. And I hope with God’s help that I will succeed in this until my final blessed end.”

And he did succeed.

“This Sweat-Soaked, Stifling Cloak of Mush That Is the Body”

“Kierkegaard almost resembled a caricature,” wrote one of his contemporaries, the theologian Peter Christian Zahle, who went on to provide us with this concise portrait: “Under the low-crowned, broad-brimmed hat one saw the big head with the coarse, dark-brown hair; the blue, expressive eyes; the pale yellow color of his face and the sunken cheeks, with many deep wrinkles down the cheeks and around a mouth, which spoke even when it was silent. He frequently carried his head tilted a little to one side. His back was a bit curved. He had a cane or an umbrella under his arm. The brown coat was tight and snugly buttoned around the thin body. The weak legs seemed to bear their burden uncertainly, but for a long time they served to carry him from the study out into the open air, where he took his ‘people bath.’ ” Zahle gives us a picture of an aging Kierkegaard, but since he aged strikingly quickly, according to the testimony of many, it is not unreasonable to assign the portrait to the later 1840s, perhaps even earlier. Thus one day, when Hans Brøchner had touched on the relationship between existential intensity and biological age, he intimated to Kierkegaard that he was truly “the oldest man” he had ever known, Kierkegaard merely smiled, thereby apparently accepting Brøchner’s “mode of calculation.”

More than the angle from which a person viewed Kierkegaard, it was the eyes that did the viewing that determined whether one characterized him, as Zahle does here, as having a “back [that] was a bit curved” or as: “high-shouldered” (Regine) or with “his shoulders hunched forward a bit” (Goldschmidt) or “with a crookedness that seemed just on the verge of hunchback” (Sibbern) or “somewhat deformed or at any rate round-shouldered” (Hertz) or “round-shouldered” (Otto Zinck), or simply “hunchbacked” (Carl Brosbøll and Troels-Lund). In any case this back, subsequently so world-famous, was not straight, and its irregularities, according to Henriette Lund and others, were perhaps owing to a fall he had once taken from a tree in Buddinge Mark, a village a little north of Copenhagen. “The shape of his body was striking, not really ugly, certainly not repulsive, but with something disharmonious, rather slight, and yet also weighty,” wrote Goldschmidt, whose physiognomic portrait trails off into an impressionistic stroke of genius: “He went about like a thought that had got distracted at the very moment at which it was formed.” Touché.

Hertz also left some quite fine sketches for a portrait in one his notebooks from the late 1840s, when he had the idea of writing a play that would feature a certain Johannes Climacus, whose form, drawn “from nature,” was as follows: “of middle height, with broad shoulders and a rather rounded back, a thin lower body; a bit bent-over when he walks; thin, rather long hair; blue? eyes; the voice often breaking into a treble or a bit piping. Also quite easily provoked to laughter, but suddenly switching to seriousness. There was something pleasing about him … something entertaining (he took his sweet time). He sits or lies down comfortably, with a certain sense of physical ease. The certainty in him.”

For Kierkegaard the body was a necessary evil, a temporary earthly envelope, which in his case had unfortunately been cut crooked across the shoulders. In 1848 he wrote this pained journal entry: “To be a strong and healthy person who could take part in everything, who had physical strength and a carefree spirit—oh, how often in earlier years have I wished that for myself. In my youth my agony was frightful.” After only four days’ service in the Royal Life Guards he had been issued a physician’s “Certificate of Discharge on Grounds of Unsuitability.” And when he took riding lessons in 1840 he fell, not off the horse but, worse yet, into the category of the comical. “He did not cut a particularly good figure on a horse,” wrote Hans Brøchner, who followed the matter from a respectful distance. “He sat on the horse stiffly and gave the impression that he was constantly recalling the riding master’s instructions. He can hardly have had much freedom to pursue his thoughts and fantasies on horseback. And so he soon gave up this sport.” As can be seen from a drawing that appeared in the January 16, 1846, issue, The Corsair still had memories of the magister’s lack of balance as an equestrian. Nor was fencing, which Peter Christian enjoyed, something in which the younger brother took any passionate interest. And there was no reason whatever to mention dancing—the refusal was immediate and almost a matter of principle: “No, many thanks, I do not dance.” For a man whose body was this intractable, it must have been excruciating to be the object of Regine’s devotion, all the more because it was allegedly directed at his entire person: “She did not love my well-formed nose, nor my fine eyes, nor my small feet—nor my clever head—she just loved me, and yet she did not understand me.”

The journals report on indispositions, headaches, dizziness, insomnia, vision problems, cramps, urinary difficulties, and other things of this sort, including recurrent constipation. Thus in a letter to Peter Christian dated February 5, 1843, the younger brother complained of “a case of hemorrhoids,” while to his nephew, the physician Henrik Lund, he confessed that he was suffering from “a hardened obstruction,” which in plain language meant that “my a[rse] is stuck shut.” Colonel Barth once heard Kierkegaard complain about abdominal pains and counseled him to get himself “a horse to ride and to ride properly; then the stomach would certainly be all right again.” But since a cure based on this sort of horse sense was quite understandably not the thing for Kierkegaard, he chose instead to alleviate his problem with Miss Reinhard’s boiled prunes or a dose of castor oil.

In a letter dated April 2, 1841, Henrik Lund’s uncle Henrik Ferdinand informed his older brother Peter Wilhelm, who was in Brazil, that Uncle Søren not only had “got engaged to a young and quite pretty girl, a daughter of Councillor Olsen,” but also that he had been sick: “His chest … is affected and he has begun to spit blood again.” The condition was not given a medical diagnosis, but it was also attested to by Henriette Lund, who mentions “a party for a group of young people” at which Kierkegaard “was taken ill, to the point of spitting up blood.”

Kierkegaard himself nowhere mentions spitting up blood, perhaps because for him the disparity between mind and body was the seat of the most profound suffering. A “Remark” in his journal from 1845 captured the misrelation perfectly: “Just as an invalid longs to cast off his bandages, my healthy spirit longs to cast off the fatigue of the body. Just as the victorious general cries when his horse has been shot from under him, ‘A new horse!’—oh, would that the victorious health of my spirit might dare to cry out, ‘A new horse, a new body!’ ” In the margin, next to the words “fatigue of the body,” Kierkegaard added: “this sweat-soaked, stifling cloak of mush that is the body and the body’s fatigue.” Kierkegaard could also formulate the relation between spirit and flesh in a modern metaphor: “Like a steamship whose machinery is too large in proportion to the ship’s construction—that is how I suffer.” Or even more summarily and with yet another maritime metaphor: “I am now living in melancholia’s private berth.”

As fortunately is the case with most people, as the years passed Kierkegaard, too, seems to have become more reconciled to his body, concerning which The Corsair had practically compelled him to have a sense of humor. But as few others have succeeded in doing, Kierkegaard was gradually able to reinterpret his physical weakness and discern a theological point. In 1847, he sighed that “viewed in animal categories, as a plow horse or as beef for butchering, I am quite inferior…. I have neither muscles nor strong legs nor fat flesh. No wonder, then, that I am looked down upon by other people.” But in 1854 he would write: “A frail, thin, sickly, pitiable man, so small-boned, almost like a child, a form such as every animal-man almost finds laughable to view as a human being—he is employed for strenuous tasks under which giants would collapse: You scoundrels, do you not see that I, too, am present, I, the Almighty? Do you not see the absurd?” The abnormally powerful spirit could now be pitted in earnest against the frail and imperfect flesh: “Slight, thin, and weak, denied in almost every respect the physical basis for being reckoned as a whole person, comparable with others; melancholic, sick at heart, in many ways profoundly and internally devastated, I was granted one thing: brilliant intelligence, presumably so that I would not be completely defenseless.”

The misrelation between spirit and body not only made a theological point, it was also a prerequisite for artistic productivity. So it is scarcely too much to say that by a strange paradoxical logic, it was Kierkegaard’s psychosomatic conflict that made him a great success in world literature.

This very success, however, was itself a great theological problem. And it led to new suffering.

The Bull of Phalaris

When the tyrant Phalaris, who ruled over Agrigentum in Sicily, wanted to put his enemies to death, he had them roasted in a gigantic copper bull whose nostrils were outfitted with flutes fashioned such that the screams of his enemies were transformed into the most delightful sounds. This perversely refined instrument of torture was what Kierkegaard had in mind when he wrote the first of the “Diapsalmata” that constitute the opening section of Either/Or: “What is a poet? An unhappy person who conceals profound torment in his heart, but whose lips are so formed that when sighs and cries pass over them, they sound like beautiful music. His lot is like that of the unfortunates who were put in Phalaris’s bull and gradually tortured over a slow fire: Their screams could not reach the tyrant’s ears to terrify him; to him they sounded like sweet music. And people crowd around the poet and say to him, ‘Sing again soon,’ which means ‘May new sufferings torment your soul, and may your lips remain formed as they have been—because the screams would only upset us, but the music is delightful.’ And the reviewers show up and say: ‘That’s right. That is how things must be in accordance with the rules of aesthetics.’ Now it goes without saying that a reviewer resembles a poet in every detail, except that he does not have the torments in his heart or the music on his lips. See, therefore I would rather be a swineherd in Amagerbro and be understood by the swine than be a poet and be misunderstood by people.”

If we didn’t know better, we might be tempted to believe that Kierkegaard had secretly been reading Freud, for Freud, too, diagnosed artistic creativity as a symptom of an unresolved conflict within the artist, a sublimation of a crisis in the self-relation. The artist or poet is a person whose own life is not congruent with what he writes about, and his writing is compensation for a lack of existential realization. He can tell everyone else’s secrets, only not his own, and this lack of clarity is precisely the unconscious growth zone for artistic productivity. Even Judge William had a notion of this: “A poet existence as such resides in the obscurity that results when despair has not been carried through, when the soul constantly trembles in despair and the spirit cannot achieve genuine transfiguration.”

