“Dr. Exstaticus”

“Dr. Exstaticus”

1849

Dedications and a Rebuff

Kierkegaard’s relation to the literary scene was in fact not nearly as unequivocal as he liked to portray it in his bleakest moments. Thus, for example, when he reissued Either/Or on May 14, 1849 (the same day The Lily of the Field and the Bird of the Air appeared), he saw to it that a judicious selection of “this country’s writers” received individual copies of the former: “I felt it was my duty. And now I could do it, for now it was no longer possible to form a coterie in support of a book—because of course the book is old, its critical period is past.” Nonetheless, it was the pseudonym Victor Eremita who sent the book to the poets. Adam Oehlenschläger and Christian Winther had earned their gifts because Kierkegaard admired them, while Henrik Hertz would have to be content with having received the work because he was so amiable. It is unknown whether these three writers thanked Kierkegaard, but the poet Jens Paludan-Müller, whom Kierkegaard had also remembered, thanked him the very next day for his “welcome gift,” and he promised to study it carefully, “to the limit that my abilities and my knowledge permit, which is not always the case when I read philosophical works.” Indeed, even Carsten Hauch received a copy, and he assured Kierkegaard that he had already found many “hints and allusions in your writings that have facilitated my own spiritual development”; in fact, if he “were put in solitary confinement and were permitted to choose only a single book to keep me company in my solitude,” he might well choose Either/Or “because in it I would find so much material to reflect upon that my time would hardly pass without spiritual progress.” (On the same day, May 14, 1849, Hauch himself had published The Sisters on Fir Tree Mountain, subsequently performed a number of times at the Royal Theater, but Kierkegaard found it “botched in every respect” because Hauch had “confused his categories.”) Even though the way he had been put in his place by Kierkegaard some years earlier had left Hans Christian Andersen with little to be thankful for, he responded with a remarkably unostentatious and spontaneous delight all the same: “Dear Mr. Kierkegaard! You have given me truly great joy by sending me your Either/Or! I was very surprised, as you can well understand; I did not at all think that you harbored kindly thoughts about me—but now I see you do! God bless you for it! Thank you, thank you! Yours in heartfelt devotion, H. C. Andersen.”

The republication of Either/Or subjected Kierkegaard to the obligatory tortuous reflections that not only were ironically related to the title of the work, but also stood in curious contrast to the firmness Kierkegaard had displayed in his negotiations with Philipsen and Reitzel. It had long been clear to him that the reissuing of the work would have to be accompanied by a religious piece just as had been the case in 1843, when the first edition of Either/Or had received Two Edifying Discourses as its companion on May 16. Now, however, both the situation and Kierkegaard had changed: “Since then, I have taken on the character of a religious author; how can I now dare let it be published without a careful explanation?” He therefore considered letting it be accompanied by A Cycle of Ethical-Religious Essays, though on February 19, 1849, he had become more inclined to let the “Three Notes” (which were connected to The Point of View) serve in that role—“this very much appeals to me”—and then in April he changed his mind again and assigned the task of escorting the new edition of Either/Or to his three godly discourses, The Lily of the Field and the Bird of the Air, which he had been working on since March.

In the middle of May, more or less simultaneously with his receipt of the various letters thanking him for Either/Or, a messenger delivered a note from the Swedish authoress Fredrika Bremer. She had been in Copenhagen since the autumn of 1848, gathering material for a book on life in Scandinavia. Apart from Hans Christian Andersen, whom she had encountered by chance twelve years earlier on the way to Stockholm, the forty-eight-year-old writer had not known a soul when she arrived in Copenhagen. But in record time she had succeeded in coming into contact with Hans Christian Ørsted; Carsten Hauch; Grundtvig; the choreographer August Bournonville; the composer J.P.E. Hartmann; the poet B. S. Ingemann, whom she visited in Sorø; Caroline Amalie (the queen who had done some reading in “Either and Or”); and last, but not least, Court Chaplain Martensen, who received her warmly. During her stay she was a frequent caller at Martensen’s home, where she was the first person to read the proofs of his Dogmatics, which had just been completed. Martensen later recalled “with joy the many evening hours when she came to my room and spoke of what had moved and edified her in the work—she thought that in the spiritual sense I had constructed a cathedral.” Bremer had also had “doubts and misgivings,” however, particularly about the consciousness of sin; she could not come to terms with it, but Martensen was patient: “Therefore we had to have a number of conversations about sin and grace.”

Before she continued on to England, from which she journeyed further to America, the popular authoress tried to arrange a meeting with Kierkegaard. Citing her status as a “recluse like yourself” she made application to Victor Eremita, “in part to thank you for the heavenly manna of your writings, in part to speak to you about ‘Life’s Stages’ ”—and also to request an interview with the magister the following Thursday, Ascension Day, right after church. Kierkegaard apparently hesitated in replying to the request, because a couple of days later she repeated her invitation, now addressed to “Theological Graduate Mr. Søren Kierkegaard, Gammeltorv,” which was the wrong address, inasmuch as the aforementioned theological graduate had been a resident of Rosenborggade since April 1848. When Kierkegaard finally pulled himself together and wrote a reply, it is clear that he would be having none of this “recluse” who rubbed shoulders with anyone and everyone. “It is my hope that I will not be misunderstood; it would very much pain me if I were misunderstood; but even if that were the case, I still cannot accept your invitation,” Kierkegaard wrote at the beginning of a draft reply, in which his distress is revealed by countless deletions. In a vain attempt to find a dialectical cadence that would endow his rebuff with charm, Kierkegaard did, however, manage to write that it was surely not “the Swedish authoress who was famous throughout Europe” who had displayed recklessness in approaching him. “No, I know more about recklessness—and I appeal most recklessly to your own reckoning. I dare to the utmost in recklessness—I who say No to the invitation.”

And this—the part about it being reckless to decline an invitation from Fredrika Bremer—would soon turn out to be true to a fare-thee-well.

Martensen’s Dogmatics

While Kierkegaard was sitting in the July heat, slaving over the proofreading of The Sickness unto Death, Martensen’s Christian Dogmatics was being published. The appearance of Martensen’s book had been anticipated with unusually great expectations, which the work did not disappoint. It was reviewed in Flyve-Posten, where it was described as “probably the most significant work that has appeared in our theological literature.” The reviewer believed that the work would be “a blessing” both in theological circles and in other circles where “modern negative speculation, borne along by the spirit of the times, consciously or unconsciously has been granted entrance, and has undermined the foundations of faith.” Mynster, too, was delighted; he felt “great sympathy” for the work and made it the object of much “attention,” employing it in his own dogmatic studies.

Christian Dogmatics reached beyond the narrow circle of specialists in the field, and although the first printing had been larger than was normal for such a work, a second printing became necessary even before the year was out, which of course was a cause of some annoyance for Kierkegaard, whose The Sickness unto Death sold badly and did not even get reviewed. Martensen lived to see four printings of the Danish edition, and as the Dogmatics marched triumphantly across Europe, he also witnessed the appearance of editions in Swedish, English, French, and German; indeed, in Germany, the book had no fewer than seven printings. In his old age Martensen reported that the work was also the subject of study in the Roman Catholic and Greek Catholic churches; “probably in order to refute it,” he conceded, but then added “still, in doing so they revealed their respect for it.”

Martensen was a success and had been nothing but a success since he had been appointed to the university ten years earlier. At that time it had been the consensus that with Martensen an entirely new era would begin, while Mynster would soon be nullified and pushed aside by the Hegelian system. To avert this, Mynster, in his role as a member of the governing board of the university, arranged for Martensen to be appointed extraordinary professor of theology. Not long after that, Mynster proposed Martensen as a member of the Scientific Society, an enormous honor. And when there were rumors to the effect that the industrious and serious fellow felt a need to give sermons, Mynster had him made court chaplain in 1845. In this capacity Martensen was obligated to preach only every sixth Sunday, but when he did the Castle Church was filled with the snobbish bigwigs of Copenhagen, while Kierkegaard went somewhere else. Mynster had also succeeded in getting Martensen, at the age of only thirty-nine, made a Knight of the Dannebrog. All this preferential treatment from Mynster had to pay off, and indeed, in Martensen’s Dogmatics, Mynster is accorded the elevated status of the most frequently cited authority. As a consequence of this, the Dogmatics, was regular evening reading at the bishop’s residence for quite some time, and Martensen was invited there more frequently.

Kierkegaard followed all this at some distance, and he not only hated Martensen’s good fortune, he especially hated that it had come at the behest of Mynster, who had so publicly made Martensen into his protegé and favorite. Kierkegaard’s reactions displayed every indication of disgust: “Oh, but it must be dreadful to be a fool like Martensen: to preach Christianity … for the aristocrats and for the fools who tag along only because it is aristocratic. What a satire! Martensen is a preacher, so he is of course a disciple of the teacher, Our Lord Jesus Christ, upon whom the world spat…. But Martensen must either be terribly worldly minded (so that a minor title and some distinction can be so important to him) or very stupid. I wager it’s the latter.” Kierkegaard felt pushed aside, rejected, and humiliated, so there was a certain predictability to his evaluation of Martensen’s treatise on dogmatics. Here is one of Kierkegaard’s first reactions: “While the whole of existence is disintegrating, while everyone can see that all this about millions of Christians is make-believe, that it is more likely that Christianity has disappeared from the earth—Martensen sits there and puts together a system of dogmatics.” And the system itself is nothing to brag about: “It is really ridiculous! Now we have had this talk of system and scientific scholarship, and scientific scholarship, et cetera—so finally the System comes. Great God and Father! My most popular piece is more rigorous in its conceptual definitions, and my pseudonym Joh. Climacus is seven times more rigorous in his conceptual definitions.”

Kierkegaard’s contempt for his old tutor, who had tried to drum the principles of dogmatics into his head ten years earlier, knew almost no bounds: “The essential thinker always states an issue in its most extreme form; this is precisely what is brilliant, and only a few can follow him in this. Then the professor comes and takes the ‘paradox’ away. A great many people, almost the entire multitude, can understand him, and so people think that now the truth has become truer! … Every essential thinker can only view the professor comically. The professor is what Leporello is in relation to Don Giovanni.” At one moment the Dogmatics makes a show of too much scientific scholarship, at the next moment this same scientific scholarship makes a show of its absence: “Martensen does not have one single category. There is no more scientific scholarship in his Dogmatics than in Mynster’s sermons”; indeed, “the only scientific scholarship I have detected is that it is divided up into §§s.” In his memoirs Martensen repaid Kierkegaard’s doubt about his scholarly abilities with the following remarks about Kierkegaard: “I also assume that he was unsuited to do scholarly combat in theology, because he was suited only to fight in quasi-poetic, humorous circumstances, in which he could make use of playful discourse and flank attacks. He did not have the gift for instructive and dogmatic discourse, which explains why he continually polemicizes against ‘the assistant professors,’ whom he loathed.”

Even though Kierkegaard had a very well-developed sensitivity to even the least blemish in Martensen’s argument, it was not so much the details as the disparity between the lifestyle of the dogmatist, on the one hand, and his dogmatics, on the other, that made the ink in Kierkegaard’s pen boil over. And the explanation of this is quite obvious: “Christianity everywhere tends toward the actual, toward being made into the actual, which is the only medium to which it is truly related…. Martensen … also talks of how Christianity must be a life, an actual life—and now the reassurances start: a real, actual life, a very real, actual life in us; one must not relate to Christianity via the imagination. Good. But now to Martensen’s existence—what does it express? … It expresses that he—honestly—has profited from the great deception that we are all Christians. For all these distinctions of being the court chaplain, of being a knight, of being celebrated at dinners, are essentially related to the illusion that we are, sort of, all Christians.” The tacit approval of such an illusion reveals that “Mynster has really demoralized Martensen,” who had adopted the bishop’s category, a category that was as comfortable as it was profitable: peace. “What does this peace mean? It means that one guarantees oneself one of the most respected positions in society, with the prospect of an even more respectable one. And that is where one would like to remain and really enjoy life. Therefore one must have peace. This is tarted up as Christianity.” All in all: “What drivel his whole business is.”