Everything King Midas touched turned to gold; everything Kierkegaard touched turned to writing. But unlike King Midas, who in the end came close to perishing of hunger, Kierkegaard lived off the writing he himself produced. And before anyone else did so, he acknowledged the connection between his mental crises and the therapeutic function of writing: “Oh, how burdensome! As I have often said about myself, like that princess in the Thousand and One Nights, I saved my life by telling stories—that is, by productivity. Productivity was my life. A melancholia of immense proportions, inner sufferings of the sympathetic sort, everything, everything, I could manage everything—if I was permitted to produce.” This idea of sublimation recurs in a myriad of more or less identical versions, repeated so often that a prosaic “et cetera” can slip into the middle of his anguished confessions as an almost unnoticeable bit of dissonance: “I became productive, which rescued me from a melancholia profoundly rooted in my being et cetera.”

Among these stereotypically introverted journal entries, which at some points congeal into sheer clichés, there are, however, also reports of how happy he is with his work, its naturalness, its divine blessedness. In other words, he reports on his work as a successful sublimation, as, for example, in this sketch of a typical workday from 1849: “I get up in the morning and thank God. Then I get to work. At a set time in the evening I break off, thank God—and then I sleep. And that is how I live, admittedly at some moments not without bouts of melancholia and sadness, but essentially in the most blessed enchantment, day in and day out.” Kierkegaard lived in a close-knit synthesis of monastic routine and inspired rapture into which melancholia only just barely managed to squeeze for a few moments now and then. But “essentially” this was a life lived in an unself-conscious enchantment into which the artist had been transported by means of artistic creativity. Productivity was nothing less than a physical need, an appetite: “Only when I am productive do I feel well. Then I forget all the unpleasant things of life, all the sufferings; then I am happy and at home with my thoughts. If I stop for just a couple of days, I immediately become ill, overwhelmed, oppressed; my head becomes heavy and burdened. After having gone on day after day for five or six years, this urge, so abundant, so inexhaustible, still surges just as abundantly—this urge is of course also a calling from God.”

The productivity was a calling from God, but the hesitation visible in the words “of course also” betrays Kierkegaard’s need to come up with additional justification for his literary activity. It was of decisive importance to him to clarify his understanding of his suffering and the productivity to which it gave rise. For years he had viewed the suffering as a permanent psychosomatic conflict that stemmed from extraordinary burdens, both inherited and environmental. And as long as he could cling to this understanding of himself, he could be reasonably sure that making use of his melancholia in the service of his writing was justifiable. Sublimating his personal conflict into writing was legitimate because in the final analysis it served an overarching human and existential purpose: “I have understood my task to be that of a person who has himself become unhappy, yet who, since he loves human beings, wants precisely to help others who are capable of happiness.” With this position, the external justification—that of helping other people—seems to have been established; all that remained were the variations: “Thus I believed myself to have been sacrificed because I understood that my sufferings and my torments made me resourceful in exploring truth, which in turn could be beneficial to other people.” In the more official version published in The Point of View for My Work as an Author, self-imposed penance, penitence, is installed as a dynamic factor in the sublimation: “My work as an author was the prompting of an irresistible inner urge, the only possibility for a melancholy man, the honest attempt of a profoundly humbled man, a penitent, by making every sacrifice and bending every effort in the service of the truth, to do something good in return, if possible.”

Here Kierkegaard appears to have become mired in his own psychosomatic conflict. He believed that it was unavoidable, but—perhaps—he believed that this was the case especially because the conflict was the basis of his art. “Yes,” he wrote in 1849, “if my suffering, my weakness, were not the basis for all of my intellectual activity, I would of course make another attempt to deal with it quite simply as a medical matter. After all, if one’s life is absolutely without significance anyway, it just isn’t right to suffer as I suffer and simply do nothing. But here is the secret: The significance of my life corresponds exactly to my suffering.”

“What Does the Physician Really Know?”

Traditional medical treatment was not particularly applicable, in Kierkegaard’s view. This is made clear by evidence such as a journal entry from 1845 entitled, “Remarks by a Humorous Individual,” which near the beginning includes this merry monologue: “Things here go just as they did with me and my physician. I complained about being out of sorts. He replied, ‘You probably drink too much coffee and walk too little.’ Three weeks later I spoke with him again and said, ‘I really do not feel very well, but now it cannot be because of drinking coffee, for I do not drink coffee at all, nor because of lack of exercise, for I walk all day long.’ He replied, ‘Well, then the reason must be that you do not drink coffee and that you walk too much.’ And so my infirmity was and remains the same, but if I drink coffee the cause of my infirmity is that I drink coffee, and if I do not drink coffee, then my infirmity is caused by my not drinking coffee. And that is how it is with us human beings. All of earthly existence is a sort of infirmity.”

So much for the medical guesswork that would rather hit the wrong target than hit nothing at all, a caricature which Kierkegaard, by the way, found so successful that he subsequently made use of it in the Postscript. But despite all his skepticism about medical confusion, Kierkegaard could not abandon the notion that there might be a medical way out of his suffering. Was it a somatic problem or an ethical-religious one? Ought he interpret his isolation as the unavoidable situation of the extraordinary person, or was his situation the result of a self-imposed self-enclosedness in which he made himself believe that he was acting in accord with God’s wishes—and in so doing was merely burrowing his way deeper in sin? In principle he shared the point of view of the pseudonymous master psychologist Vigilius Haufniensis, who dissociated himself from earlier notions of sin as “a disease, an abnormality, a poison, a disharmony.” The demonic has been studied—erroneously—from three vantage points: “aesthetic-metaphysical,” “ethical judgmental,” and “medical treatment,” explains Vigilius Haufniensis who believes, just like Judge William, that it is a misunderstanding to go to a physician with problems connected to the demonic, because the demonic is not “something somatic” that should be grouped with “the natural phenomena, but is a psychical phenomenon, an expression of unfreedom.” The traditional medical diagnosis is therefore superficial and inadequate, and when Vigilius Haufniensis peers into a physician’s office, he has in his eye a splinter from a troll’s magic mirror that captures grotesque scenes: “People have viewed the demonic from the vantage point of medical treatment. And obviously this means with powders and with pills—and then with enemas! Now the pharmacist and the doctor join forces. The patient is removed so as not to frighten the others. In our courageous times we dare not tell a patient that he is going to die; we dare not call the pastor out of fear that the patient will die of shock.”

Yet, with all this, Kierkgaard has not excluded the possibility of examining suffering from a medical vantage point; he has merely situated it one or two notches below the psychological and the “pneumatic” approaches. At one point in 1846 he raised this question in one of his “journals” (and of course he himself used this medical-sounding term for those volumes): “And when you get right down to it, in the medium of actuality and of becoming, what do the physiologist and the physician really know, then?” The question is raised preemptively and with rhetorical resignation, but it had a highly personal reference, for Kierkegaard really did not know what the physician really knew about psychosomatic misrelations.

He therefore found it advisable to consult his physician, Oluf Lundt Bang, who was very well known at the time. Bang was Bishop Mynster’s half-brother and had been the Kierkegaard family physician for almost a generation. His relationship with Kierkegaard was on the level of social acquaintance, if not personal friendship, and he would occasionally invite Kierkegaard to dinner. On December 29, 1849, for example, Kierkegaard received an enthusiastic invitation that, for once, had not been written in verse. Bang suffered from an an irrepressible urge to write verse on every occasion, and he loved to send lengthy rhymed letters after Kierkegaard had presented him with one of his books; even Bang’s autobiography was written in verse.

An extensive journal entry from 1846—titled “How I Have Understood Myself throughout the Whole of My Work as an Author”—is devoted to his first visit to the doctor. In this entry Kierkegaard presents a compact autobiographical sketch that begins with language that would later become almost proverbial: “I am in the deepest sense an unhappy individual and from my earliest days have been nailed fast to one or another suffering that verged on madness and that must have its deeper origin in a misrelation between my mind and my body—because (and this is both remarkable and a source of infinite encouragement) it has no relation to my spirit, which on the contrary, perhaps because of the tense relationship between my mind and my body, has been granted an unusual resilience.” Next comes his relationship with his aged father, whose melancholia was passed on to the son. Then comes the catastrophe with Regine that changed his life and made him an author. And then, finally, Kierkegaard approaches his medical appointment. We do not learn how the consultation went in any concrete or clinical sense, but even by itself, the unfree and formal style of Kierkegaard’s journal account makes clear the clumsy, shy—and in the most literal sense, buttoned-up—manner in which he had approached the matter: “Even though I am no friend of confidants, even though I am absolutely disinclined to speak to others about my innermost affairs, I nonetheless believe and always have believed that a person must not fail to make use of the remedy of consulting another person. Only it must not become a frivolous intimacy, but a serious and professional communication.” That was Kierkegaard’s lengthy run-up, now his leap: “I have therefore spoken with my physician about whether he believed this misrelation in my constitution, between the physical and the psychical, could be overcome so that I could realize the universal. This he doubted. I asked him whether he believed that the spirit was capable of refashioning or reshaping such a fundamental misrelation by force of will. This he doubted. He would not even advise me to bring the whole of my willpower (of which he has some notion) to bear upon it, for then I might explode everything.”

We sense how carefully Kierkegaard formulated the questions he put to Bang so that he would only get to hear what he could have said to himself. More than anything else, the consultation was in reality simply a formality and barely concealed the fact that Kierkegaard was not genuinely interested in a medical diagnosis of his sufferings. His notion, that by summoning up all his willpower he might be able to reshape the misrelation between the soul the body, was quite in keeping with the generally held view at the time, namely that one could cure mental disorders with external, iron discipline and moral toughness, with mortification of the flesh. “From that moment my choice was made. This grievous misrelation, with all its sufferings—which undoubtedly would have made suicides of most of those who had enough spirit to comprehend fully the appalling nature of their suffering—I have viewed as my thorn in the flesh, my limitation, my cross. I have thought of it as the costly bargain in which God in Heaven sold me a spiritual strength that has not yet found its equal among my contemporaries. This does not make me conceited, for I am indeed crushed; my desire has become my bitter daily pain and mortification.”