Kierkegaard’s malaise seemed already to have reached its culmination point there, but his reading of section 234 of the Dogmatics, on “The Order of Salvation,” gave him even greater nausea. Here Martensen wrote: “The individual can develop his charisma in love’s reciprocity with the many different charismas that are all present and belong to the same kingdom. He cannot fulfill his sanctification by living in egoistic and sickly fashion as an ‘individual.’ ” Kierkegaard felt struck right in the solar plexus. “Martensen appears to be directing sarcasm at me with this talk of a sickly, egoistic life as an individual,” he noted, but he did not lack for a rejoinder: “What Christianity understands by health is something entirely different from what the worldly person understands by health. By health, the worldly person understands saying good-bye to infinite effort, but to be shrewd about finite goals, to get yourself a lucrative living and a velvet-covered belly as quickly as possible, to live in aristocratic circles.” After nine years of marriage to Helene Mathilde Hess, who died in September 1847, Martensen married Virginie Henriette Constance Bidoulac in November 1848. Kierkegaard was well-informed about this and could thus continue as follows: “And when, in addition to this, a man has been married two times, a worldly person will regard him as very healthy, indeed he will even see it as proof of unusual healthiness that, in his Ethics, the person himself is capable of teaching that second marriages are not praiseworthy”—which Martensen had indeed said on page 84 of his Outline of the System of Moral Philosophy from 1841. When a person is capable of bending his own moral principles like this to suit his own tastes, then everyone can come up with glib remarks about other people’s sickliness, Kierkegaard snarled, adding this dialectical conclusion: “See, in this sense I am certainly a sickly person—and an egoist. To yield to an idea, to lose some of the animal health that selfishly looks after itself, and so forth—this is precisely what Christianity regards as a sign of health.”

Martensen, who imagined himself healthy, would never have understood anything like this. We cannot but be a bit relieved that in his decidedly aggressive, manic reading, Kierkegaard had apparently only managed to skim the preface of the Dogmatics. For here Martensen’s sarcasm soared to its highest level, making merry at those “who do not feel the tendency toward coherent thought, but are able to satisfy themselves by thinking in random thoughts and aphorisms, sudden discoveries and hints.”

This bit of venom was directed at Kierkegaard, who also knew how to administer a thrashing. He delivered the goods in an attack aimed at this world’s many Martensens, who go through life getting straight A’s—egregie [Latin: “distinguished”]—on their report cards, but who regrettably have forgotten what really matters: “Have egregie on your theological diploma, on top of that be the most capable of all those who received that grade, stand on the very summit of the cultivation of the age; and then read one of those old theological works by someone who took the cure of souls seriously; and then learn to be disgusted with all your knowledge qua theological knowledge; learn to be disgusted with this Sunday devotional rubbish, this dissertation nonsense.”

A Sunday in the Athenæum

Kierkegaard’s irritation with Martensen’s trash found a sympathizer in Rasmus Nielsen, the professor of philosophy who on Friday, July 20, 1849, could inform his “Dear Mr. Magister” that he had now received “the System”; Nielsen meant the Dogmatics, published the previous day. It was now to be studied—and sabotaged. The result was available on October 15, 1849, in the form of a detailed review, actually an entire little book, titled Mag. Søren Kierkegaard’s “Johannes Climacus” and Dr. H. Martensen’s “Christian Dogmatics”.

In his memoirs Martensen plainly admits that Nielsen’s criticism caught him off guard. For previously Nielsen had in fact “had a friendly and sympathetic relationship, indeed a friendship with me,” and therefore Martensen had viewed Nielsen as a “brilliant colleague who wished to fight alongside me for the common cause.” In fact, before the Dogmatics had been published Martensen had let Nielsen see a number of sections of it, which had won his full approval. “Now he declared the entire Dogmatics to be a totally erroneous piece of work.” Martensen had no doubts about the reason for Nielsen’s reversal, which was obviously that Nielsen’s “easily influenced mind had been overwhelmed by Søren Kierkegaard.” Indeed, Nielsen was so much under the influence that in his “intoxication he did not even borrow his ideas from Kierkegaard himself, who indeed showed his true face only rarely, but from one of his masks, the pseudonym J. Climacus. So great was the dependence that he did not even make the attempt to convert the words of this mask—which had been spoken in the form of humorous and mocking witticisms—into an instructive lecture, but he incorporated them in unmediated form and treated them as dogmatic statements.”

However much Martensen and Kierkegaard might have disagreed on other issues, they were united in their irritation at the lack of nuance in Nielsen’s use of the pseudonyms as authorities on dogma. Thus Martensen recounted how one Sunday afternoon he had strolled out to Christianshavn, where he ran into Kierkegaard, who accompanied him on a walk along the Christianshavn rampart. There they had a lengthy conversation about the wretched state of Danish letters, including of course The Corsair, to which Martensen felt Kierkegaard adverted all too often. On the way home the two men stopped at 68 Østergade, the site of the Athenæum, a private library. Martensen gestured as if to indicate to Kierkegaard that now they were going their separate ways, but Kierkegaard accompanied him inside. “And here—it came up of itself so to speak—a conversation started about my dispute with Rasmus Nielsen. I expressed unreserved indignation over what I found objectionable in Rasmus Nielsen’s behavior, especially the completely distorted, erroneous, and improper way in which he had used Kierkegaard’s Johannes Climacus, crudely taking sentences from that work out of context, investing them with dogmatic significance, and making direct use of them.” Kierkegaard did not contradict Martensen, nor did he offer the least gesture of support for Rasmus Nielsen. On the contrary, he criticized “particular expressions in the introduction to my Dogmatics, which he believed would best have been omitted.” Here Martensen was apparently referring to the introduction of his Dogmatic Information, written in large measure as a refutation of Rasmus Nielsen, where he spoke of Kierkegaard’s writings as “that long-winded body of literature” which—and this was emphasized no fewer than two times--was “of absolutely no concern” to him.

It goes without saying that Kierkegaard was not pleased with this, but that Sunday afternoon in the Athenæum he apparently did not snap at Martensen. Martensen could even remember that Kierkegaard had said that despite everything their disagreement was a “difference within Christianity,” a phrase that Martensen interpreted as a sort of “rapprochement,” inasmuch as “a difference within Christianity could perhaps be worked out,” and he therefore requested that Kierkegaard “explain himself in more detail.” Then Kierkegaard explained that in his view people “should not try to make use of the Pauline opposition between sin and grace, which most people are not mature enough to appropriate. Rather, he felt that we should try to make thorough use of the epistle of James.” This sounds plausible, because it was precisely that epistle’s exhortation that we be not merely “hearers” but “doers” of the Word that was indeed one of the passages to which Kierkegaard repeatedly returned. Martensen was thus quite able to follow Kierkegaard, but he did not have the energy to “argue,” to put it plainly, “because if there is anything to argue about here, there are certainly other and larger issues.” In retrospect, however, it was clear to Martensen that on that day he had missed an opportunity to get closer to Kierkegaard. But, he conceded, “I was so opposed to his essential being—experimenting and self-enclosed as it was—which seemed to me to be unavoidably linked to the danger of some inner falsity in his character, that I was unable to feel any desire for a closer relationship…. I was unable to come to any confidence in him and had to stick to the view that everyone must hold to his own ideas.”

Rasmus Nielsen

During these years a new name began to appear in the journals, that of Rasmus Nielsen. Kierkegaard’s personal connection to him was quite recent, dating from the early summer of 1848, when the two had passed each other on the street. The situation was about as symbolic as could be: The two men were on opposite sides of the street, each on his own sidewalk, and walking in opposite directions. But Kierkegaard waved to Nielsen, indicating that he should come over to his side so that they could have a bit of conversation, and then he invited him for a private visit. This latter circumstance in particular must have made an overwhelming impression on Nielsen, who knew how cautious the magister was about inviting outsiders into his home. And Kierkegaard’s retrospective account of the event makes it clear that he, too, had found it remarkable: “Most likely he had only thought that he would sort of knock on my door and that then I would sort of open it a crack or not even that much; instead the double doors were flung open and he was invited to come in. That was more than a person could ask.”

It is unclear what they spoke of that day, but it must have gone fairly well because shortly thereafter Kierkegaard mentioned Nielsen as the most suitable candidate to “publish my posthumous papers” when it became necessary. “Assume I died tomorrow—there would be no account of my life,” Kierkegaard (according to Kierkegaard) suddenly mumbled half audibly during a carriage ride to Hirschholm when he began to entertain the idea of having a disciple, perhaps even a confidant. And he had no doubt about the type of person he was looking for: “What I need is a person who does not gesticulate by waving his arms from a pulpit or wagging his finger from a professorial chair, but a person who gesticulates with the whole of his personal existence, with his willingness to deal with every danger, willing that his deeds express precisely what he teaches. An assistant professor is a person who has seventeen things to take into consideration: He wants to have a permanent position, he wants to get married, he wants to be well respected, he wants to satisfy the demands of the times, et cetera.”

Nielsen was not the most gesticulating of men, and furthermore he was not a mere assistant professor, but a full professor as well as a Knight of the Dannebrog, and on top of everything, he was married, which to Kierkegaard’s way of thinking was a serious debit in Nielsen’s account balance. But Nielsen was at any rate the least inferior person in town. This must be the explanation of Kierkegaard’s arrangements, because he had long had very little respect for the professor of philosophy who had taken over Poul Martin Møller’s vacant chair in April 1841. For example, shortly after his successful defense of his magister dissertation, when Sibbern encouraged him to apply for a university position as an assistant professor of philosophy, Kierkegaard had replied that he would have to request a couple of years to prepare himself. “Oh! How can you imagine that they would hire you under such conditions?” Sibbern asked in amazement. “Well, of course,” replied Kierkegaard, “I could do like Rasmus Nielsen and let them hire me unprepared.” Then Sibbern became cross and said, “You always have to pick on Nielsen!” And Sibbern was not entirely wrong. In 1839 Nielsen had placed an announcement in Adresseavisen, inviting the public to subscribe to Outlines of a Christian Morality, which he intended to publish in the course of the coming winter; and in a later newspaper article, “Public Confession,” Kierkegaard ironized about Nielsen’s undertaking: “The age is working its way toward the System. Prof. Nielsen has already published twenty-one paragraphs of his logic, which form the first portion of a Logic, which in turn forms the first part of an all-encompassing Encyclopedia—this is noted on the cover, although without specific mention of its size, probably in order to avoid scaring people, for a person might dare conclude that it will be of infinite size.”

Things got no better when Nielsen published Outlines of Speculative Logic. Four installments of the work appeared in booklet form between 1841 and 1844, and in its preface the work referred to itself as a “fragment of a philosophical methodology,” which it indeed became, inasmuch as it was never completed and broke off literally in mid-sentence. This involuntary fragmentation was the source of some glee in Kierkegaard’s Prefaces, where a certain “Mr. B. B.” (in the manuscript Kierkegaard had originally written “Prof. R. Nielsen”) who promises to write “the System” puts in an appearance. That same year Kierkegaard referred to Nielsen as a “systematic schoolmaster,” which was not meant in friendly fashion, and it is quite understandable that Nielsen soon began to go to some lengths to avoid this Kierkegaard and had in fact expressly requested to be excused from sitting on the committee that evaluated Kierkegaard’s magister dissertation.

At an early stage, Nielsen had been captivated by Hegel and had wanted to unite philosophy and theology, but he freed himself from this notion of objectivity when he got his hands on Kierkegaard’s Postscript, which insists that subjectivity is truth. Nielsen imbibed this, perhaps a bit freely, for in his Propaedeutic he proclaimed: “Life is subjective. The eternally true life is absolutely subjective. The will is subjective. The eternally unconditioned will is absolutely subjective. Thus the objective as the objective is not the true.” There cannot be the least doubt that Kierkegaard had here acquired a disciple who, in the words of the master himself, had “a tendency to toss me up into the highest regions of the extraordinary”—and this, Kierkegaard had to admit, perhaps did contain a “little flattery.”

After only a couple of the walks that the two men took with ritual exactness every Thursday, however, Kierkegaard began to have doubts as to whether Nielsen was the right confidant, all the more so because confidence of course carries with it the risk of betrayal. With the beginnings of paranoia seeping from his pen, Kierkegaard noted, “I must keep my police officer’s gaze on him.” One of the ways Kierkegaard did so was to let the publication of The Crisis and a Crisis in the Life of an Actress serve as a sort of litmus test of Nielsen’s dialectical capacities. If we recall Kierkegaard’s own unending scruples and doubts about publishing the piece, it is clear that Nielsen could not do other than fail the test, which he did in a big way: “He has continually maintained that he understood how the aesthetic was used as a lure and as an incognito. He has also maintained that he understood that it is always of greatest importance to be attentive.” So far, so good, but the only direction from here was down: “That little article, which he did read, seems to have completely escaped his notice…. Thus there has been a misunderstanding in this regard; he will perhaps never become an essential dialectician. And furthermore—alas!—he seems to have a very slender grounding in religion, perhaps none at all.”

It is not easy to have disciples. First they don’t understand what is going on, as Nielsen in this case; then they prove to be altogether too adept at learning, they rob you blind, just as this same Nielsen also did. “R. Nielsen’s book has been published,” Kierkegaard wrote shortly after The Faith of the Gospels and Modern Consciousness, a 530-page clunker of a book, plodded heavily into the literary world on May 19, 1849, the same day that Kierkegaard’s Two Ethical-Religious Essays appeared. Nielsen had had the idea—a disastrous one, in Kierkegaard’s view—of “juxtaposing doubt and faith and letting them debate.” But this sort of thing could not be done successfully unless one had dialectical accuracy and absolute passion, virtues Nielsen lacked. “This book appears to aim at being an Either/Or. It will perhaps only become a neither/nor. It is fundamentally dependent upon Joh. Climacus, and he is the only person who is not cited.” The further he read in the volume, the more Kierkegaard saw that one idea after another had been siphoned off: “The writings have been plundered in many ways; most of all, of course, the pseudonyms, which he therefore never cites, perhaps having made the clever calculation that they are the least read. And then my conversations!”

All in all, it was an “unbelievable amount of petty copying, and bad copying.” The whole of Nielsen’s enterprise consisted in “pasting together a new structure that is essentially plagiarism.” And this was neither more nor less than mediocrity, because there are “certain things concerning which being able is what is absolutely important,” and mediocrity consists precisely in “sort of wanting to go along with something a little.” Furthermore, what Nielsen did could not be done without violating the very form of communication that was essential to the pseudonymous writings: Nielsen taught about Kierkegaard, thereby making him doctrinaire. The consequences of this error were dreadful: “The upshot will be to provide a heap of ecclesiastical drivelheads with a new apparatus with which to drivel up one page and down the next.” Rasmus Nielsen had turned up at the rich fountain of Kierkegaardian genius—with a teacup!

Kierkegaard lodged a protest at the first opportunity. And indeed in one of two letters dated May 25, 1849, Nielsen sounds subservient, almost battered: “Dear Mr. Magister! You are right, which is to say, I am wrong, and I hereby beg your pardon. Last Thursday I did not yet have a clear idea of what I must do. Yours, R. N.” In the second of the two letters, Nielsen asked Kierkegaard more directly to recall that at their first meeting, what Kierkegaard had to communicate was too “serious to be imparted during a walk.” This was also the case with what Nielsen now wanted to impart, so the implicit message was: We should meet privately! After a “P. S.” in which he expressed heartfelt thanks for the “godly discourses,” he had received, Nielsen’s letter was signed, “Yours, R. N.” The next day Kierkegaard replied, noting that such an arrangement could certainly have been made if, that is, Nielsen had taken the trouble to keep their appointment last Thursday and had shown up at the accustomed meeting place for their Thursday walks. Kierkegaard had been there, but had had to stand there, watching the grass grow. And if Nielsen did not want the subjects that interested him dealt with on a walk, he ought in all decency to have informed Kierkegaard of this in writing and in advance. Besides, Kierkegaard in fact preferred for them to meet during walks rather than privately—encounters of the former sort are implicitly not nearly as binding as the latter sort.

It was not easy to be Nielsen. In a journal entry from mid-July 1848—thus only a few months after their first real conversation—Kierkegaard provides an example of irony in practice; it might very well have been inspired by an encounter with Nielsen: “People generally have no idea of … what it means to put oneself into a character…. I have attempted this with irony. I have told a person that there is always something ironic about me. And what then? Then we had come to an understanding with each other; I had revealed myself. But then, at the very moment that I assumed the character, he was bewildered. At that instant all direct communication had been cut off; my entire posture, my gaze, my remarks were sheer question marks. Then he said, ‘Aha, it’s irony.’ He of course expected that I would answer yes or no—that is, that I would communicate directly. But the moment I assume a character, I strive to be completely true to it. Now, it was impossible for him to come to certainty about whether it was irony—precisely this was irony.” In a journal entry like this, we can almost see Nielsen’s eyes darting here and there in desperation.

Still, the situation became one of involuntary irony when, in no time at all, Nielsen—who was supposed to have been Kierkegaard’s helper, perhaps even his heir—developed into a problem of considerable dimensions. For many months Kierkegaard would now have to put up with this clumsy “copier,” who had read and absorbed so much of the pseudonymous writings that every minute or two he would unconsciously come up with metaphors and observations that stemmed from Kierkegaard’s pen. Kierkegaard could clearly see where it was all headed: “Now Nielsen will probably stir up a sensation with material he essentially owes to me.” Or as Kierkegaard, not exactly self-effacingly, put it: “Thus, what is present in me, in the extraordinary fullness of its originality, is something I have served with equally rare selflessness and sacrifice—to excess, indeed, almost to the point of madness. And, when it’s R. N.’s turn to serve up this same brew, things will be extraordinary! Still, R. N., in being great, is little enough to be great in Denmark.”

Kierkegaard was unsure about the situation. On the night of August 23– 24, 1848, he had left Nielsen out of his prayers, but he immediately regretted it as a “terrible sin,” and therefore brought him back into his “God relationship.” And Kierkegaard knew from experience that once someone had become a part of that relationship, it was almost impossible to get him or her out of it again. The same thing had indeed happened with Regine, who had earlier served as the occasion that enabled Kierkegaard to come to greater clarity about his own task. Now God was using someone else, a man, Nielsen: “The fact is, I am the person who is to be brought up, and for this purpose someone like this is used and is brought into my God relationship.” Nielsen was not the end, he was the means by which Kierkegaard attained his end: “I always need a person at the point that I am to make a sharp turn. To me, he will be what that little girl once was, though to a much lesser degree.” Where the relationship with Regine had been emotional, the relationship with Nielsen was one of principle. That was how the two cases differed. The similarity, on the other hand, was that in both cases, even though Kierkegaard realized quite early that the relationship had no future, he left it to the other party to sever the connection.

This process can be followed in Kierkegaard’s and Nielsen’s relatively detailed correspondence during the summer of 1849. Among Professor Nielsen’s privileges were the long vacations he spent north of Copenhagen in a pretty spot between Lyngby and Tårbæk, from which he wrote letters to his walking companion back in the stinking city. It was not long, however, before Kierkegaard’s letters began to bulge oddly, full of suspicion. For example, after he sent Nielsen a copy of The Sickness unto Death hot off the printing press, Nielsen immediately read it and thanked him profoundly for it on July 28: “Dear Mr. Magister! Thank you for the note, many thanks for the book, a thousand thanks for the contents of the book.” Then Nielsen added some reflections on the relation between Climacus and Anti-Climacus, who in his view had a number of similarities, for example, in the way they defined offense. Kierkegaard’s reply of August 4 inexplicably went astray in the mail, but he had been farsighted enough to make a copy of it: “What an anticlimax! Is this appropriate for a professor of logic? You thank a ‘thousand times’ for the contents of the book, less for the book, least for the note.—You surely forget that I am only the editor, so that when you write to me the climax ought to be reversed.” Kierkegaard’s objection was thus the following: He himself was only the editor, so Nielsen ought properly to have thanked him least for the book’s contents, more for the book itself, and most for the note—after all, that was the only thing that had been authored by Kierkegaard!

Nielsen would hardly have been delighted with this philosophical reprimand, but nonetheless he was not without good humor in his letter of August 10, when he informed the master, “I have seen the light. I have made a new discovery. In my last note I observed that Climacus and Anti-Climacus encountered each other in offense, each coming from opposite sides. That was an observation made in haste…. No, now I have quite a different understanding of what is going on. Despair is the point…. I hasten to inform you of this, in part so that you will see how diligently I am studying the writings, and in part so that you will know that I am not slow-witted when it comes to making discoveries.”

Kierkegaard did not wish to discuss the aforementioned “discovery” by post, but if “there is opportunity at some point for verbal communication, I shall be happy to explain myself with reference to the dubious relationship of this new discovery to the previous discovery and to my first note, which accompanied the copy of The Sickness unto Death.” Kierkegaard was rather more direct in his journal: “In a note dated Aug. 10, R. Nielsen has now discovered that the common point shared by Climacus and Anti-Climacus is despair…. In a previous note Nielsen had thought that the common point was offense. That was in fact much closer to being correct, and his new discovery is quite simply an anticlimax.”

On August 28, Nielsen wrote Kierkegaard from Weidemann’s Bakery in Lyngby, informing him that, as requested, he had asked at the inn and at the other baker in town, but in vain: Kierkegaard’s note of August 4 seemed to have disappeared entirely. “With respect to my two remarkable discoveries, I am still of the opinion that I will probably be able to bring them into harmony by means of a third, and I hope to do so when I have the pleasure of hearing your verbal communication. Please, therefore, permit me to consider myself—in anticipation, and for the time being—the Knight of the Three Discoveries.” Kierkegaard apparently did not give a fig about the knight of anticipation’s increasingly confused ideas, and in an undated letter he requested that Nielsen inquire at the Lyngby post office regarding the missing note, on which Kierkegaard’s servant had allegedly forgotten to pay the postage. “If you get hold of it, do me the favor of returning it to me unopened. There is a certain method to my letters, and I do not like to have them read out of sequence.” The whole business sounds strange, but Nielsen was nonetheless nice enough to rush over to the post office, though in vain, and with great expressions of regret he communicated as much to the magister, who in a sort of pique about this, informed Nielsen that he did not really have the desire to continue their correspondence: “I have always been somewhat superstitious, and from the moment my lengthy note of August 4 went missing, I have in fact despaired of the correspondence.”

That a missing letter—and even more remarkably, a letter of which Kierkegaard had made a copy—was able to become the focus of so much attention was a strange and sorry testimony to how little the two gentlemen really had to say to each other. Oddly and characteristically enough, the only thing they seemed to have been able to agree on was that in reality the reasonable thing was to do practically nothing at all. So in September, when Nielsen complained that illness compelled him to remain out in the country, and that as a convalescent he was doing very little work beyond “looking at nature and at the baker’s chickens,” Kierkegaard replied that he was entirely in agreement with respect to “the baker’s chickens”: “When the opportunity presents itself, one ought not neglect making this sort of thing the object of one’s observations. A ‘quiet hour’ of this sort is certainly much more profitable than many of those so celebrated ‘quiet hours’ that are employed in fooling people about Christianity.”

“Take the paradox away from a thinker—and you have a professor,” Kierkegaard wrote in the late summer of 1849. Nielsen did not give him any reason to soften his language.

A while later, on September 20, Nielsen was back in town, informing Kierkegaard of his return with a laconic note: “Have arrived here. Yours, R. N.” The absence of correspondence in the ensuing period makes it reasonable to assume that they had resumed their Thursday walks—and also the conversations that led to their final break.

Fredrika Bremer’s Report Card

If the thinker Kierkegaard and the philosopher Nielsen did not have anything else to talk about on their Thursday strolls, the publication of Fredrika Bremer’s Life in Scandinavia, which appeared in Danish translation on September 12, 1849, would in any case have been a obvious subject. At only forty-four small pages, the book is almost over before it starts, nor is it unforgettable. And it would probably have passed unnoticed had it not provided portraits and assessments of a number of prominent personalities whose lives and activities took place within the ramparts of Copenhagen. Bremer’s book is thus a report card for a very miscellaneous class that has subsequently been bundled together and given the name “the Danish Golden Age.”

The book begins with an exuberant description of the country as the Danes like to see it: “It is a friendly, splendid country of islands, a land of green, rolling fields, which, without mountains and crags, simply rises up out the sea with its fertile plains and beautiful forests.” Bremer’s report is also a national report card on the character of the Danish people themselves: “The people are poetic, romantic, humorous. They love legends, epic poetry, romantic ballads, songs, and jokes. The people are also deeply religious.” That is as it should be, and Bremer knew what she was writing about. After these polite remarks Bremer approached the heart of the nation and thus the heart of her report card, Copenhagen: “The Dane of Copenhagen, or the Copenhagener, is not entirely as good-natured as Danes in general, and sometimes he values the head at the expense of the heart. He is critical. He is quick to see the failures and errors of his neighbor…. Nonetheless, the good-natured smile is still near at hand, and the hand is ready to make peace. The Dane is unacquainted with vice and wickedness; he abominates rancor.” And thus, despite everything, the people of Copenhagen can be seen “by the traveler from abroad as a lively, cheerful, zestful people, extremely pleasant and lovable, open-hearted, helpful, and communicative.”

It is in this high-spirited style that Bremer arrives at the Copenhagen intelligentsia, whom she presents in a series of miniportraits, arranged in rather arbitrary order and decked out in a dazzling display of superlatives: “At the dawn of the century, Mynster and Grundtvig appeared in the church with the fire of the Spirit, with the power of the Word, proclaiming anew the ancient, eternally youthful teachings of religion; Mynster, scholarly, clear, harmonious; Grundtvig (a volcanic soul) with the power and the spirit of the prophets of old.” Next, Henrik Hertz is praised for the “magical power of poetry” he is able to capture in verse “that is also saturated with a lofty and moral earnestness.” Something similar is the case with Carsten Hauch, “a warm, enthusiastic soul,” whose work unites “scholarship and poetry.” Paludan-Müller, the author of Adam Homo, also receives top marks because he is a “deep thinker in verse of admirable lightness and perfection.” Christian Winther sings of “the idyllic natural world of his fatherland in poems that are so lively and fresh that Danes seem to be able to recognize the scent of fresh hay in them.” Only at this point do we arrive at J. L. Heiberg, who receives a slightly cool mention inasmuch as he is a critic, something Bremer did not really like very much, because she had certain difficulties in accepting any “supreme judge in literature excepting that which sooner or later takes shape in the people’s own living heart.”