The second time that Kierkegaard is known to have consulted Bang was in connection with several ecstatic days around Easter 1848. In the journal entry for April 19, 1848, following two large “N.B.’s” we can read: “My entire being is transformed. My concealment and self-enclosedness are broken—I must speak. Great God, grant me grace!” No sooner had Kierkegaard decided to speak than Bang came by, but even though this coincidence of events might seem to bear a perfect resemblance to “Governance,” Kierkegaard nonetheless avoided mentioning the subject—“it is too sudden for me.” But he did want to talk, absolutely. On Easter Monday, however, his mood had changed completely. Once again, after two large “N.B.’s” he wrote: “No, no, my self-enclosedness cannot be lifted, not now, at least. The idea of wanting to lift it has become such a constant preoccupation for me that it merely becomes more and more fixed.”

Nonetheless, prompted by the sudden reversal at Eastertime, Kierkegaard decided to consult Bang after all, and this in itself had a sedative effect even though (or perhaps precisely because) he spoke “to” and not “with” his physician: “But I do take consolation in having spoken to my physician. I have often feared that I might be too proud to speak to anyone. But as I did it earlier, so I have done it again now. And what does the physician really have to say? Nothing…. I certainly believe in the forgiveness of sins, but I understand it, as I always have, to mean that I must bear my punishment throughout my life, remaining in the painful prison of this self-enclosedness, distant in the deeper sense from the society of other people—though mitigated by the thought that God has forgiven me, … and so indescribably happy or blessed in the spiritual activity that God has so generously and graciously granted me.”

Neither this journal entry nor any later ones contain so much as a hint about what the conversation between doctor and patient was about. On that occasion as well, Kierkegaard had evidently wished to preserve the “secret” that his suffering stood in the most intimate imaginable connection to his creativity. And thus he left it to posterity to piece together a medical diagnosis.

“For I Have Loved My Melancholia”

It is difficult to come up with a plausible critique of Kierkegaard that he himself did not anticipate in his analyses of the Kierkegaard phenomenon. Few psychologists have assigned such central importance to resistance to recovery, and to anxiety about the good, as did Kierkegaard. He could of course hide behind the pseudonym Vigilius Haufniensis, but he could never run away from the profound personal experiences without which The Concept of Anxiety could never have seen the light of day. True, the work was not a psychological autobiography in any ordinary sense, but the mere fact that Kierkegaard was practically speaking the first person to produce a monograph on anxiety makes it reasonable to look to his own problematic inner life as its primary source.

Thanks to his own analyses, Kierkegaard did indeed manage to distance himself from demonic self-enclosedness, but we must not forget that he also spoke of a justified self-enclosedness, for which he seems to have had quite unlimited sympathy. Vigilius Haufniensis formulates the problem like this: “Always keep in mind that according to my terminology, one cannot be self-enclosed in God or in the Good, because that sort of enclosedness means precisely the greatest sort of expansiveness. The more definitely conscience is developed in a person, the more expansive he is, even if in other respects he closes himself off from the entire world.”

The final clause, with its apparently harmless “even if,” makes all the difference. Is it precisely here that the demonic Kierkegaard’s modification of Vigilius Haufniensis’s theory of openness is to be found? Is that little “even if ” in reality the great disavowal of the saving power of communication? Is it Kierkegaard’s own private proviso, his mental reservation? Or do the words say the opposite, that is, that the relationship with God liberates a person in relation to himself and his fellow human beings? Who would not prefer to believe in this latter possibility?

Nonetheless, neither here nor at other points can we completely escape from the impression that it was perhaps less the case that Kierkegaard was ruled by his self-enclosedness than that the self-enclosedness was ruled by Kierkegaard, for the sake of his creativity, his writing, his art. Unlike openness and rashness, self-enclosedness and melancholia are aesthetically productive factors that bind the artist to the world and make him breathe deeply; this was something Kierkegaard had experienced and had expressed in writing: “In this melancholia I have nonetheless loved the world, for I have loved my melancholia.” “Sweet is the joy of melancholia,” wrote Ossian, the legendary Irish warrior and bard, whom Kierkegaard paraphrased in Stages on Life’s Way, where he wrote, “Sweet is the sorrow of melancholia.”

Posterity has very much doted on the Kierkegaard who doted on his melancholia and wrote page upon page about his unspeakable sufferings, his vita ante acta [Latin: “previous life”], the thorn in the flesh, the wound that would never heal, the traumatic experiences of childhood (or rather, the traumatic lack of a childhood), but in all this it has often been forgotten that Kierkegaard’s unhappiness, his sorrow and his despair, also interested him—and he was rarely so depressed that he did not feel like writing about it. There are no signs of depression in the abnormal, clinical sense of the term, which would have left large chronological gaps in the journals. On the contrary, the perseverance that characterizes the entire literary enterprise is evidence of a colossal energy surplus, a sort of mental health despite everything, which is why the label of manic-depressive—which has been put forward now and then for want of anything better—seems quite erroneous. Psychiatrists speak of folie à deux, by which they mean an illness that the mentally ill person can impart to others. And a rather obvious supposition is that the father passed on his depressive condition to his son, Søren Aabye, who in fact seems to have recognized this years later: “Now if I had been brought up in more ordinary fashion—yes, it stands to reason that I would scarcely have become so melancholy.”

It would certainly be heartless as well as incorrect to assert that when Kierkegaard was dejected, he was merely feeling the way ordinary people ordinarily feel, but it was undeniably a refreshing contrast to the traditional presentation of Kierkegaard as a permanent depressive with a hunchback when his brother-in-law Johan Christian Lund spontaneously exclaimed (after having read some of Kierkegaard’s posthumously published papers): “Well, isn’t that an unpleasant thought, that a person who always seemed so happy was so fundamentally melancholic.” We are almost tempted to assume that Kierkegaard was right when he wrote to M. H. Hohlenberg (in a letter marked by a certain irrational exuberance) that the cause of his melancholia was perhaps to be found in the rubber of his galoshes.

“I dare say that he was never melancholic during the long period I knew him, and it was only during his final two or three years that I no longer saw him,” wrote Sibbern, age eighty-four, about Kierkegaard, with whom he had first become acquainted in the early 1830s and whose dissertation On the Concept of Irony he had helped to evaluate. During the period of Kierkegaard’s engagement, Sibbern would occasionally come along as a sort of chaperon, sitting in the coach when the young couple were driven out to the Deer Park, so he must have acquired at least some knowledge of Kierkegaard’s psyche. Nor was Sibbern blind to the fact that Kierkegaard “was, inherently and in his innermost being, a very inwardly complicated sort of person.” If Sibbern saw no traces of melancholia in Kierkegaard, it of course could have been because Sibbern, as Kierkegaard once remarked to Hans Brøchner, totally lacked “an eye for the disguised passions, the reduplication by which the one passion assumes the form of another.” This latter criticism is not entirely fair, however. In the same breath in which he made his controversial remark about Kierkegaard’s lack of melancholia, Sibbern added: “I must nonetheless point out that it is certainly possible for a man to carry a great melancholia within himself along with a good deal of liveliness and buoyancy.” The reader is therefore tempted to conclude that Kierkegaard’s nature contained more “liveliness and buoyancy” than “melancholia.” In reality, he was like everybody else—merely multiplied tenfold.

It is well-known that art emerges from spiritual crises, just as the owl of Minerva only takes flight at close of day. “To be in perfect physical and psychic health and lead a true life of the spirit—no one is capable of it, for in that case he would be carried away by an immediate sense of well-being,” Kierkegaard noted in 1849, with his characteristically shocking objectivity. There was no danger that the man who made this observation would himself be carried off by any immediate sense of well-being. He was already more spirit than flesh. Nevertheless, one cannot avoid the flesh as the vessel of the spirit, and neither can one avoid the question of the extent to which Kierkegaard had a privileged psychosomatic access to his artistic talents.

And this question can best be answered by taking a little detour to examine someone with a very singular fate.

Adolph Peter Adler

On June 29, 1843, Søren Aabye wrote a letter to Peter Christian at his parish down in Sorø. Most of the letter is inconsequential but then there is a little postscript: “You know that there is in town a Magister Adler, who became a pastor on Bornholm, a zealous Hegelian. He has come over here, wants to publish some sermons in which he probably will make a move in the direction of orthodoxy. He is a bright fellow, quite experienced in many of life’s grammatical cases, but at the moment a bit overwrought. It is nonetheless always possible, however, that this is a phenomenon worth keeping an eye on.”

The phenomenon of Adler, Adolph Peter Adler, was indeed very well worth keeping an eye on. He had arrived in Copenhagen ten days earlier on the steamer Harlequin and had looked up Kierkegaard in order to present him with a copy of Some Sermons, just off the printing press. The book was covered with a lovely dust jacket of shiny green paper, and on the inside cover Adler had written in his most elegant handwriting—albeit with a single error—“Mr. Magister Kirkegaard. In friendship, A. Adler.”

The two men sitting in Kierkegaard’s apartment knew each other from the Borgerdyd School, where they had attended the same classes for a number of years. This probably also explains why they were on familiar terms and could discuss family matters. Like Kierkegaard, Adler was also the son of a well-to-do businessman who was sufficiently successful that by 1815 he could style himself a “merchant,” and that was something in those days. After passing his university entrance examinations Adler enrolled as a theology student in 1832, completing his education in 1836 with a grade of laudabilis. The next year he embarked on a foreign tour that brought him to Germany, Italy, Switzerland, and France. On his return to Copenhagen he continued his study of philosophy, primarily Hegel, and in 1840 he defended his magister dissertation, The Isolated Subjectivity in Its Principal Forms, which, having been granted a royal dispensation, Adler submitted written in Danish—as did Kierkegaard in 1841.