After this little plunge into pathos Bremer’s style once again becomes warm and soft and supple, and she now recounts, almost as though it were a fairy tale, the story of a “simple, unpretentious flower” that sprang forth on the spring-green islands one day. “Some people protected it. And the sun loved the flower and shone upon it. And its leaves unfolded and took on wonderfully beautiful shapes and colors; they took on wings, slipped free of Mother Earth, and flew over—the entire world! And everywhere people gathered and listened, great and small, old and young, learned and unlearned, at court and in cottages. And when one listened, one was amused at one moment, moved at the next…. Who in the cultivated world has not heard tell of Hans Christian Andersen’s ‘fairy tales for children’? ” The sketch was done with great tenderness and truly catered to Andersen’s vanity: He was a “wonder child” who had found “his originality and his immortality” in the fairy tale.

Via Steen Steensen Blicher and Mrs. Gyllembourg, Bremer arrives at her discussion of the other “branches of art,” represented, for example, by the sculptors Thorvaldsen, Jerichau, and Bissen, the painters Marstrand, Sonne, Skovgaard, and Gertner, the composers Hartmann, Rung, and Gade, and finally the linguists Rask and Molbech. The reader is already a bit out of breath, but must also hear what Bremer has to say about the shining “double stars” in the firmament of scholarly knowledge, the Ørsted brothers, the jurist Anders Sandøe and the natural scientist Hans Christian, whose discovery of “electro-magnetism” is depicted as movingly as is only possible by one ignorant of the subject.

Now the tour has finally reached the country’s philosophical thinkers. Here Bremer a bit uncertainly singles out Tycho Rothe as the leading philosopher, but then she quickly hurries onward to Sibbern, whose stormfilled youth was obviously of more interest to her than the philosophy he subsequently elaborated. After him comes “a seedsman in the highest sense of the word”—no one less than Martensen. By “his living words and his philosophical writings (highly regarded in Sweden as in Denmark), he [broadcast] the seeds of a new development of the church’s religious life and of scientific scholarship through a more profound understanding of what they essentially are.” Bremer is tireless in praise of her “seedsman”: “The unusual clarity and distinctness of language with which this richly gifted thinker can present the most profound speculative principles, and the interesting and ingenious manner of his teaching make him a popular writer. In his Dogmatics we await a major work, and not only for the learned. It is about time that theology developed popular appeal. That was what Our Lord did eighteen hundred years ago.” This last sentence, at least, makes it clear that Martensen had not been entirely successful in his private theological tutoring of Bremer!

From this exalted notion of the parallels between Christ and Martensen, Bremer plunges down to make yet another daring comparison: “Whereas from his central standpoint the brilliant Martensen sheds light upon the entire sphere of existence and upon all the phenomena of life, Sören Kierkegaard stands on his isolated pillar like a Simeon Stylites, his gaze fixed uninterruptedly on a single point. He places his microscope over this point, carefully investigating the tiniest atoms, the most fleeting motions, the innermost alterations. And it is about this that he speaks and writes endless folios. For him, everything is to be found at this point. But this point is—the human heart. And—because he unceasingly has this changeable heart reflect itself in the Eternal and Unchangeable; … because in the course of his exhausting dialectical wanderings he says divine things—he has gained a not inconsiderable audience in happy, pleasant Copenhagen, particularly among ladies. The philosophy of the heart must be of importance to them. Concerning the philosopher who writes on these matters, people speak well and ill—and strangely. He who writes for ‘that single individual’ lives alone, inaccessible and, when all is said and done, known by no one. During the daytime one sees him walking in the midst of the crowd, up and down the busiest streets of Copenhagen for hours at a time. At night his lonely dwelling is said to glow with light. The cause of this [behavior] seems to be less his wealth and independence than a sickly and irritable nature, which can find occasion to be displeased with the sun itself when its rays shine in a direction other than what he wishes. Something like the transformation about which he writes so often seems to have taken place within him, however, and it has led the doubt-plagued author of Either/Or through Anxiety and Trembling to the brilliant heights from which he speaks with inexhaustible bombast about The Gospel of Sufferings, about Works of Love, and about ‘the mysteries of the inner life.’ S. Kierkegaard is one of the rare, involuted types who have been found in Scandinavia (more frequently in Sweden than in Denmark) since the earliest days, and it is to like-minded spirits that he speaks of the sphinx within the human breast and of the quiet, mysterious, and all-powerful heart.” And then Bremer goes on to discuss the political scene.

“Anxiety and Trembling”—that was of course just as idiotic as when the queen had said “Either and Or.” And it would be a mistake to say that Kierkegaard was particularly pleased with Bremer’s portrait. He quickly saw through the underlying motive: “It has now pleased Bremer to bestow her judgment upon Denmark. Naturally it consists of echoes of what the people concerned have said to her. This can best be seen in the case of Martensen, who has had quite a bit to do with her.” In the margin Kierkegaard added: “She lived here for quite a while and had physical intercourse with famous people. She wanted to have physical intercourse with me, but I was virtuous.” The rest of the journal entry continues: “She was nice enough to send me a courteous note inviting me to have a conversation with her. Now I almost regret that I did not reply as I had originally thought of doing, with merely these words: ‘No, many thanks, I do not dance.’ But in any case I declined her invitation and did not go. So I get to hear in print that I am ‘inaccessible.’ It is probably owing to Martensen’s influence that Fredrika has made me into a psychologist and nothing else, and has provided me with a significant audience of ladies. It is really ridiculous—how in all the world can I be considered a ladies’ author? But it is owing to Martensen. He has surely noticed that his star is in decline at the university. It will certainly be droll for Rasmus Nielsen and those who are truly of the younger generation to read that I am a ladies’ author.”

Kierkegaard simply could not wrench himself free of his annoyance at this, and later that same year, after having complained of the sacrifices he had had to make for the sake of his literary productivity, he wrote: “In Fredrika it is stated that I am so sickly and so irritable that I can become embittered when the sun does not shine as I wish it to.—Goody-goody old maid, frivolous tramp, you’ve hit it just right! This explanation will unite different circles that perhaps are not that different from one another. On the one side, Martensen, Paulli, Heiberg, et cetera, on the other side, Goldschmidt, P. L. Møller…. All of them together: It would be a fine world, except that Mag. Kierkegaard is so sickly and irritable that he can become embittered if the sun does not shine as he wishes it to.”

Bremer’s sun, at any rate, did not. And indeed, this by itself was enough to embitter a person.

Kierkegaard’s Dream

In addition to all the opposition in the outer world, Kierkegaard suffered the special self-torment associated with the unpublished manuscripts—as time went on, quite a considerable number of them—that had been accumulating and piling up in his study. At length he decided that The Point of View for My Work as an Author was to be shelved, while The Sickness unto Death could certainly be published. This was the sort of “decision I had so desperately needed to make; it had been so frightfully fatiguing to have those manuscripts lying there, and every blessed day to think about publishing them, correcting a word here, then a word there.”

No sooner had Kierkegaard come to an agreement with Bianco Luno, the printer—who, to Kierkegaard’s surprise, asked to have the manuscript the very next day—when he learned that Regine’s father, Councillor of State Terkild Olsen, had died on the night of June 25–26, 1849: “It made a strong impression on me; had I known of it before I wrote to the printer, it would have been cause for a postponement.”

It had been slightly less than a year since Kierkegaard had last seen the councillor. Toward the end of August 1848, thoughts of Regine had returned with irrepressible urgency, and Kierkegaard had “again brought up her situation,” but at the same time he reminded himself that he could do nothing for her, however much he might want to: “She will go absolutely wild if she finds out how things actually were.” Shortly thereafter, on Saturday, August 26, 1848, driven by an obscure impulse, he traveled to Fredensborg and stayed at the Great Inn. Kierkegaard felt inexplicably happy and strangely confident that he would encounter the Olsen family, who often stayed in Fredensborg toward the end of the summer. When he arrived, no one was to be seen, however. He took his usual walk down along the Skipper Allée, a long, straight road that starts in front of Fredensborg Castle and slopes downward toward Esrom Lake, ending at the Skipper House. When Kierkegaard reached the house he chatted a little with a boatman named Thomas, who correctly observed that this was the first time the magister had been in Fredensborg that year. Kierkegaard asked casually how often Councillor Olsen had actually been there in the course of the year, and Thomas replied that the only time he had been there had been on Easter Sunday. Kierkegaard then walked back up to the Great Inn and ordered his dinner, but just as he began to eat, a man walked past the window and caught his attention: Councillor Olsen!

Kierkegaard very much wanted to speak with the councillor and if possible to reconcile with him, but he could not do it with a mouth full of food! Before he could finish chewing his food and put down his napkin, the councillor had vanished. Kierkegaard looked for him and began to get impatient, for he had to return to Copenhagen before long. So he decided to take a walk down Skipper Allée; he just might encounter the councillor there, but he promised himself that he would only take one look. And, indeed, there stood the elderly man. Kierkegaard had many strong feelings about him: “I go over to him and say: Good day, Councillor Olsen. Let us speak together for once. He took off his hat in greeting, but then he brushed me aside with his hand and said, ‘I do not wish to speak with you.’ Alas, there were tears in his eyes, and he spoke these words with stifled emotion. So I walked toward him, but then the man began to run so fast that it would have been impossible to catch up with him even I had wanted to. I did, however, manage to say this much, and he heard it: ‘Now I make you responsible for not listening to me.’ ”

Kierkegaard was thirty-five years old, the councillor was sixty-four. Nevertheless, it was impossible to catch up with him. And now, a year later, he was dead, and Kierkegaard had never managed to say what he wanted to say to the man he respected so highly and whose daughter he had sinned against out of melancholy love. He had even considered “dedicating some piece of writing to the memory of Councillor Olsen,” but it never came to anything, and now the idea would not do at all. During the night of June 27–28, 1849, Kierkegaard slept fitfully and had a mysterious dream. He otherwise never wrote about his dreams, and this one was not in fact written down in his journal until months later. He could not remember whether he had spoken to himself in the dream or whether someone else had spoken to him; he was only able to recall the words, but here, too, it was not clear who had actually spoken them: “I remember these words: ‘Look, now he wills his own destruction.’ But I cannot say with certainty whether this was because I was the one who wanted to refrain from sending the manuscript to the printer and make an overture to her—or the reverse, that I was the one who insisted on sending the manuscript to the printer. I can also remember the words: ‘It of course is of no concern to’—but I can’t remember with certainty whether the next word was ‘you’ or ‘me’—’that Councillor Olsen is dead.’ I can remember the words, but not the particular pronoun: ‘You’—or ‘I’—‘could certainly wait a week or so.’ I can remember the reply: ‘Who does he think he is?’ ”

In the period that followed, Kierkegaard attempted to make sense of this dialogic monologue, but it was not until August 7 that it became clear to him that in “that nocturnal conversation,” it had been “[my] common sense, and not my better self, that had wanted to restrain me.” With this he had come to a conscientious, though not an especially logical analysis of the dream’s “remarks and rejoinders.” He was nevertheless still unable to determine whether it was “my pride that had wanted to be daring in spite of a cautionary voice (‘Look, now he wills his own destruction’) or precisely the reverse, that it was in fact my common sense that wanted to restrain me and make me wait for a week or so, which would have let everything return to normal once again, and this would have been my destruction.” It is clear that interpreting the dream had been fraught with torment: “It is dreadful; I felt sufferings like the pains of death.”

When he awoke in the morning he was completely confused and was in a state of “undefined dread.” The agreement with the printer had of course been made, and he feared that he would become “an utter fool” if he now, “after having struggled with the question of publication for so long,” were suddenly to rush over and cancel the book. And he would be “very loath to weaken the printer’s impression of my business sense.” It was a dilemma. On the one hand, “something had happened that wanted to warn me off,” and on the other hand, he had just recently been reading the French mystic Fénelon and his spiritual kinsman, Gerhard Tersteegen, a German religious writer. Kierkegaard was profoundly affected by this reading, especially Fénelon’s statement that it would be terrifying for a person if God had expected somewhat more of him. Thus Kierkegaard could not rule out the possibility that the situation was a test, and he reflected that when God terrifies a person it does not always mean that God is trying to restrain a person from doing something fearsome—but that the fearsome thing just might be the very thing that had to be done: “He must be terrified in order that he learn to do it in fear and trembling.”

During this unrest it became clear to him that if The Sickness unto Death was to be published at all, it would have to be published pseudonymously. And there the matter rested. Work began at the printer’s on June 28. In the midst of the process there was some “nonsense with Reitzel” that made Kierkegaard “extremely impatient,” so that he almost took back the manuscript and put it aside to be published later with the other manuscripts and in his own name. It was not too late to do it: The title page had not yet been set, nor had there been a final decision about the author’s name. But when Kierkegaard went to Luno he learned that the book was mostly finished, with Anti-Climacus on the title page as author and Kierkegaard as the editor. “This is how one must be helped and how one must help oneself when it is so difficult to act,” Kierkegaard later explained to himself in his journal, where we are also informed that in the manuscript he had deleted the “passages that referred to me and to facts concerning my work as an author, which of course a poetic figure (a pseudonym) could not say; and only a few touches remained, which were of the sort appropriate to a poetic personality.” So Kierkegaard could once again breathe easily, think clearly, and look back: “I must apologize and blame myself because much of what has previously been noted in this journal is an attempt to exalt myself, for which God will forgive me. Until now I have been a poet, absolutely nothing more than that, and wanting to go beyond my limit has been a desperate battle…. Therefore: The Sickness unto Death will now appear, but pseudonymously, and with myself as the editor. It is labeled ‘for edification,’ which is more than my category, the poet category of ‘the edifying.’… The pseudonym is named Johannes Anticlimacus, as opposed to Climacus, who said he was not a Christian; Anticlimacus is the opposite extreme: to be a Christian to an extraordinary degree. If only I myself manage to become even a quite simple Christian.”

On July 30, 1849, Adresseavisen no. 176 contained an advertisement for The Sickness unto Death: A Christian Psychological Exposition for Edification and Awakening. The book was 136 pages long, with seven additional pages for the table of contents and introduction. It was written by Anti-Climacus, but edited by a man who concealed himself behind the name S. Kierkegaard, or was it the reverse? In any event, the mysterious dream reveals how close Kierkegaard and the pseudonyms had come to one another, but it can also be seen as an ironic footnote to the often wildly abstract theories advanced in later times purporting to explain the reasons Kierkegaard might have had for publishing his works pseudonymously. In this case it was due to a random convergence of a variety of factors: a sudden death, a disquieting dream, and a typesetter who had more space in his calendar than he had counted on.

The Sealed Letter to Mr. and Mrs. Schlegel

On July 1, 1849, the Sunday after Councillor Olsen’s death, Regine was in Holy Spirit Church with her entire family. Kierkegaard was also there. He always left church immediately after the sermon, while Regine usually remained seated. But this Sunday, accompanied by her husband, she also left shortly after Pastor Kolthoff said “Amen”: “And she also contrived things so that we more or less met as I passed beneath the choir loft. Perhaps she even expected me to greet her. I kept my eyes to myself, however…. Perhaps it is just at well that I had had all that trouble at the printer’s at that time, because otherwise I might perhaps have gone over and made an overture—flying directly in the face of my previous understanding, that her father was the only person with whom I might wish—and dare—to get involved. Perhaps she has the opposite view, perhaps she thinks that he was the very person who stood in the way of my making any sort of approach. God knows how much I myself feel the need to be gentle to her—humanly speaking—but I dare not. And yet in many ways it is as though Governance wants to prevent it—perhaps in the knowledge of what would follow.” On July 22, the next time Kolthoff preached, Kierkegaard was again seated in Holy Spirit Church, but that Sunday Regine did not show up.

Holy Spirit Church was not the only place they encountered each other. They also saw each other frequently in the Castle Church, where he had his regular seat and she would sit quite nearby. At one point in January 1850 there was a sort of repetition of the previous awkward situation: Regine left immediately following the sermon and thus ended up in the company of Kierkegaard, who noted the situation in his journal, including in his account one of his few portraits of himself as seen from without: “Outside the church door she turned and saw me. She stood in the curve of the path to the left of the church. I turned to the right as always, because I like to walk through the arcade. My head naturally inclines somewhat to the right. As I turned, I bowed my head perhaps a little more markedly than usual. Then I went my way and she went hers. Afterwards I really reproached myself, or rather I worried that she might have noticed this movement and interpreted it as a nod indicating that she should walk with me. Probably she did not notice it at all, and in any case I would have had to leave up to her whether she wanted to speak to me—and in that case my first question would have been whether she had Schlegel’s permission.”

They encountered each other all over the place, the two of them. In the same journal entry from 1850, Kierkegaard noted that for more than a month he and Regine had “seen each other almost every blessed day, or least twice every other day.” And he continued: “I take my usual walk along the ramparts. Now she walks there, too. She comes there either with Cordelia or by herself, and then she always walks back the same way, alone; consequently, she encounters me both times. This is certainly not entirely accidental.” It could scarcely have been, just as it seems more than an accident that Kierkegaard was guilty of a heaven-sent slip of the pen when instead of Regine’s sister’s name, Cornelia, he wrote Cordelia. Furthermore, Kierkegaard was convinced that if Regine had wanted to speak with him, there had been “plenty of opportunities.” He was similarly convinced that Regine possessed the requisite courage to approach him, “for in fact, both during the period that followed the end of our engagement as well as during the period of her engagement to Schlegel, she gave a little telegraphic gesture in search of a hint from me, and indeed she got it.” As for Schlegel, Kierkegaard was quite certain that “his cause is in good hands with me; for only if it has his consent does it interest me. A relationship with her in which there was the least trace of nefas—oh, Good Lord—in that case people just don’t know who I am.”

Schlegel, however, knew very well who Kierkegaard was; he also knew that nefas was a Latin word that actually meant an action in which one broke divine law, a scandal, but that it was also used in connection with adultery. There could be no talk of any such thing, Kierkegaard promised, but as is well-known, there are many degrees of adultery, and a “little telegraphic gesture” is not nearly as innocent as Kierkegaard would have it seem.

On August 24, 1849, Kierkegaard began keeping a separate volume of journal entries he titled “My Relation to ‘Her,’” in which he provides a relatively complete and to some extent historically accurate account of the course of the engagement, an account which has formed the basis for the interpretations produced by subsequent generations. Even though the entries were intended and written as a report to history, and thus addressed to posterity, they nonetheless aroused in Kierkegaard the sentimental rush of a desire to speak to Regine, whose voice he had not heard in almost eight years. But to hear her voice he would need Schlegel’s permission; otherwise he risked nefas.

And therefore, three months later, on November 19, 1849, Office Director Schlegel received one of the most curious letters he ever received. Or rather, two letters. Like some sort of Victor Eremita with a penchant for Chinese boxes within boxes, Kierkegaard placed, inside the first letter, a sealed envelope containing another letter, which the office director was requested to give to Regine, “that single individual,” who then alone—entirely alone—was to learn the contents of the letter. The exact wording of the letter to Schlegel is not known, but the final in a series of progressively briefer drafts reads as follows:

Esteemed Sir:

The enclosed letter is from me (S. Kierkegaard) to—your wife. You yourself must now decide whether or not you will pass it on to her. For of course I cannot defend approaching her, least of all now, when she is yours, and for that reason I have never availed myself of the opportunity that has presented itself—that has perhaps been presented—for a number of years. It is my belief that a little information concerning her relationship to me might be of service to her now. If you disagree, may I ask that you return the letter unopened, but also that you inform her of this. I have wanted to take this step—to which I feel myself religiously obligated—and to do so in writing, because I fear that my pronounced personality, which probably had too strong an effect at one point, might once again have too strong an effect and thereby be disturbing in some way.—I have the honor [of being] etc.”

Apparently, the office director did not believe that information about the relationship between the author of the letter and his wife could serve any purpose whatever, and he therefore returned the letter unopened. And he can hardly be blamed for having done so. Not only was he acting in accordance with the express wishes of the author of the letter, he also had every conceivable reason to be rather piqued at the remark—dialectically honed, to be sure, but also quite unmistakably clear—to the effect that for a number of years his wife had presented herself to the author of the letter, whose pronounced personality had caused a serious disturbance once already. Yes, indeed!

It is quite understandable that Schlegel did not feel tempted to enlist in the service of indirect communication; indeed, it is all the more understandable when we appreciate the grotesque constellation that Kierkegaard had in mind. This can be seen in one of the drafts of the letter to Schlegel: “If your reply is yes, I must stipulate in advance a couple of conditions in case you do not see occasion to stipulate them yourself. If the exchange between us is to take place in writing, I stipulate that no letter from me is to reach her without having been read by you, just as I will not read any letter from her unless it has your signature, certifying that you have read it. If the exchange is to take place orally, then I stipulate that you be present during every conversation.”

It is not unreasonable to ask what Kierkegaard really had in mind. Did he really, seriously think that the office director was going to sit down and censor his letters and also put his signature on the letters Regine might write to Kierkegaard? And the idea that Schlegel would witness conversations between his former rival and his present wife is if anything even more absurd. For what would they talk about? Nothing in the world. They would have to talk in circumlocutions the whole time, and in the quiet rooms it would soon have been possible to hear one pin dropping after another. In short, it is not the least bit puzzling that Schlegel said “No, thank you” to the suggestion that he open his door to Kierkegaard as a platonic friend of the family.

But Kierkegaard was more than puzzled, and when the sealed letter was returned to him two days later, on November 21, he caustically noted that the “Esteemed Sir” had enclosed an “indignant, moralizing note.” Kierkegaard scarcely finished reading it before he fed it to a nearby flickering flame. He later wrote that Schlegel had “become infuriated and would in no way ‘tolerate any interference by someone else in the relationship between himself and his wife.’ ”

Thus we do not know the contents of Schlegel’s letter. Nor do we know what “information” Kierkegaard had intended for Regine, information she would now be spared—or perhaps cheated out of. But here, once again, there are quite a number of surviving drafts, the last of which is probably not so different from what was in the sealed letter, which in turn was probably not so different from the intimate confidences Kierkegaard generally removed from his journals. If we expected to find an unambiguous elucidation of their relationship, however, we are disappointed, because the draft of letter reads: “Cruel was I, that is true. Why? Well, that is something you don’t know. Silent I have been, that is certain. Only God knows what I have suffered—may God grant that when I speak, even now, it is not too soon! Marry I could not. Even if you were still free, I could not. You have loved me, however, as I have loved you. I owe a great deal to you—and now you are married. Well then, for the second time I offer you what I can and dare and ought offer you: reconciliation.” At this point Kierkegaard had at first written “my love, that is, a love of friendship,” implicitly “reconciliation”; this had apparently been too vehement, so he then shortened the formulation simply to “my friendship”; but this was still too emotional and was therefore changed to the rather contractual-sounding term “reconciliation.” Kierkegaard continued: “I am doing this in writing in order not to surprise or overwhelm you. At one time my personality did perhaps have too strong an effect; that must not happen again. But for the sake of God in Heaven, consider carefully whether you dare become involved in this, and if so, whether you wish to speak with me at once or prefer to exchange some letters first. If your answer is no—well then, for Heaven’s sake, bear in mind that I have at any rate taken this step.

In any case, I remain your—

as in the beginning until this final point—

sincere and entirely devoted

S.K.”

This rather long, drawn-out conclusion practically appears to be petrified prose, frozen in formality, but in reality it is almost the opposite of this: It is intimate, and the words have been chosen with extreme care, for with a few variants it is a repetition of the conclusion with which Michael Pedersen Kierkegaard ended his letter to Søren Aabye, who in the summer of 1835 had stayed at Gilleleje in order, if possible, to find himself. Now, many years later, Kierkegaard unsealed his lips and composed a sealed letter in order, if possible, to find himself with respect to a married woman from whom he could not wrest himself free. By looking at the sequence of drafts we can see how he systematically tried to rid the letter of the sensuality that almost physically dripped from his pen whenever he thought of Regine. Thus in the first draft, several pages in length, he wrote: “Thank you, oh, thank you! Thank you for everything I owe to you; thank you for the time you were mine; thank you for your childlike qualities, from which I learned so much—you my charming teacher, you my lovely teacher. You lovely lily, you, my teacher. You ethereal bird, you, my teacher.” When we bear in mind that Kierkegaard elsewhere insisted that he only had two teachers, Christ and Socrates, Regine had no reason to feel shortchanged.

The episode with the sealed letter makes it clear that even eight years after the end of the engagement, Kierkegaard was still almost obsessed with Regine, but that he also feared her nature, her passion, her body. Again and again, even if in slightly concealed fashion, we find formulations in Kierkegaard’s journals that depict Regine as a being full of erotic energy. Here is an example from one of the drafts of the sealed letter intended for Regine: “You were the beloved, the only beloved. You were most beloved when I had to leave you, even if you saddened me somewhat with your vehemence, which was neither able nor willing to understand anything.” And later, in yet another draft: “For this reason as well, if you wish to speak with me, I intend to give you a serious dressing-down because in your passion you once went beyond a certain boundary.”

What boundary, we are tempted to ask. And what experiences lay behind a statement like this: “With respect to ‘her,’ I am, as always, ready and willing—only, even more fervently, if possible—to do everything that could make her happy or cheer her up. But I always fear her passion. I am the guarantor of her marriage. If she understands my true situation, perhaps she will suddenly lose her taste for marriage. Alas, I know her all too well.” What was it that Kierkegaard knew all too well—indeed, so well that he shrank from telling the reader what it was? And why did he fear that Regine could “lose her taste for marriage”? Might not the truth in fact be that Kierkegaard had had to write Judge William’s lengthy defenses of the aesthetic validity of marriage in order to convince an unbelieving and furious Regine that the institution of marriage made sense despite everything?