During the winter semester of 1840–41 he offered a series of public lectures at the university on Hegel’s objective logic, but then he broke off his Copenhagen career, married, moved to Bornholm, and became a parish pastor for the congregations of Hasle and Rutsker. Several months earlier, his predecessor in the position had been dismissed on grounds of insanity. That same year, Bishop Mynster went on an official tour of inspection to the sunny little island, and in a letter to his wife, dated July 24, 1841, he discussed his visitation of the newly appointed Pastor Adler: “It was, as you may well imagine, Copenhagenesque. But what moved me even more was that, for all his Hegelianism, Adler is quite good at preaching and at looking after his job, and that his wife, who is a good one, is extremely happy in Hasle despite the fact that she is a Copenhagen lady. I think he is also liked by the congregation.”

So everything seemed idyllic, but in 1842, just before Christmas, the life of the young pastoral couple took a dramatic turn. Adler himself recounted this in the preface of Some Sermons: “In December of last year I had almost completed writing a work that I had intended to call ‘Popular Lectures on the Subjective Logic.’ … One evening I had just written on the topic of the origin of evil; then I saw in a flash that everything depended not upon thought, but upon the Spirit, and that there existed an evil spirit. That same night, a hideous sound descended into our room. The Savior ordered me to rise up and go in and write down these words.” This is followed by eleven lines that are supposed to explain how evil arose when “man’s thoughts became absorbed in themselves.” The preface ends: “Then Jesus commanded me to burn my own writings and in the future to keep to the Bible. I know that the sermons and discourses from number VI to the end were written in collaboration with the grace of Jesus, and that I have only been the instrument.”

So it was this man and his collection of sermons that turned up in Kierkegaard’s apartment one summer day in 1843. Kierkegaard did not write about the visit himself, but he described it to Hans Brøchner, who relates the episode as follows: “One day Adler came to Kierkegaard with a work he had published and talked to him for a long time about both of their activities as religious writers. Adler made it clear to Kierkegaard that he viewed him as a sort of John the Baptist in relation to himself, who, since he had received the direct revelation, was the genuine Messiah. I still remember the smile with which Kierkegaard told me that he had replied to Adler that he was completely satisfied with the position that Adler had assigned him: He found it a very respectable function to be a John the Baptist and had no aspirations to be a Messiah. During this same visit, Adler read aloud a large portion of his work to Kierkegaard; some of it he read in his ordinary voice, the rest in a strange whisper. Kierkegaard permitted himself to remark that he could not find any new revelation in Adler’s work, to which Adler replied: ‘Then I will come to you again this evening and read all of it to you in this voice (the whisper), and then you shall see, it will become clear to you.’ When he told me the story, Kierkegaard was much amused by this conviction of Adler’s that the variation in his voice could give the writings greater significance.”

Others were less amused. Because of a number of heretical (and in places very eccentric) pronouncements in Some Sermons and in Studies, which also appeared in 1843, Adler had in fact incurred the disapprobation of the ecclesiastical authorities. Bishop Mynster was drawn into the matter quite early on, and on August 12, 1843, he was compelled to report to the government: “As for the aforementioned sermons, it becomes clear as early as the preface that the author is at present mentally ill, and unfortunately the entire book supports this judgment. From the remnants of several philosophical studies and some loose theological reading the author has compounded several sentences that he repeats again and again.” Mynster wished to proceed leniently, however, emphasizing that the mental illness was perhaps only of a temporary nature: “Magister Adler is still only in a state of so-called idées fixes, and in every other respect he speaks and acts entirely reasonably. Several days before the book came out I myself had a lengthy conversation with him on a variety of subjects without noticing any confusion.” Dean F. L. Steenberg of Bornholm adopted a similar, relatively tolerant attitude, and in a letter to Bishop Mynster dated September 8, 1843, he reported that Adler’s “mental state is completely unchanged,” which meant that in his daily routine he did not show “the least trace of mental illness.” When he preached, on the other hand, he did display such symptoms, with his “delivery” generally “quite intense and his gaze as wild as a madman’s; but the moment he leaves the pulpit he becomes entirely calm, appearing gentle and friendly to everyone and speaking entirely reasonably.”

Dean Steenberg asked Adler to answer four questions. First, he asked him if he could acknowledge that he had been in “an unbalanced and confused mental state” when he wrote the works in question. Second, whether he could comprehend that it was “fanatical and wrong to expect and to follow such supposedly external revelations.” Third, whether he would admit that his works contained “many false propositions that deviated from Christian doctrine.” Fourth and finally, whether he would concede that he had made statements that were “offensive, repugnant, or extremely inappropriate,” for example, that “witches should be burned,” or the view that “if a son does not believe in Jesus, his father might just as well break his neck, and that if the father himself does not believe, he might just as well slit his own throat.”

Adler himself published a piece in which he followed and commented upon the development of the case, Papers Related to My Suspension and Dismissal, but in the view of the ecclesiastical authorities he had replied unsatisfactorily to their questions and was deemed unsuited to continue in office. Despite the fact that no fewer than one hundred fifteen of his parishioners petitioned in favor of their pastor, he was suspended in January 1844 and finally dismissed—albeit honorably and with his pension—in August 1845, though the case, which included more than seventy documents, was not formally closed until June 1851. As a result of the intercession of Mynster, in particular, the charge was changed from “mental illness” to “monomania.” As a sort of supplemental explanation for his dismissal, it was noted that in 1843, on returning from a lengthy journey abroad, a younger brother, Johan Adler, had been diagnosed as schizophrenic and hospitalized in an insane asylum in Slesvig. (He would drag out a miserable existence there for the next fifty-seven years.) Shortly after Johan’s hospitalization he had been visited by a sister, but when she, too, demonstrated that she was in “a completely demented state,” her visit was prolonged by almost a year. Mental health was not the Adler family’s strong suit.

Adolph Peter Adler did, however, possess sufficient common sense to sail over to Copenhagen in the latter part of June 1845 in order to meet with Mynster, to whom he had sent a declaration a couple of weeks earlier to the effect that he now completely acknowledged that “the unusual, strange, offensive, aphoristic, and abrupt form in which the ideas are expressed at many points in my sermons and studies may reasonably have aroused the misgivings of the high authorities.” This statement displays a certain accommodation, but no recantation of the alleged revelation, so the battle was lost.

After his dismissal, Adler dedicated himself to his literary activities. He traveled to Italy in 1847–48 and wrote a charming book on his experiences there. He returned to Hasle, but in 1853 he moved to Copenhagen where he remained until his death in 1869. Throughout his life, however, he retained his love of the rocky island of Bornholm and its culture, and in 1856 he published an Attempt at a Dictionary of the Bornholm Dialect.

The Book on Adler

In paging through Kierkegaard’s copy of Adler’s Some Sermons it becomes clear that despite some underlining and marginal notes, the book does not show signs of particularly careful reading; pages 93–107, containing sermons 24, 25, and 26, have not even been cut. Nor did he cut the pages from 117 to the end of the book, which contained the second half of sermon 28. On the other hand, Kierkegaard diligently used his knife to cut open the pages containing sermon 27, where he also underlined various passages. This is the sermon in which Adler set forth his peculiar views on sexuality. Here Kierkegaard could read that “the sexual instinct is the evil spirit and came into the world by means of the evil spirit.” Adler varied this assertion in a number of his subsequent writings, where he maintained that “sexual intercourse, as it currently exists, was not originally intended for human beings,” which was why Adler was compelled to describe the “natural connection between the sexes as it currently exists as sinful and abnormal.” In this connection he expressed his great admiration for Origen, who castrated himself for the sake of the kingdom of heaven. “It is profitable to refrain from touching a woman,” Adler proclaimed, urging sexual abstinence—nevertheless, the year after the publication of Some Sermons, Mrs. Adler gave birth to a healthy baby boy!

In 1846 Adler had aroused a literary sensation with his sudden publication of four books (or a total of more than eight hundred pages) at one time, and Kierkegaard resumed his intensive engagement with Adler. On the day of publication, June 12, Kierkegaard immediately went over to Reitzel’s Bookshop and purchased all four volumes, returning home with Studies and Examples; An Attempt at a Brief, Systematic Presentation of Christianity in Its Logic; Theological Studies; and Some Poems. “Four books at one time!” he noted in referring to this mountain of paper. At the same time he gave a little sigh of disappointment at the fact that Adler had not written pseudonymously, “so that a person with an artistic sense, if he learns in a roundabout way that they are by one author, might still take a certain pleasure in entering into the illusion that these are not four books by one author, but by four authors…. This has in fact been done in Danish literature not long ago, in a somewhat more artistic manner.” Kierkegaard here alluded to his own accomplishment in publishing Three Edifying Discourses, Philosophical Fragments, The Concept of Anxiety, and Prefaces, all four of which appeared in a two-week period in June 1844.

On August 25 Kierkegaard purchased Adler’s Papers Related to My Suspension and Dismissal, and by that point had acquired seven of Adler’s works. On the basis of these volumes, particularly Studies and Examples, he wrote his—first—book on the Adler phenomenon, between the middle of June and the end of September 1846, and in a journal entry dated January 1, 1847 he described his 337-page book as finished. It was not long, however, before problems began to surface: “The entire Adler affair pains me a great deal. I am truly more than willing to support Adler. We need energetic people—unselfish, energetic people—who do not give up, exhausted by unending concern over their livings and wives and children.” Kierkegaard respected Adler for his religious passion, something that seemed a rarity in “reasonable, lily-livered, calculating, refined Christendom.” So Kierkegaard’s overall assessment was generally positive: “In the final analysis, however, for all his confusion Adler still has much more religiousness than most.”

Kierkegaard therefore devoted an entire section of the book to “Adler’s Merits,” in which he noted, first of all: “What is good and meritorious about Magister Adler is that he has been shaken, moved, that his life has thereby taken on an entirely different rhythm than the slow trot at which most people, in the religious sense, apathetically make their way through life…. All religiousness is rooted in subjectivity, in inwardness, in being moved, in being shaken, in qualitative pressure on the springs of subjectivity.” Being moved in this manner is the indispensable precondition for being able to engage seriously with Christianity, and this is what separated Adler from many a “quiet, still-life professor.” But unless the “heartfelt language of deep emotion” is united with “proficiency and training in Christian conceptual categories,” the young theological graduate had absolutely “nothing with which to resist,” and it will therefore be easy for him to confuse internal religious feelings with a revelation. According to Kierkegaard, Adler was in fact in “mortal danger” because he was atop “70,000 fathoms of water”—an expression Kierkegaard otherwise never used with reference to any specific individual. And even though throughout the book Kierkegaard officially remained a supporter of the State Church, with marked sympathies for Mynster (whose administrative abilities and personal merits are praised in grand style for a number of pages), he was definitely not blind to the fundamental absurdity that threatened Adler: “At the very moment when, by having been religiously moved, he has undeniably come closer to becoming a Christian than ever in the entire time he was a Christian—at that very moment he is dismissed.”

Reluctantly, Kierkegaard acknowledged that he was a party to the case, and he therefore considered whether he ought to approach Adler and ask him to retract the notorious preface to Some Sermons, in return for which, as a sort of compensation, Kierkegaard would refrain from publishing his manuscript. Kierkegaard abandoned this idea of gentle blackmail, however, and instead considered breaking his manuscript up into “very short, separate parts,” publishing only the more theoretical portions: “It could very well be done, and then the work would be read quite differently. And I would be spared having to mention Adler by name, spared from the awful business of having to put a person to death like that.” By December 1, 1847 the book had undergone yet another transformation: “I have now once again organized and arranged the book on Adler. With this arrangement everything has been illuminated and made as transparent as possible.” Kierkegaard, however, was afraid that by publishing the book he would risk coming “into contact with this confused person who has nothing to do, and therefore will most likely write and write.” Kierkegaard was not the least bit interested in a contact of that sort, because in that case the matter could easily end as a “cockfight between Adler and myself for the benefit of a curious public. No, it is better to drop Adler.”

That was more easily said than done. In the course of the next couple of years the manuscript was reworked many times. At one point, part of it was titled A Cycle of Ethical-Religious Essays, but this solution also failed to satisfy Kierkegaard. Finally, on May 19, 1849, a modest portion of the material saw the light of day as one of the Two Ethical-Religious Essays. Two days after they were published Kierkegaard purchased Adler’s Notes from a Journey. At the same time, Kierkegaard also considered using more of the Adler material by publishing Three Ethical or Ethical-Religious Essays, but he abandoned the idea for fear that people might think that it was he himself and not Adler who had been the occasion for the essays’ reflections on the conditions under which a personal revelation might be possible. Kierkegaard sought various ways out of the problem, but he never published any more of the material. He did, however, continue his editing and reorganizing of the work all the way up to the spring of 1855. The manuscripts thus are among the most complicated that Kierkegaard has left us, and they are capable of giving philological heartburn to anyone who might think of editing and publishing them.

“Confusion-Making of the Highest Order”

In its first incarnation, The Book on Adler consisted of an introduction and four lengthy chapters, of which the latter two were subdivided into a series of sections (marked with §’s) and supplemented with a single appendix. Kierkegaard explained his method in technical terms, stating that he “always argues only e concessis,” meaning that he analyzes and discusses the various problems on the basis of Adler’s own statements, which he wanted to illuminate, so to speak, from within and with as little bias as possible, granting the assumption that Adler had in fact had a revelation. In this connection he emphasized that the book was not intended to provide a critique in the traditional sense, and that Adler’s own person will also be drawn into the investigation: “Magister Adler is thus not an author. By dint of his revelation-fact he has become a phenomenon. In the midst of reality he is a dramatic figure, and it is out of the question to do what is normally required, to forget him in order to concentrate on his writings. No, this is solely a matter of using his writings in order to concentrate on him, who by dint of his revelation-fact has been placed in such an extreme position that he is either a charlatan or an apostle.” Given this radical set of alternatives—charlatan or apostle—we more than suspect what the final outcome of the investigation will be, and we have to grant Kierkegaard that his undertaking is an unusual one: “In addition I myself know very well how strange the whole business appears. In dealing with an author who hitherto has not been read particularly much, I am writing a book that presumably will not be much read, either. Just as the story is told about those two princely personages who were so very fat that they exercised by circling around each other—thus, in a little country it can easily become an exercise for writers to circle around each other.”

In the beginning, however, it was mostly Kierkegaard who circled around himself. Thus, large portions of the first chapter, which treats the relationship between the “extraordinary” person and an ethical-religious “existing order,” are related to the problems posed in Fear and Trembling. Similarly, when Kierkegaard argues in the second chapter that a contemporary revelation (in this case, Adler’s) does not differ in its paradoxicality from the incarnation, he is repeating a series of positions he took and points he made in the Fragments and the Postscript, to which he frequently refers in long footnotes. In these chapters Adler functions chiefly as a mere occasion, and he himself is rarely the focus of the analyses. Adler only becomes a central figure in chapter three, which includes a careful reading of the documents presented in Papers Related to My Suspension and Dismissal. At eighty-three pages, this is the longest chapter in the book, and here Kierkegaard reveals himself to be a formidable inquisitor who pursues even the least details of the case with an almost metaphysical zeal in order to lay bare his opponent’s self-contradictions in the most excruciating fashion; in doing this Kierkegaard of course occasionally slips into the defiantly gloating and sophomoric style he never quite outgrew.

As the case dragged on, things of course became a little hot for Adler. In one of his replies to the ecclesiastical authorities, he therefore attempted to temporize a bit, claiming that perhaps the revelation mentioned in his notorious preface had actually only been an “awakening,” by means of which he had been saved “in a wonderful fashion.” This he later toned down to the utterly harmless assertion that he had experienced “the onset of enthusiasm.” Viewed with Kierkegaard’s eyes, Adler had here become guilty of sheer “lawyerly-pettifogging practice,” for one cannot both claim to have received a divine revelation and shunt aside what has been revealed in an attempt to appease the ecclesiastical authorities. Here there was an absolute either/or; any such more-or-less/in-between was absurd. Matters were not made any better when Adler added that in the future, as he worked through them, his ideas would gradually become capable of “developing into a more appropriate form that would be more in accord with the specific language of the Holy Scriptures.” And things went completely awry when Adler made excuses, adding that “even if one views my Sermons and Studies as a child’s first, babbling, feeble, imperfect speech, I still believe that the words bear witness to the fact that an event has taken place in which I have been moved by faith.” It was simply improper and impermissible for one to use this term—childish babbling—to describe something that one elsewhere has insisted was written down as the Savior dictated it! Adler had indulged in “confusion-making of the highest order”

Adler’s slippery slide from his original assertion to his later, fuzzy circumlocutions was symptomatic of his conceptual confusion and remained one of the recurrent points of Kierkegaard’s critique. Toward the end of the third section of the first chapter, Kierkegaard summarized his case with the following lines (which he later deleted): “Let us repeat it, then. Dated Hasle, [Bornholm] June 18, 1843, we have before us a man who has been called by a revelation and who has received from the Savior Himself a teaching that he has written down in accordance with His dictation.—Dated May 10, 1845, we have before us a man who has been saved in a wonderful fashion.—Dated July 5, 1845, we have before us a man who in a moment of enthusiasm has had to seek help in looking to several fixed points of reference. This man is Magister Adler.”

It simply does not make sense. Not by the laws of nature, at any rate.

Saint Paul and Carpetmaker Hansen

In the second section of chapter three, Kierkegaard moves from the documents related to the case to a critical reading of Adler’s four publications from 1846. Here Kierkegaard expresses his amazement that Adler—“as a lyrical poet in the carefree obscurity of Bornholm”—had apparently completely forgotten his revelation in order instead to behave like a genius: “In the four latest books, Adler is merely a genius, pure, unadulterated genius—and yet he apparently thinks he is still in agreement with his first book. It has been forgotten that those words in the preface to the Sermons (to which Adler repeatedly returns) had been imparted to him in a revelation in which they were dictated to him by the Savior. It has been forgotten that the Sermons (to which Adler frequently refers) had been written in collaboration with the grace of Jesus.” The situation is grotesque, the confusion is complete, and Kierkegaard reacts with a combination of a humorous shake of his head and strenuous indignation: “That a man can forget his cane somewhere in town is an innocent enough thing; that a man can forget his name or even the fact that he is married, and go off and get himself engaged, is bad enough; but to forget that one has had a revelation—it is a sort of blasphemy.”