In any case, the unfathomable quality of her passion is such a recurrent theme in Kierkegaard’s journals that there must be profoundly frightening experiences behind it. In 1849, for example, he wrote: “Perhaps even the entire marriage is a mask, and she is more passionately attached to me than before. In that case, all would be lost. I know well what she is capable of when she gets hold of me.” It was not a seducer who spoke like this. It was more likely someone seduced, who was afraid that the seduction would be repeated and would be even more tempestuous the second time than it had been the first: “So assume that the passion is ignited once more and that we have the old story, raised to a higher intensity. Assume that she bursts the bonds of marriage, that she kicks over the traces and casts herself upon me in desperation, that she wants a separation, wants me to marry her—not to mention that which is even more frightful.”

We dare assume that here, once again, Kierkegaard was wallowing in cares that might better have been saved for worse times and better purposes. Only in an overwrought fantasy would it have been possible to imagine that Regine could suddenly demand a separation from her considerate Fritz, who had rescued her reputation and provided her with financial security. On the other hand, the thoughts Kierkegaard had about the possible consequences are noteworthy because they appear to confirm—quite genuinely—that the classical codes of sexual conduct had been reversed: Regine was full of erotic energy like some sort of Don Giovanni, while Søren Aabye shrank away and felt himself pursued. Like some sort of Zerlina, who wants and yet doesn’t want “that which is even more frightful.”

“Come Again Another Time”

He had been sitting in the anteroom for quite a while, but Bishop Mynster kept him waiting. It was not the first time. Three weeks earlier—in the beginning of June 1849—he had sat and waited just like this, and when he had finally been permitted to enter, Bishop Mynster had paced nervously back and forth, unable to bring himself to do more than say “dear friend” over and over again, addressing no one in particular. This peculiar scene made Kierkegaard think of a similar episode a year and a half earlier, when he had called on the bishop to find out what he thought of Works of Love, and even at that time it had been quite a while since the bishop had received the book, replete with a high-flown dedication in which Kierkegaard expressed his profound devotion to the bishop. On that occasion Kierkegaard had scarcely come in the door before the bishop had asked rather pointedly, “Was there anything you wanted?” And indeed, there was—quite a bit, in fact—but not on the conditions offered.

Among other things, Kierkegaard now wanted to speak with Mynster about the possibility of an appointment to the Pastoral Seminary. Kierkegaard had raised the matter earlier, in March 1849, but that visit had in fact primarily served as an occasion for Kierkegaard to prove to himself that he actually could seek a position: “If someone offered it to me, it would hardly tempt me.” Later he had repeated the attempt, though he did not get to see the bishop, and he had left the bishop’s residence yet again with the strangely mixed feelings of relief and indignation typical of a person unable to decide what he really wants. He had also called upon J. N. Madvig, minister of church and education, but he, too, had been unavailable. So, a while later he had gone yet again to see Mynster, who wanted to have Kierkegaard as far out of the way as possible and therefore had tried to palm off on him a pastoral appointment in the most faraway rural parish imaginable. “As soon as you become involved in the practical affairs of life, it will surely disappear.” “What?” Kierkegaard had asked. “The ideality,” Mynster had replied, without the least hint of irony.

Kierkegaard had found the remark embarrassing, but in a way he shared the same goals that “the very reverend old man” cherished, except he wanted them “in a major key.” This was one of the main points Kierkegaard now wanted to make at the bishop’s residence that Monday, June 25, 1849, but his musical metaphor disintegrated into dissonance. For when Mynster finally showed up, he once again performed his strange pantomime, repeating his “ ‘dear friend,’ probably six or seven times” like a mechanical doll, all the while being very much the bishop, clapping his former confirmand on the shoulder. “Come again another time,” he said with a strangely off-putting receptiveness, pushing an indignant Kierkegaard backward and down the stairs, then home to his writing desk, where he finally recovered his composure when his pen rasped poisonously across the pages of his journal.

Mynster had often caused Kierkegaard’s pen to behave in this manner, but in recent years the intervals between the venomous patches had become shorter and shorter, and Mynster earned the dubious honor of being the contemporary figure Kierkegaard mentioned most frequently in his journals. Mynster’s posthumous reputation was thus shaped, to an extent that would have terrified him, by his relationship with Kierkegaard—who for his part was not satisfied with bringing only Regine with him into history.

Mynster did have his own history, however, and despite his various administrative chores, his time-consuming official visitations, his service on the boards of countless organizations, he managed to find the time to write his memoirs, which he soberly titled Communications concerning My Life. It had taken him just under a year. The preface was dated February 2, 1846, and on January 21, 1847, he blotted dry the ink on the final pages. So he put the manuscript away, but he took it out again on September 13, 1852, because he wanted to make some minor changes in the despondent tone with which he had earlier concluded the memoirs. But the work was not published until after Mynster’s son Frederik Joachim—to his surprise—discovered the manuscript as he was going through his father’s papers after the bishop’s death. Mynster’s son added a short preface and a brief postscript and published it in mid-April 1854.

Thus Mynster had begun and concluded his autobiography during the period that Kierkegaard had started calling on him systematically. It seems a malicious irony that Kierkegaard’s journal entries describing their conversations came to form the beginning of a story about Mynster that not only concluded quite differently from Mynster’s own story about himself but was also accepted quite uncritically by subsequent generations, who have viewed Mynster from Kierkegaard’s point of view, and never Kierkegaard from Mynster’s.

And this has tended to blind us to the obvious parallels between the two men.

Jakob Peter Mynster

Communications concerning My Life is divided into five large sections that provide a chronological narrative of Mynster’s life from his childhood until old age. “The biography,” he explains near the end of the book, “was written in much haste, and for the most part it was just as hastily conceived. I have had neither the time nor the desire to rewrite it, and I have been most inclined to commit these pages to the flames.” The tone is subdued, at times dry, occasionally ironic and with a dash of satire. The book displays not a little self-esteem, but this was typical of the times, for one thing, and it is often counterbalanced by an unfeigned sense of inferiority, for another—and in any event, as the years passed, Mynster did in fact have something about which to feel self-esteem. Nonetheless, the preface quite modestly states: “Outwardly, my life has had so little in the way of unusual events that it could be summed up in a few lines. And as for my inner life, not only would it be no easy task to present it reasonably truthfully, but there is also a certain bashfulness associated with this sort of undressing in the presence of others. And a great deal of what has moved me most profoundly will seem childish and ridiculous to most people.” We must therefore not expect intimate confessions from Mynster; there were certainly enough weaknesses to display, “but I am not so vain as to seek to attract attention to myself by telling about every weakness and flaw of which I am aware.”

Jakob Peter Mynster was born November 8, 1775, the youngest son of Christian Gutzon Mynster, a jurist and later an official at Frederik’s Hospital, who died of consumption at the age of only thirty-five. Shortly afterward, Mynster’s mother, Frederikke Nicoline Christiane, who had been left with two sons, five-year-old Ole Heironymus and Jakob Peter, who was two, married the head physician at the hospital, F. L. Bang, subsequently also a professor of medicine. “My first journey,” Mynster writes, “was thus from the one side of the hospital to the other.” The marriage was short-lived: Frederikke died when Jakob Peter was four years old. She left a letter to each of her two sons. In one, she cautioned Ole against his “great flightiness,” while to Jakob Peter she wrote, “Right from your earliest childhood you have displayed an exceedingly stiff and inflexible temperament that has brought many tears to my eyes. And even though there has been notable improvement, I still sometimes notice that you would rather be punished than give way.” Mynster could remember standing before his parents’ grave when he was young; shortly thereafter both Nikolaj Church and its adjacent cemetery were destroyed in the great fire of 1795, “and now the place is a meat market.”

Head Physician Bang remarried shortly afterward, once again to a widow, but two years later she, too, died at the age of twenty-seven. Just five months later Bang married for the third time, now to a girl of sixteen summers named Louise Hansen; she was the daughter of a pietistic pastor, though this circumstance had not dampened her passionate nature. She was full of zest for life, generous, though also hysterical—“often attacked by the most severe convulsions”—and she gave birth to nine children, five of whom died at an early age. With all this, the management of the household was somewhat neglected, so the mother-in-law, a respectable lady, had to be brought in, and she brought along two more daughters of her own.

“My father, a little, corpulent, animated man, and quite friendly—when nothing was the matter—was sanguine of temperament,” Mynster wrote with respect to his stepfather, with whom most probably everything was the matter. “Everything easily made a powerful impression on him. Every difficulty brought a sigh or a scolding from him, the latter sometimes lasting many days.” The stepfather was of a prosaic nature and believed that poetry was something for only women and young people; he insisted on being an autodidact but read nothing, which made his opinions increasingly one-sided and trivial.

Worst of all, however, he was an awkward combination of hearty fellow and pietist or—as his stepson put it—“much too sincere and lively a man to be what one could call dull.” Even though he himself never set foot inside a church, he forced the children to go, and when they returned home quite tired, he required them to give him detailed summaries of the sermon of the day and examined them on a chapter of the Bible. The frequent evening devotions held in the home were also intolerable: The entire household would gather in the parlor to watch the heavyset fellow thumb back and forth through his diaries, looking for something with which he could amuse the congregation: “It was usually some rather trivial, long-winded reflections on the world’s sin and unbelief, but also on his own weaknesses.” These pious exercises were more harmful than beneficial, and they instilled in Mynster a true disgust for anything that might even suggest a stodgy pietism. And despite all this, almost a generation would have to pass before Mynster would come to the personal conviction that Christ was not the “bogeyman with which people had terrified me in my childhood.”

When the grotesque evening devotions were over, Jakob Peter and Ole, together with some of their young friends, went up to their room on the second floor, room number 5 on the corridor, for a little “fun.” They brought their favorite books and something to smoke, but if someone had forgotten his tobacco it was no problem, because the room also housed a tall East Indian pipe “in which the smoke made lots of noise as it went through the water and gave off a disgusting odor.” Ole’s friends, including Henrik Steffens and Grundtvig, who was the son of the strict stepfather’s sister, gathered here, discussing philosophy and aesthetics and expressing their passionate support for the ideals of the French Revolution. The star of the group was Steffens, who was especially excited about geology and the “World Spirit”; next was Ole, who knew everything and was always busy with something, but who also had a perverse dash of laziness as well as a certain sense of distance from his own abilities. Later the three youths formed a little debating society that they pompously dubbed the “Trifolium,” whose purpose was to toughen their spirits and sharpen their command of Latin.

When Mynster looked back on his years as little Jakob Peter, his pen was not guided by sentimentality. True, time and the forces of nature did soften his stepfather’s frigid nature somewhat, “but in those days almost every mealtime was seasoned with long, bitter, punitive lectures, and often a frightful storm would suddenly erupt out of nowhere…. We trembled when we were unexpectedly called in to see my father, and sometimes we received long epistles written in the harshest language.” Mynster thus had no patience for the mawkish way in which childhood is often presented as an idyll. Indeed, Mynster asserted that the countless “hymns of praise to the joys of youth are for the most part built upon an illusion; the glorious light of a few hours or days is made to shine retrospectively upon the whole of youth. The pressures of the present cause one to forget the pressures one suffered from in the past.”

Jakob Peter was educated by a series of private tutors. It was only when one of his tutors went out of his mind and started fanatically proclaiming the imminent return of Jesus Christ that Jakob Peter was sent for a year to the Latin school affiliated with the Church of Our Lady. In their free time the children played in the hospital’s courtyard or in its long corridors and quiet rooms, where the corpses were laid out, providing the perfect background for the ghost stories the maidservant told when the children gathered in the nursery at dusk. In the summer the family’s greatest amusement on a Sunday afternoon was to take a stroll in the Frederiksberg Gardens and have tea at a suitable restaurant, while on moonlit winter nights they might wander around the palace arcades. Apart from a wonderful collection of conch shells that belonged to the father of one of his private tutors and in which Jakob Peter and Ole took great delight, childhood did not offer many opportunities for diversion: “we did not have much in the way of toys or other equipment.”

The alternative to all this boredom was books, and at an early age, Mynster devoted himself to reading with great passion and with long-term plans: “As far back as I can remember, being an author had always represented the highest sort of bliss for me.” He would secretly copy passages from works of natural science onto fine paper and then amuse himself by dipping the sheets into water so that they looked as if they had just come off the press! Mynster’s literary productivity also included writing some poems of his own, of which the aged bishop provided a judicious selection in his memoirs, generally accompanied by harsh criticism. Nor was he mild in his judgment of himself as a young man: “Capricious and surly,” he wrote of his nature, supplementing this description with terms such as “self-conscious, laconic, bashful, always afraid of being a burden to other people.” Mynster remained painfully aware that he had not changed noticeably with respect to this latter point: “Quite often, people perhaps still view as aloofness what is fundamentally only a fear of burdening other people by approaching them, or a fear of behaving clumsily.” It is not surprising that this shy child began to play the game of pretending and for a time seized the opportunity to appear on stage in a little theater in Nyhavn, where he was especially successful with “roles for ladies.” And when he played the role of Else in the play The Ridiculously Sensitive he looked so lovely that a male guest later informed him that he would have fallen in love with him but for the little circumstance that he was not a woman.