Despite the fact that Adler “maintains a tavern for brilliant wit” in his books, he nonetheless reflects a typical tendency: He is an exponent of the aestheticization that is characteristic of the times and he is thus capable, in a Hegelian twinkling of an eye, of transposing Christian categories into purely human terms: “When the sphere of the paradox is abolished or explained by being referred back to the aesthetic, an apostle becomes neither more nor less than a genius, and then good-bye Christianity! Brilliant wit and spirit and revelation and originality and being called by God and ingenuity and an apostle and a genius: They all end up amounting to about the same thing.” In this respect Adler was not notably different from many of his colleagues: “They speak loftily of the Apostle Paul’s brilliant wit, of his beautiful metaphors, et cetera—sheer aesthetics. If Saint Paul is to be regarded as a genius, then things look pretty bad for him. Only pastoral ignorance could hit upon the idea of praising him aesthetically…. It could as easily occur to this sort of thoughtless eloquence to praise Saint Paul as a stylist or a linguistic artist or, even better, since it is known that Saint Paul also was an artisan, to claim that his achievements as a tentmaker were such perfect masterpieces that no carpetmaker before or since has been able to make anything as perfect—for as long as you say something good about Saint Paul, then everything is all right.” But everything is not all right, however, if one forgets that the capacity in which Saint Paul acted was that of an apostle, and that it was by virtue of that capacity that he possessed his specific qualities: “As a genius, Saint Paul does not bear comparison with Plato or with Shakespeare. He does not rank particularly high as an author of beautiful metaphors. He has a totally obscure reputation as a stylist.—And as a carpetmaker, well, I must say that I do not know how high he might rank in that respect.” So with respect to Saint Paul the conclusion is obvious: “As an apostle he has no kinship whatever, not with Plato, nor with Shakespeare, nor with stylists or carpetmakers; they are all (Plato fully as much as carpetmaker Hansen) without any comparison to him.” A genius is what he is by his own doing, while an apostle is what he is by means of the divine authority that is precisely a “specific quality which intervenes from somewhere else.”

In a footnote Kierkegaard finds occasion to point out that he has always described himself as an author by stating that he is “without authority,” and he has used this phrase so emphatically that it is almost a “formula that is repeated in every preface.” Therefore, if he has not accomplished very much, he has “at least done everything possible to avoid confusion concerning what is highest and most holy.” And if one is in doubt about Kierkegaard’s own placement, he willingly takes up his position: “I am a poor individual human being. If, as some people think, I am a bit of a genius, then in that regard I would say: Forget about it. But an apostle is in all eternity qualitatively just as different from me as he is from the greatest genius who has ever lived and from the stupidest person who has ever lived.”

Exaltation: 7–14–21; 7–14–21; 7–14–21

It was characteristic of Kierkegaard’s preoccupation with Adler that he not only conducted a philosophical and theological examination of Adler’s standpoint, he also judged the way Adler’s writings worked, the impression his books made. It was very much on the basis of these observations of Adler’s texts that Kierkegaard drew his conclusions, which were conclusions from the form of what had been written to the psyche of the writer. This was more or less the same maneuver Kierkegaard had used years earlier in his critique of Hans Christian Andersen’s book, which he found to be a failure because the author lacked a “life view.”

Right in the introduction to his book, Kierkegaard emphasizes that Adler is one of those writers who admittedly have certain premises, but who never come to a genuine conclusion: “We do not have here a poet who produces a poetically complete whole; nor a psychologist who organizes the individual details and the individual person as parts of a total view; nor a dialectician who points out the areas that lie within the life view he has at his disposal. No, despite the fact that he writes, he is not essentially an author.” In reality, Adler’s four books were thus unfinished, since they were “four yards cut from the same bolt of cloth.” They had been published separately, but they could “just as easily have been twelve books as four,” and this is why Kierkegaard was compelled to conclude that they all fall into “the category of random length.”

Kierkegaard provides a series of colorful descriptions of this sort of author—“the premise author”—and gradually it becomes clear that his interest in Adler is deeply rooted in a complex of psychosomatic problems. One of the descriptions is a little demonstration of Kierkegaard’s mastery as a presenter of fully rounded figures, and it is fascinatingly wicked in its parody: “As a person living in a rural district gives himself over completely to himself and to the indefinite destinations of his ramblings, now infatuated with one impression, then with another; now making a little hop of delight, then a long jump for the sake of amusement; now he stands still, pondering, then he is really profound; and next he is rather tasteless and insipid: This is how Adler saunters about in reading the Bible.” Soon after this the scene shifts from a rural idyll to an apartment that just might be Kierkegaard’s own place. Even though he conceals his personal knowledge of Adler for technical reasons—“utterly renouncing any private view of Magister Adler, concerning whom I indeed have no information”—the following account clearly draws on the incident in which Adler varied his tone of voice when he had been foolish enough to call upon Kierkegaard at home: “For that matter, it would be quite in keeping if Adler, like magicians and sorcerers, were to recommend and prescribe certain ceremonies: that one should get up at the stroke of midnight; then walk around the parlor three times; then take out the book and open it up; … then read the particular passage, first in a soft voice, then let one’s voice rise to its highest volume, and then again downward … until the voice becomes quite soft; then walk around the room making a figure eight seven times—and then see if there is not something in the passage.” The same situation recurs in a more expanded form in which Kierkegaard abandons his description of the fantastic in order to open a more pathological perspective: “One cannot help but think of Adler, pacing the floor and continually repeating the same single sentence, perhaps encouraging the fantasy effect by gesticulating and changing his voice, until he has bewitched himself into a sort of intoxication, so that he senses a strange, solemn whispering in his ears. But this is not thinking. If a man wanted to put himself in a solemn mood and then pace the floor while saying: 7–14–21; 7–14–21; 7–14–21, this monotonous repetition would function as a magic formula; it would function the way strong drink does on the neurasthenic. It would seem to him as if he had come into contact with something extraordinary. And if someone else to whom he communicated his wisdom were to say to him: ‘But what is it about this 7–14–21?’—he would probably reply, ‘It depends on the voice in which you say it, that you continue saying it for a whole hour, and that you gesticulate while doing so—then you will certainly find that there is something to it.’ ”

Mynster was the first to note how Adler, from “some remnants of several philosophical studies and some loose theological reading,” had formed “several sentences that he repeats again and again.” Kierkegaard observed the same thing and bluffly asserted that if one omitted the repetitions in Studies and Examples, Adler’s “573-page-long book would hardly amount to more than a little essay of eighty or one hundred pages.” He actually sat down and counted the repetitions in Adler’s Studies and Examples and could present the following accounting: “On pages 105 and 106, the very same six-line biblical passage is printed in its entirety six times; and the words Adler appends to this are repeated word for word in the three aphorisms. Since the individual aphorisms are separated by empty lines, there are only twenty-five lines per page. 2 × 25 = 50 lines; 6 × 6 = 36 lines; the words repeated word for word by Adler himself are about 3 × 3 lines = 9; 9 + 36 = 45 lines. Result: 5 lines. From the bottom of page 121 to the middle of page 123 the same one and one-half lines are printed word for word thirteen times. On pages 137– 139 the same one and one-half lines are printed word for word seventeen times. I could easily cite even greater examples, but they surely are scarcely needed to convince the reader that such behavior either is a sort of mental illness or is literary shamelessness.”

“The Sensual Pleasure of Productivity”

Kierkegaard does not need to cite additional examples. He has already convinced his reader that Adler’s conduct must be attributable to a “sort of mental illness.” But on the other hand Kierkegaard still owes his reader a explanation for why he finds it necessary to occupy himself so intensely with this Adler in the first place. Why, after all, spend one’s time on a long since concluded case concerning a second-rate, mixed-up pastor who gave assurances about his heavenly mission and claimed to have had a personal revelation, but who probably was only a sick charlatan who had run amok on an island many miles from civilization?

The answer to this question is not immediately obvious, but what is most likely is that Adler was bound up with two closely related problems that had long captivated Kierkegaard. One was the problem of authority or authorization, and the other was the problem of revelation. Both of these problems are central to Fear and Trembling, and Kierkegaard had been working on the manuscript of that work when Adler had published his claim of having had a personal revelation. “I cannot deny that when I … heard that Magister Adler had come forward with the claim that he had had a revelation, I was surprised,” Kierkegaard readily confessed. But immediately thereafter he grimaced, adding, “When I heard that, I thought the following—either, I thought, this is the man we need, the chosen one, who in his divine originality possesses the springs needed to refresh the exhausted soil of Christendom, or he is an … ignorant prankster.”

This was not a full explanation of his interest in Adler, however, and the manuscript also contains a number of more unofficial reasons and expectations. For the time being, we will simply give vent to our suspicions by advancing this supposition: May not Kierkegaard have recognized in Adler, if not his own self, then at any rate certain sides of himself which he did not wish to lay bare? Did Kierkegaard actually know from his own experience that Adler’s revelation had nothing whatsoever to do with a revelation, but that something entirely different was involved, something about which Kierkegaard could not speak without revealing his own secret?

The reader senses an answer in the conclusion of the third chapter of the book on Adler, in which Kierkegaard explains that if one “wanted to define Adler’s genius totally and essentially, one would have to say that it is dizziness.” Conceding that the term “dizziness” might seem strange, Kierkegaard explained himself further: “Physiology has correctly pointed out that dizziness occurs when the eyes have no fixed point upon which to rest. One thus becomes dizzy when looking down from a high tower, for when the gaze plunges downward it finds no boundary, no limitation. For a similar reason one becomes dizzy at sea, because everything is continually changing, so that once again there is no boundary, no limitation.” It is clear that Kierkegaard is familiar with The Concept of Anxiety, in which Vigilius Haufniensis put forth similar definitions, but Kierkegaard was not ashamed to repeat the words of his pseudonymous colleague: “What makes one dizzy is the extensive, the infinite, the unlimited, the indeterminable, and dizziness itself is the senses’ lack of restraint. Indeterminableness is the basis of dizziness, but it is also the temptation to surrender oneself to it. For, while indeterminableness is certainly opposed to human nature, … it is precisely because indeterminableness is against nature that it is also tempting. The dialectic of dizziness thus contains within itself this contradiction: that one wants what one does not want, what one shudders at, while this shudder only deters one—temptingly.”

Kierkegaard’s elucidation of dizziness and its dialectic is intended to serve a polemical purpose, but to some extent it fails in doing so. Indeed, Adler did not write in such an infinitely dizzying manner, but this was the effect he had on Kierkegaard!

Quite near the beginning of his manuscript Kierkegaard calls Adler a “dizzy-brilliant author”; then he appears as “the man of movement”; next he becomes “a stirring stick”; and all the while his work is called an “allover-the-place production” and a “jumble.” Kierkegaard’s insistence on the random length of the books parallels the indeterminableness that is precisely the basis of dizziness. “Adler’s books are a peculiar sort of productivity, an almost anguished sort of productivity,” explains Kierkegaard, who sensed how Adler’s writings almost rush violently on the reader—“as it were, assaulting the reader with their outbursts.” And this assessment of Adler’s effect on the reader compels Kierkegaard to revise his critical comments about Adler’s significance as an author: “What in the introduction of this book I pointed out as Adler’s shortcoming as an author, which makes him not essentially an author—namely, that he comes too close to actuality—is in another respect his merit. For even though he is totally confused for the moment, he is for that very reason quite capable of producing an effect or an impulse, capable of moving the reader. And he actually does.” Thus Adler has moved Kierkegaard, who at a number of points completely forgets his objections and simply surrenders: “In his style there is … at times an almost audible, lyrical seething, which despite being flawed from an aesthetic standpoint is nonetheless capable of inciting the reader. One does not doze off when reading him, nor does one’s mind wander; rather, one is more likely to become impatient because someone has come so close to the all the machinery of one’s actual personality.”

Reading Adler made Kierkegaard dizzy, but why? Because the psychological ambivalence was like its aesthetic analogue, caricature—that is, the resemblance consisted precisely both in resembling and in not resembling! In other words, Kierkegaard recognized his own repetitions, his ecstasy in writing, “the sensual pleasure of productivity.” He became dizzy because in that confused man, “the stirring stick,” he saw himself, sometimes smudged into grotesque form, sometimes with more urbane and recognizable features, but most often repellent in all its likeness. And what Kierkegaard’s metaphors accomplish indirectly, he himself accomplishes more directly elsewhere. On the next-to-last page of the third chapter he lifts the veil just enough to give us the insight we need. Here he reiterates that he has made use of Adler’s writings for a quite specific purpose: “If I were to deal with them purely aesthetically and in straightforward fashion, I would permit myself the pleasure of acknowledging, as officially as possible, that in my judgment one can actually learn something from them—or, to express myself entirely accurately, that I have actually learned a thing or two from them.” What he had learned—indeed, what he had “actually” learned—remains a secret. But Kierkegaard did write that although a reviewer could sometimes recommend to the public a work under review even when he himself had not learned anything from its author, in the present case the situation is almost the reverse of this: “Undoubtedly—indeed, unconditionally—most people will only be harmed by reading Adler’s writings because he causes total confusion. But the person who possesses what Adler lacks—dialectical clarity about the [individual] spheres and about the totality—he and he alone will truly be able to learn something from a single brilliant, lively, edifying, moving, and at times profound utterance.” In plain language (and, it is true, with a bit of reading between the lines) Kierkegaard here maintains that he has had privileged access to an understanding of Adler. He knows something that others do not know, “he and he alone” has learned something which other people have no basis to comprehend.

Other reviewers went about their task more straightforwardly, however. Thus, in July 1846 Frederik Helveg wrote a lengthy piece in the Danish Church Times in which he reviewed Adler’s latest four books, comparing them with—Kierkegaard’s work. Helveg duly noted an “opposition” between the two writers, but he also found “a striking similarity … on certain points.” This was particularly clear in matters of style.

Kierkegaard was in the middle of writing his book on Adler when Helveg’s review appeared, and he read it immediately. It irritated him to be compared with Adler, all the more because in his view the similarity cited by Helveg was owing exclusively to the fact that Adler had plagiarized his pseudonyms, in particular Frater Taciturnus, to whose “stylistic form” Adler had merely added a chaotic and unartistic ferocity. This was both true and not true: Adler’s writings prior to 1843 had adhered to a dry, academic, often polemical but never elegant style, while after 1843 his presentations were aphoristic and unusually rich in metaphor. It is known that Adler had read On the Concept of Irony, Either/Or, The Concept of Anxiety, Philosophical Fragments, and presumably the Postscript as well, but Kierkegaard’s suspicion that Adler had simply plagiarized him is probably unjustified, if only because of the dates of publication of the various works involved.

If Kierkegaard nonetheless felt himself a victim of plagiarism, it was because he could recognize his own style in Adler’s. It is thus very revealing that in the earliest sketches of the book on Adler, which were completed before Helveg’s review appeared, Kierkegaard was much more positive in his assessment of Adler as a stylist than he was after the appearance of the review. Before the review appeared, Kierkegaard wrote that Adler “is not without lyricism, stylistic felicity, not without profundity,” and he could almost guarantee that Adler had not “made any effort to attach himself to the pseudonyms.” After the review appeared, Kierkegaard had the opposite opinion: “He has taken the lyrical bubbling of his style from the pseudonyms. He did not have this before, not in the Sermons. What is stated in the Church Times is not true, namely that he and the pseudonyms were roughly simultaneous, because he came afterwards, and that is very decisive.”

Despite all the stylistic differences between the two, there was a very specific rhetorical figure for which both had a remarkable penchant, in Adler’s case sometimes bordering on the pathological. And this rhetorical figure was repetition. Kierkegaard noticed this phenomenon in Adler very early; he added up Adler’s repetitions and proposed his own firm definition of what he considered to be an allowable frequency of repetition for a writer. “With unusual indulgence” one may permit a writer “to repeat his own words two, at most three, times in one and the same book.” Kierkegaard’s own repetitions demonstrate beyond doubt that he was being too restrictive. The fact that he reworked his material and thus came to repeat the manuscript of the book on Adler is ironic in itself, but in that selfsame manuscript he also repeated himself, not only in the first two chapters in which he devoted lengthy passages to recycling the problems dealt with in Fear and Trembling, the Fragments, and the Postscript, but also—with an odd paradoxical logic—in the very chapter in which he criticized Adler for his repetitions. Thus on page 105 he repeated word for word no fewer than five lines of Adler’s “first reply,” which are repeated in slightly abbreviated form on page 112. He undertook this same reduplication on page 117 in connection with Adler’s “second reply” from which seven lines are cited, and five of these lines are in turn repeated, word for word, on page 118. The word “confused” appears sixteen times, “confusion” appears nineteen times, and various forms of “jumbled” seventeen times. Similarly, Kierkegaard frequently repeats his own metaphors. Thus he uses “polestar” twice, only six pages apart, as a metaphor for the immovability of the paradox, just as a specific figure of speech involving an “inkwell” occurs twice in less than two pages. In his review of Stages on Life’s Way, P. L. Møller had also singled out precisely “repetitions” and “self-excavations” as the dominant stylistic features of Kierkegaard’s writing, while in his review of the Postscript, Møller asserted that the work was so poorly “worked through organically” that even in the best of circumstances it would only “find its place under the rubric of ‘chaotic literature.’ ” This was more or less the same as calling Kierkegaard what he again and again called Adler: “confused”!

The desire to write was closely connected with this repetition and was perhaps its cause. In Adler’s case this desire was so powerful that it bordered on being a compulsion to write. Adler wrote down everything that occurred to him, and even the act of writing put him in a sort of exalted state of mind that at root had an almost erotic rhythm; the pen became an organ that drained the person writing with it. Nor would this have seemed strange to Kierkegaard, for indeed he himself often mentioned his irresistible urge to write. Thus he confided to his nephew Henrik Lund that “as soon as [I] have pen in hand on a blank sheet of paper, I run the risk of writing on and on.” And he announced to his cousin Julie Thomsen quite openly that “The truth is that I am really in love with the company of my pen. Someone might say, ‘That is a poor object on which to cast your love.’ Perhaps! It’s not exactly as though I were always pleased with it. Sometimes I hurl it far away in indignation. Oh, but this very indignation makes it clear to me, once again, that I am indeed in love with it.” Similarly, Kierkegaard told of how he could sit (one is tempted to say, like a genuine “premise author”) totally lost in his own “indolent productivity, in which I produced and produced (and in one sense splendidly) but never deigned to think about publishing.”

Clearly, Adler and Kierkegaard shared a number of the same artistic experiences. Did they share the same medical fate?

Graphomania

Approximately 400 B.C., the father of medicine, Hippocrates of Cos, and a number of his colleagues wrote the book On the Holy Sickness. The title itself contains a polemic against the view of the disease that was then current, namely that it was divine because it was so alien, doing to human beings what only the gods were capable of doing. Terrified observers noted how the sickness, when it raged, could seize a person and cast him to the ground, overcome with convulsions. They therefore labeled the disease with a word for this seizure: epilepsy.

Hippocrates and his followers did not have much patience with the metaphysical explanation, maintaining instead that epilepsy was caused by too much phlegm or mucus in the brain. They were wrong on this point, and their explanation was in a way no less naive than the one they rejected, but their contribution was to point out the brain as the seat of the illness.

The neurophysiological explanation did not find much support for many centuries, however, and the disease continued to be regarded as mysterious and connected with demons. During the Middle Ages, epilepsy was viewed as supernatural possession, either divine or satanic, but particularly the latter, and in fact epilepsy was among the plagues that Luther called down on the Catholic Church. It was only late in the Renaissance, which of course in many respects harked back to classical antiquity, that the Hippocratic diagnosis again attracted medical attention and the disease was to some extent demythologized. Today it is primarily, if not exclusively, regarded as a neurophysiological dysfunction, but the disease has not entirely lost its old metaphysical roots, which can be seen in the aura that hovers around the figures who are often singled out in descriptions of epilepsy—the “great” epileptics, so to speak: Moses, Saint Paul, Caesar, Caligula, Holy Roman Emperor Charles V, Flaubert, Dostoyevsky, and van Gogh.

Epilepsy is caused by a number of different dysfunctions in the brain and therefore appears in many different forms. The epilepsy that is touched off by the temporal lobes of the brain is called temporal lobe epilepsy. Attacks are characterized by psychic and by physical symptoms, but they can also be exclusively psychic, as, for example, in experiencing a particular memory or an intense emotion, often one laden with anxiety. An attack can also take the form of a feeling of sublime bliss. Among these examples there is not one that might not apply to Kierkegaard.