At the age of fifteen Jakob Peter took his university entrance examinations, received top marks in all subjects, and that same year, 1790, he matriculated into the university to study theology, in accordance with his stepfather’s wishes. He went to the lectures “reasonably diligently,” but found them “only minimally instructive.” Mynster, who had long been “smallbodied and thin-voiced,” now suddenly became a “long, lanky person whom everyone thought was destined to die of consumption…. As a consequence of this rapid growth I had weak nerves; I often felt ill, though without any actual illness.” On July 14, 1794, not yet nineteen years old, he left the university with his theological degree, having received top honors in all disciplines.

Mynster did not have to concern himself about what he would do next. His stepfather had long since decided that he would be a private tutor for Count Joachim Godske Moltke’s only son, nine-year-old Adam Vilhelm. The stepson yielded to the wishes of his stepfather. To him, one position was as good as another, because at root only one thing mattered: “The task with which I was unceasingly confronted, which almost consumed me, and many times brought me to the verge of despair, was how I would amount to anything in the spiritual sense.” We cannot help but be reminded that Kierkegaard was not the first person to search for an idea for which he could live and die.

In 1784 Moltke had resigned as prime minister and now spent his summers at Bregentved, his estate, and his winters in his palace in Copenhagen. His wife, Countess Georgine, was gentle, amiable, quiet—indeed, shy—and as a rule Mynster saw only the serving staff at the evening meal, at which the other guests included an older, German-speaking private secretary and the count’s sickly sister, who lived at the estate. The conversation at the table was “not very lively”; the atmosphere was strangely antique and the tone was always dry, so when the meal was over everyone went to bed—excepting the young private tutor who loved to spend the late evening hours in the company of a book.

Mynster’s eight years at the estate were above all eight years with books--books that developed and matured him. New and unsuspected areas of growth and interest were kindled when he would disappear into the extensive library of Vemmetofte Monastery. Adam Vilhelm, whom Mynster was to educate and entertain from nine in the morning until eight in the evening, was both gifted and eager as a pupil, so the reading list soon went far beyond what was usually assigned to children. While the boy ate apples and nuts, Mynster would go over the indispensable classics and then question the child about them, backwards and forwards. They also read English, German, and French together, while Mynster struggled on his own with Italian and was eventually able to scrape his way, more or less, through such authors as Dante, Petrarch, Tasso, and Machiavelli. Furthermore, he took an interest in economics and for a while made quite an extensive study of Adam Smith. And in addition to all this, he read the categorical Kant, who led him backwards to Hume. Then he disappeared into a passion for Jacobi and was bewitched by Helvétius. He took on Montesquieu and Rousseau in French and then returned to the young titans of German philosophy—to Fichte, but especially to Schelling, the philosophical comet who dazzled everyone. His friendship with the Norwegian, Adrian Bentzon, led him to Aeschylus and to Goethe, but the greatest miracle was his reacquaintance with Homer, whose works he read in the warm summers with his heart pounding and his temples throbbing: “Of course, from handbooks of history and mythology I knew well what people call the contents, but an entire new world was opened for me and enchanted me with its elevated simplicity and its profound feelings which, however, are always expressed within the bounds of moderation and which often only find expression in a few chords. I came to the clear realization that as long as Homer is still read, genuine taste will never die out entirely. I translated the fourteenth song of the Odyssey and the sixth song of the Iliad into hexameters.”

Later he also read Jean Paul and was quite carried away, for where others fell silent for lack of the right words, this German romantic kept on, daring to utter “what others said could not be spoken.” Mynster had been inspired by Jean Paul’s aphoristic style, and in his memoirs he reprinted some of his youthful attempts, bittersweet bon mots which—if not in their quality, then at any rate in their tone—call to mind the Kierkegaardian “Diapsalmata.” One of these aphorisms exudes its own tragic world-weariness: “My situation is like that of the Greeks of the modern era: During the merriest days of the Easter season, there is always a time when I wander among the graves.” Another of these aphorisms immediately calls to mind the final portion of Fear and Trembling, which employs a metaphor about the time the Dutch dumped spices into the sea. Mynster wrote: “In order to keep them from losing their value, do not indulge in enjoyments too frequently, just as the Dutch uprooted cinnamon trees in order to keep the price of cinnamon from falling.” A third aphorism brings us into more grotesque territory: “Many people resemble the devil tree of America: With a large explosion, they spread their fruit as soon as it is ripe—often long before it is ripe.”

Mynster also wrote what he later contemptuously called a “sentimental drama” in one act, as well as a tragedy that remained an unfinished fragment. And Mynster was tempted to enter the university’s gold-medal competitions for essays on set topics. Mynster’s first attempt was in 1795 in answer to this question, probably rhetorical: “What sort of times are most suited to produce a great poet—those that are simple and unsophisticated, or those that are cultivated and sophisticated?” Mynster wrote several drafts but was unable to complete his essay. The following year the topic was a comparison of ancient and modern popular education, and Mynster actually completed a short essay, but it did not please him and he consigned it to his desk drawer. Things were different in 1798, however, when the subject was “the advantages and shortcomings of both public and private education.” Mynster wrote his essay in three weeks and won the prize. His essay had been motivated in part by “the indignation I felt and still feel at modern educators, generally the shallowest of people, who think that with their phrases and their fragmentary knowledge they can reshape the human race.” Perhaps things have not really changed so much since then.

“All of that looks quite nice now,” Mynster wrote in retrospection, admitting that he had in fact experienced plenty of happy times, “but I truly had many burdensome and bitter times as well. Within me there was a storm and stress that I was embarrassed to discuss with anyone, that I tried to discuss with myself in verse and in prose, though without success…. A love smoldered, but found no object; there were emotions that could not be subdued, thoughts that would not come to fruition, an ideal I despaired of ever achieving…. Many were the times that I descended into lethargy; everything, myself included, became a matter of indifference to me.” Jakob Peter became adept at the enervating sport of deception: “No one knew my condition. I fulfilled the responsibilities of my job. In the company of others I behaved as I always had. But whether I was with others or alone, whether I was at work or idle, I was filled with the same darkness.”

The young theological graduate also began to drink a bit, and continued to do so for about half a year. Previously he had not kept strong drink in his room, but Ole had given him a bottle of liquor, “and in my dispirited and probably somewhat neurotic condition it was so inexpressibly pleasant to me to go and have a nip, that I needed whatever remaining strength of character I possessed in order to resist doing so and thus starting down a path that might have been very pernicious.” Mynster never quite freed himself of this depressive tendency, and even many years later he would sense what he called “a bitter peace that is never very distant from my naturally hypochondriacal makeup.” It was not so much a “bitterness against the world,” he explained, but rather an elusive “I know not what,” that could seize hold of him without warning and infuse its “wormwood drops into every goblet of joy.”

Jakob Peter was consumed by a love that was unhappy because it had never been embodied and was thus without a history. He remained what he and Ole termed a platonic “polygamist” and recognized his situation as the fleeting phenomenon Jean Paul had called “simultaneous love.” When he looked back on it, Mynster was absolutely unable to “remember a time when I had not been in love.” At one moment it would be a female cousin with a sweet smile, who lived in the city; then it would be a Norwegian girl who, without even being asked, cut off a lock of her brown hair and presented it to her embarrassed admirer—and who after so many years still had it tucked away. Sometimes the infatuation would be more profound, as in the case of Sophie Gaarder, who had certainly been one of those women everyone fell in love with and who then suddenly disappeared. Steffens had been of the opinion that she had a brilliant intellect, but Mynster disagreed: “She had neither real brilliance nor wit, nor was she really much of a beauty; she was almost too blonde. But when she stood there, straight-backed and with unaffected grace, her fine complexion and gentle eyes expressing all that was stirring within her, she was really breathtaking, and every word from her lips was full of meaning. I have never heard more beautiful words of praise than those she uttered upon having heard that a friend of hers had acted honorably: She folded her hands across her breast, raised her eyes upward, and said the simple words, ‘God, that was fine.’ ”

As the point approached when Adam Vilhelm would take his university entrance examinations, thus rendering a private tutor no longer necessary, the position of parish pastor in the village of Spjellerup in southern Zealand fell vacant. Mynster had his doubts. “Am I really going to take up arms against the fulfillment of all my plans and wishes, entrenching myself behind a pulpit and an altar rail?” he wrote emotionally to Ole, but what Ole thought did not matter. The decision was in fact the count’s to make, and he believed that Mynster ought to spend one more year at Bregentved and then become pastor of Spjellerup. This sounded almost like a prison sentence to Mynster, and he would serve ten years—in solitary confinement, surrounded only by rough farm boys, simple girls, and an insufferable housekeeper who got into wrangles with everyone and about everything; her bitterness seeped like gall into the everyday affairs of life.

Nonetheless Mynster was happy finally to have a place of his own. The parsonage was spacious and in good condition, even if it had suffered a little from neglect. As time went by, Mynster managed to put one of the two gardens into decent shape, and when he took a walk across his adjacent properties, he could not suppress a certain feeling of “self-esteem.” But this was also the very feeling that would vanish almost totally when he had to write his sermons. There were times when he felt entirely bereft of ideas and had to take “refuge in the sermons of others” in the hope of finding “a theme or a longer piece” that might inspire him: “Thus almost weekly, I had a very painful feeling—which I call ‘the Saturday despair’—from which I am still not immune, even after forty-four years of practice. For on a Saturday, after one has worked oneself into exhaustion completing a sermon and then reads it through and finds it so insipid and stupid that one can barely bring oneself to speak those words—but has nothing else to offer one’s listeners—one does not go to bed with a light heart.”

During the summer of 1803 Mynster experienced a decisive breakthrough in his spiritual development. In the evening twilight, as so often before, he had been sitting on the sofa reading a book—on this occasion, Jacobi’s work on Spinoza—when suddenly an insight filled him like an illumination from on high: “If conscience is not a meaningless figment of the imagination—and I had no doubts that it was not—then, if you must obey it in one thing, you must obey it in everything, without exception; you must act and speak in accordance with your duty, as fully as you know it and are capable of doing, entirely unconcerned about the world’s judgment, its praise or blame…. The full significance of Christ’s words ‘No one can serve two masters’ had dawned on me, and I had thus gained entry into his kingdom.”

This great internal revolution stood in marked contrast to the outward uniformity of the world that surrounded the young curate. He passed the time with varied reading—Plato, Herodotus, Sophocles, Dante, Tasso. Mynster read “everything I wanted to read, and I believed, with some justification, that almost every sort of reading is grist for a cleric’s mill.” For this same reason Mynster was a frequent visitor at the Vemmetofte Monastery, where the fine collection of older French literature kept him busy from morning till evening. He traveled to Copenhagen a couple of times a year, but the friends of his youth had changed, as had Ole, who had now become head physician at Frederik’s Hospital. After a couple of brutal disappointments in his love life, Ole had followed his stepfather’s example and married a widow, who brought four of her own children with her into the marriage. Ole had now lost himself in bourgeois life and practical tasks, thus forfeiting, Jakob Peter believed, “receptivity for the ideal,” just as his fiery intellect had been supplanted by an ill-concealed irritability. Ole’s ever-present tendency to dominate his younger brother now became almost tyrannical, and the warm relationship between the two brothers tapered off into a coolness in which there was only room for “anecdotes and caprices” but never for real exchanges of views.

In these circumstances, Mynster’s acquaintance with Kamma Rahbek was of inestimable importance. Kamma and her husband were at the center of the Copenhagen literary and intellectual circles of the day. Steffens had spoken to her quite favorably of Mynster, and since Kamma was interested in getting to know a young pastor who had not “surrendered to any physical or intellectual philistinism,” it was arranged that the Rahbeks would come to Spjellerup for a couple of days during the summer of 1804. The visit was a success and was therefore repeated in the summers that followed. A correspondence soon sprung up between Jakob Peter and Kamma (who suffered from “unsurpassed partisanship”). The intimate tone and weekly regularity of these letters can scarcely have been a source of delight to Kamma’s husband, Knud Lyne, but he was an agreeable soul and was also an older gentleman, so he took it graciously. “Mrs. Rahbek did not write me little notes, but long epistles, often covering two or three octavo sheets, and usually written with a raven quill,” Mynster remembered as he inspected the stack of letters during the writing of his memoirs. Indeed, he felt tempted to leave the entire correspondence for posthumous publication, but no, “it would not do; in her letters to her close friends Mrs. Rahbek really let herself go.” Ordinarily, the subject of their correspondence was rather innocent, but certainly not always, and when she began “to write emotionally, it would develop into a real bombardment.” Furthermore, much that was in the letters could not be understood today, for they had been written in a special “language of Bakkehus,” the Rahbeks’ home just outside of Copenhagen. Even the names employed were curious: Steffens was known as “Emperor Frederik,” which was actually the nickname that had been given to a mad eccentric who wandered around the streets of Copenhagen, gesticulating wildly. Kamma was known as “the niece,” while Jakob Peter himself had a number of names, but most often “Uncle Job”—a name one of his tutors had thought up: If one removed the sad little “ak” in the middle of “Jakob,” what remained was the even sadder “Job.”