Modern research, furthermore, has also demonstrated that some patients with temporal lobe epilepsy are virtually possessed by an urge to write. In technical language they are graphomaniacs and suffer from hypergraphia. Other typical behavioral syndromes associated with hypergraphia include an enhanced interest in philosophical and moral subjects; hyposexuality (reduced sexual drive), sometimes accompanied by changes in sexual behavior; irritability; long-windedness; perseveration (compulsive continuation, often as repetition) of a train of thought; and viscosity, a certain clamminess of the skin. In other respects, patients with temporal lobe epilepsy function well.

Did Adolph Peter Adler suffer from epilepsy? Many of the symptoms make it a suggestive diagnosis, but this diagnosis was at most hinted at, never actually made. For example, in late September 1855, Frederik Helveg wrote the following in Danish Church Times concerning Adler’s having been called as a prophet: “He saw nothing, but, through his senses (namely, the olfactory sense) and especially his hearing, he received a definite impression, arose from his bed (the revelation took place at night) and then, right on the spot and in accordance with what was dictated to him, he wrote down the words that constitute the contents of the revelation.” The olfactory experience to which Helveg here refers is a phenomenon that has been recorded among patients with temporal lobe epilepsy and is presumably due to a lesion on the basal portion of the temporal lobe. Helveg, who knew Adler personally, titled his article “A Parallel between Two Prophets”—that is, Adler and Kierkegaard. The parallel concerned their critiques of the church, which resembled each other in many ways—but might not the two prophets Adler and Kierkegaard have resembled each other in other ways as well?

Or, to put it another way: Can a diagnosis of epilepsy, more specifically temporal lobe epilepsy, also be made in the case of Kierkegaard? Could his preoccupation with Adler—which at times verged on monomania—be attributable to the fact that he recognized some of his own psychosomatic abnormalities in Adler, but that, unlike Adler, he would never have dreamt of construing the attacks religiously and interpreting them as a revelation? Was his book on Adler perhaps a sort of indirect communication to Adler about the situation? Or did Kierkegaard observe in Adler a series of symptoms with which he was indeed familiar, but for which he had no name? It looks more than coincidental that it was the very same Justinus Kerner, whose tales about doppelgängers Kierkegaard had read with a shudder, who later explained that the phenomena he had described were associated with epilepsy. Why did Kierkegaard speak of “the sensual pleasure of productivity,” and why did he suspect that Adler was in an ecstatic state when he wrote? Was he projecting his own experiences? Had Kierkegaard, like Adler, erroneously interpreted the symptoms of the illness? Or did he have in mind this very illness in 1848, when he wrote in a journal entry that in the future people would study his life and what he called “the intriguing secret of all the machinery?” And what experiences, if not those of an epileptic, form the basis of a journal entry like this one from 1849: “Sometimes in a moment of despondency it occurs to me that Christ was not tested in the sufferings of illness, least of all in these most painful of sufferings, in which the psychic and the somatic touch upon one another dialectically.”

Not everyone who runs naked through the streets of the city is an Archimedes. Not everyone who cuts off an ear is a van Gogh. And not everyone who suffers from temporal lobe epilepsy is a Søren Kierkegaard! Nonetheless, questions abound, and Kierkegaard took most of the answers with him into the grave. But we are not left completely empty-handed. It is true that the word “epilepsy” nowhere occurs in his journals, and the only time Kierkegaard mentioned it in all of his published works was in a derivative and metaphorical sense—“just as when the tongue of an epileptic utters the wrong word.” But, for one thing, this absence could in itself be a piece of evidence, and for another thing, a number of Kierkegaard’s contemporaries expressed themselves much more straightforwardly. In a letter to his daughter Augusta dated October 3, 1863, Sibbern wrote: “People said he died paralyzed in his lower body, no doubt of epilepsy. But epilepsy can put the soul in a very exalted state.” Sibbern was scarcely correct in assuming that the paralysis of his lower body was due to epilepsy, but in any event “people” (Sibbern himself?) had suggested that Kierkegaard had suffered from epilepsy, which, Sibbern believed, accorded perfectly with Kierkegaard’s often exalted state. And it seems no mistake when Sibbern, in describing Kierkegaard’s 1855 assault on the church, spoke of it as “Kierkegaard’s attack.” Later, in his Writing from the Year 2135, Sibbern returned to the matter, asserting that a “bodily disturbance, or as it would now be called, an illness, had put the spirit into disorder and disarray.”

Pastor Tycho E. Spang, whose parents Kierkegaard would sometimes visit, gave the following account, which to some extent appears to support Sibbern’s diagnostic pronouncement: “His body was frail but was sustained by enormous spiritual strength. We were told that he often had powerful attacks from his ailments when he was with Giødwad, so that he would fall to the floor, but he fought the pain with clenched hands and tensed muscles, then took up the broken thread of the conversation again, and often said, ‘Don’t tell about this. What use is it for people to know what I must bear?’ ” Israel Levin reported on a similar episode, also at Giødwad’s: Kierkegaard sat one evening “on the sofa and had been so merry, playful, and charming. Then he fell down off the sofa, and we helped him up. ‘Ohh, lemme l-l-llie here till the girl sweeps up in the mornin,’ he stammered, but fainted shortly thereafter.”

Could it be that the “convulsions” of which his elder sister Maren Kirstine died were in fact a violent epileptic attack that brought an end to fourteen years of illness?

Rad. Valerianæ

Stray remarks and sporadic incidents cannot in themselves prove that Kierkegaard was an epileptic, but as the only evidence of his abnormal physical condition they cannot be ignored, either. It ought to be considered whether his oft-expressed wish to avoid involving others in these painful episodes should be regarded as indirect evidence that here we have, so to speak, come face-to-face with the hieroglyphs constituting Kierkegaard’s “secret note.” In any event, however, it is quite understandable that Kierkegaard wanted the matter treated with a certain amount of discretion. Epilepsy was seen as shameful and led to both legal and social condemnation. Accordingly, under the category “causes for which those who are betrothed may be separated,” the Danish Law of King Christian the Fifth from 1683 proclaims the following: “If anyone prior to a betrothal had any concealed sickness, such as leprosy, the falling sickness, or any other such contagious or abominable illness, and did not reveal it, then he, or she, may be quit of the other, if they desire it. But if such a sickness or other ailment comes after the betrothal, then a certain amount of time will be set during which one can seek advice as to whether the sick person can be helped; if that person cannot be helped, then the betrothal may be annulled if desired.”

The “falling sickness” was regarded as belonging to a category that covered leprosy and other abominations, including syphilis, for example, and this of course influenced generally held views about the character of the illness. Kierkegaard’s own physician, Oluf Lundt Bang, was no exception in this respect. “Marriage must be discouraged, partly out of concern for the offspring,” he explained in his Handbook for Therapy, where he discriminated between hereditary and acquired epilepsy, the former of which he viewed as “completely untreatable.” Could this have been among the reasons that Kierkegaard felt obligated to break off his engagement to Regine? In any case, the conjectures Bang offered concerning what could set off outbreaks of the illness would be more than enough to cause concern: “The most common cause is a person being frightened, which can even be passed on to the fetus by the mother, indeed, even in dreams. In general, almost all the usual causes can induce both an initial outbreak as well as subsequent attacks: exposure to bad air, where many people are gathered; getting chilled; bathing; stimulating drink; tight-fitting clothing; mental stress; music; debauchery, especially masturbation.”

Bang provided a dramatic account of an epileptic attack. An attack begins with a feeling “like that of a wind, a draft, a chill, which goes up to the brain,” shortly after which the ill person “falls down, often with a piercing scream. The eyes are unblinking; the pupils motionless; the veins are tensed; the breath is held; the pulse is weak; unconsciousness from the start. After this short-lived tetanic stage comes the convulsive stage: spasms in all the extremities and in the face; foaming at the mouth, with the foam sometimes bloody because the tongue has been bitten; the thumbs concealed in clenched fists; the half-open eyes are contorted; the face alternately red and pale; the pulse becomes stronger and fuller; after an indefinite period of time, breathing becomes deeper and the violent movements stop; consciousness gradually returns; there is tenderness and pain in those extremities which had struck anything; there is some stiffness and headache, though no memory of the previous state.” Bang also pointed out that there can be outbreaks of lesser intensity and shorter duration, but which on the other hand are more frequent, “sometimes many—indeed, one hundred in a twenty-four-hour period.” But by the same token an attack “could also come only once.” If Kierkegaard suffered from temporal lobe epilepsy, it would of course be difficult to determine how often he might have had major attacks. Perhaps it only happened on a single occasion, which a little journal entry from 1848 might allude to: “Reply: Alas, to be transported up into the third Heaven only once in an entire lifetime—and in remembrance of it to retain a thorn that brings it to mind perhaps many times every day!”

Bang was not optimistic about the possibility of “removing the causes.” It was true that quacks offered a great many “arcane remedies”—secret potions with miraculous powers—and others recommended going to “the place of execution and drinking the blood of an executed person” but, as Bang explained, “the psychological impression they make is probably the source of their effectiveness.” Bang was himself a clinician and mentioned a number of medications including “large doses of rad. valerianæ [Latin: ‘valerian root’]” to be ingested between “i–iii [times] daily in powdered form or as an infusion.”

Bang was also aware that epilepsy was not associated exclusively with things that were abominable, though in his view, there was no connection between intellectual makeup and epilepsy: “It is most likely a matter of chance that many world-famous men have been epileptics.”

We wonder whether Bang had had one of these men sitting in his office without suspecting it. Or had he actually known very well what was going on? At any rate, in the early part of October 1855, when Kierkegaard turned up at Royal Frederik’s Hospital and asked to be examined, he had a particular medication in his blood: “Rad. valerianæ.”

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