Apart from a couple of anonymously published minor poems, Mynster had not yet published anything, but when Oehlenschläger’s Poetical Writings appeared in 1805, Rahbek—and Oehlenschläger himself—asked the young curate to write a review of these epoch-making poems. Mynster acceded to the request, but was unable to do so and instead wrote the poem “To Adam Oehlenschläger,” which luckily met with the approval of the cultural circle up in Copenhagen. Hans Christian Ørsted also spoke in praise of Mynster’s poem, finding it nice work “for a dilettante.” Only Oehlenschläger’s sister, the pretty Sophie, wrinkled up her nose at Mynster’s poetical debut, but then she was known to be virtually impossible to please.

An article Mynster published in Rahbek’s journal Minerva in April 1806 was of equal importance. Mynster wrote in opposition to a piece by Bishop Boisen, who had been nattering on in favor of a more formless liturgy. Under other circumstances Mynster would not have reacted, but since the government had taken Boisen’s foolishness seriously and had already convened a commission to consider the matter, Mynster feared that “a mess would be made of the entire liturgy, the weaknesses of which I was wellacquainted with but which I loved so profoundly.” Wanting to do the honest thing, Mynster wrote his essay “On the Proposed Change in Our Liturgy,” but then he hesitated and let it lie for a few weeks: “I, an unknown, was not only to go into the lists against a man who at that time enjoyed universal favor among those of both high and low estate, but I was also, to a certain degree at least, defending the old arrangements that had been abandoned by nearly everyone and was speaking in defense of a particular view of Christianity that would astound, if not infuriate, most readers, and would in a way cast aspersions upon a governmental initiative.” Mynster sent his polemical piece to the Bakkehus, where Kamma and her brother approved of it entirely, while Knud Lyne was more dubious. But it was published anyway. Mynster had crossed his Rubicon; he was praised and criticized, and Boisen’s idea was shelved.

While Mynster was gradually becoming more and more himself down in Spjellerup, Napoleon had plunged large portions of Europe into chaos. Mynster regarded the little Frenchman with unmitigated loathing, not because he had “usurped royal or imperial power,” or because he was a “conqueror”; no, the loathing was occasioned by “hypocritical phrases with which—in the midst of the most horrifying bloodshed and the most heartless extortion—it was continually asserted that all this was being done for the sake of the well-being and salvation of the human race.” Napoleon’s troops had long been exerting pressure on Denmark through Prussia, which portended ill, but most people were nonetheless taken aback by the “quite abominable catastrophe of 1807,” when the English invaded Denmark. “As we began to harvest our fields in the most profound peace, everything suddenly took on a martial appearance. Not only soldiers who were on furlough, but also the local militia were called up for service,” Mynster wrote. He himself suffered greatly because communication between Spjellerup and Copenhagen had been cut off, and at times the only person he could communicate with was his “half-dotty housekeeper.”

One day, just before evening, bombardment could be heard from the northeast; the following evenings seemed quiet, but only because the wind had changed direction and this was in fact the calm before the storm. And Mynster remembered it so vividly that the pages themselves almost seem to disappear into the drizzle and the darkness: “At midnight I climbed up a long thatching ladder that leaned up against the gable of the house; the whole village was asleep; it was drizzling and it was so dark that I could not make out any nearby objects. But I saw fire spread across the distant horizon, and I knew well that Copenhagen—the site of everything dearest to me—was burning.” The capitulation came several days later, and Mynster went to the capital and found his family, who had sought refuge at Frederik’s Hospital, unharmed and in reasonably good spirits. As the occupation dragged on, English soldiers were quartered at Mynster’s parsonage, which was quite difficult for the unmarried curate, though tolerable as long as it was only a matter of “corporals and common soldiers.” Later on, however, it became something close to a plague when he had to play host to rude and ill-mannered officers, who cared about nothing other than their pay and their own convenience.

During the years that followed, Mynster intensified his theological studies. He read the Bible in a new light and studied Justin Martyr in relation to the four Gospels. He was also convinced that he could demonstrate that the Epistle of James contained themes that pointed forward toward the Epistle to the Hebrews, and he wrote a lengthy article on this. Of greatest importance, however, was his publication in 1809 of a little volume containing twelve of his best sermons. During the turbulent war years, of course, no publisher wanted to assume the risk of publication. Mynster had to invest his own money in publishing the sermons, but the Spjellerup Sermons enjoyed high praise and successful sales, so he made out well on his investment. The following year he published On the Art of Preaching, which was also quite a success. He had read the manuscript aloud to his theological colleagues at the annual diocesan meeting, and he was well satisfied: “The ideas were quite clear, the language was good, and in those days I was good at reading aloud, so the reading made quite an impression.” During these years Mynster was also collecting material for an ambitious project treating the first three centuries of Christianity, the days of the true martyrs, but despite persistent and lifelong work on the subject, he never managed to finish it.

On the other hand, Mynster’s own congregation was not a source of much joy. The war had occasioned an increase in agricultural prices and consequently in the standard of living of the peasants, who did not care a whit about the pastor’s sermon. When they were not drinking and fornicating to the best of their abilities, they were arrogant, impertinent, and idle. There was, however, one bright spot: Death had freed Mynster of his intolerable housekeeper; but the tender young girl who replaced her refused to eat at Mynster’s table, so now he had no one to talk to. “I found that the total solitude, which in a normal day was only interrupted by tiresome nonsense, gradually became altogether too oppressive.”

On one of the unusual occasions when Mynster expected company, an uninvited guest showed up unannounced. It was Grundtvig, then a curate in the village of Udby, still fairly young but already beginning to lose his hair; he had decided to pay a visit to Mynster, his colleague and cousin, and eight years his senior. Even though it was something of an inconvenience, Mynster did set aside a couple of hours to converse with Nikolaj Frederik Severinus, who discoursed expansively on poetry and Greek tragedy—“and I had plenty of opportunity to be amazed at the spirit with which he passed judgment on things about which he had no knowledge at all. Naturally, Grundtvig found me cold and not open toward him. I really had no desire to become better acquainted with him.” But Mynster could not avoid having any further relationship with him, for Grundtvig went on to become one of Mynster’s most vocal critics as well as one of his least favorite people. Mynster could not stand the fellow; he found him boisterous and eccentric, yet nonetheless unoriginal: “When Oehlenschläger tuned his Nordic harp, Grundtvig had to get one like it,” wrote Mynster in a typical indictment. Nor did Grundtvig’s historical works earn him Mynster’s respect: “For we know Grundtvig’s prophecies—they are usually not fulfilled.” Mynster labeled as “idolatry” the Grundtvigian belief that the Apostles’ Creed served as the link to the historical Jesus, and when the journal Scandinavian Church Times began to fire Grundtvigian salvos at Mynster as the representative of the State Church, he labeled the attacks “violent and boorish.”

Mynster had become truly bored with his “Spjellerupish life.” A pastoral call in Gentofte, just north of Copenhagen, was briefly a possibility, but when the position of first resident curate at the Church of Our Lady in Copenhagen became available, Mynster was not in doubt. Count Moltke arranged for him to have an audience with the king, and he was appointed to the position on December 13, 1811. A little more than a month later he gave his farewell sermon in Spjellerup, and the following Sunday, when he was with his congregation for the last time, he heard his old diocesan dean effuse about the newly departed pastor as a man who had not “merely endeavored to teach properly, but also to live properly.”

During the late summer of 1812, having auctioned off his personal effects at the parsonage in Spjellerup, Mynster rented some modest, cozy rooms in the garret of a house on Gammeltorv. This was where he spent his afternoons and evenings, undisturbed by the thundering city—“the noise of which I could hear under my feet”—and on the quiet summer evenings, when the tranquil darkness descended, he could hear the gentle splashing of the fountain down in the square. In the mornings he could see dawn break over the narrow roofs of Nytorv, across the square. Perhaps the thirty-eight-year-old curate stood watching the sunrise in the spring of 1813, in blissful ignorance of his future entanglements with the baby boy who came into the world on the first Wednesday in May, diagonally across the square from Mynster’s rooms.

With Mynster installed in his light and airy garret, we have now reached the fifth and final section of his Communications. His years of apprenticeship were over, and the future waited impatiently to make use of this cultivated, diligent, and mature man—a man, furthermore, who was not bound by any worldly responsibilities and who had not yet lived even half his life. The final hundred pages of Mynster’s autobiography are thus a sort of tour de force through the register of royal Danish officialdom: appointments to high office, the granting of many honors, leadership posts on various boards and commissions, attendance at splendid social events, officiating at princely marriages, and other evidence of grandeur. In 1812 he was made assistant professor of psychology at the Pastoral Seminary and appointed to its board of directors. In 1814 he completed a commentated edition of Luther’s Small Catechism. In that same year he was also a cofounder of the Danish Bible Society, of whose board of directors he became a member in 1815; one of Mynster’s responsibilities was to revise the official translation of the New Testament. Also in 1815, Mynster earned his doctoral degree with a dissertation on Saint Paul. But that was nothing compared with the true miracle: “The year 1815 brought me something that was of much greater importance and was a source of much greater joy than the doctorate, namely my dear wife.” She was Bishop Münter’s eldest (but still only nineteen-year-old) daughter, Maria Frederikke Francisca, known simply as “Fanny,” who had accepted his offer of marriage through an open window at the old bishop’s residence. “Here I found what I had so long sought in vain, a being who loved me and who gave herself to me without the least shadow of doubt.” True, she was no Sophie Gaarder who could say “God, that was fine,” but Fanny presented him with four well-brought-up children, and after thirty-one years of life together he would look back on a happy marriage and praise Fanny for her clear thinking, her sense of tact, and her tireless efforts as a housewife. He could still remember how at a little gathering he had raised a glass and proposed the following toast: “If Shakespeare has a man exclaim, ‘Frailty, thy name is woman!’ I say with the most complete acknowledgment and thankfulness, ‘Loyalty, thy name is Fanny!’ ”

Family matters did not get in the way of Mynster’s career. In 1819 Mynster was made a member of the Scientific Society. Two years prior to this he had become a member of the governing board of the university, and in this capacity he had learned that there was “no tribe of people more difficult to govern than professors; they are all learned men, and this means that they all understand everything better than everyone else; most of them believe that they have a great sense for business, even though the fewest of them actually have a grasp of it.” Nor was Mynster happy about the spirit that reigned at the faculties of humanities and theology at the university. “Ever since Hegel had been appointed to the University of Berlin, his philosophy had become absolutely the only thing, and the arrogance of his supporters was boundless.” Mynster had been quite convinced that Hegelianism would be only a passing philosophical fad, but in this he had been mistaken. He had not felt himself qualified to combat Hegelianism, however, and he was therefore satisfied with taking part in only a few “vanguard skirmishes,” in particular against Heiberg. At first, Heiberg had remained silent, but in 1839, seconded by Martensen, he took up the challenge after the publication of Mynster’s “Rationalism, Supranaturalism.” But the entire battle took place without “the least break in the respect I have for the talents of my opponents or in the affection I have for the latter [Martensen] in particular, an affection that has since increased year after year.”

Ecclesiastical labors also made heavy demands on Mynster’s time. Of particular significance in this respect were the official pastoral visitations, journeys often a week in duration that Mynster made all over the country, looking into the state of the Danish clergy, of whom he gives a quite unvarnished portrait in his visitation diaries for the period from 1835 to 1853. The countless talks and sermons that had to be written, delivered, and--in later years--also published, also took time, and he published a collection of sermons every year from 1846 through 1853. Even though the acoustics in Trinity Church (home to the congregation of the burned-out Church of Our Lady until 1829) were rather poor and therefore completely unsuited to his thin voice, about which he often complained, people flocked to the church in great numbers: “I have always had the pleasure of having a large audience, drawn from various social classes. If I have often been dissatisfied with myself for having spoken edifyingly to the lower social classes perhaps less frequently than I should have, I have also seen consoling evidence to the effect that this was not entirely the case: I had many plain citizens and manual laborers among my regular listeners.” In fact, he became the capital city’s fashionable pastor. He was particularly sought out by those who were materially or intellectually well-off, and “as time went by I succeeded in gathering around myself a circle of the most reasonable—and in every respect the most desirable—listeners the city could offer.” It was in the cards and in the stars that he would be appointed court chaplain in 1826, royal confessor and court and castle pastor in 1828, and that he would fill the post of bishop of Zealand and primate of the Danish State Church from September 1834 until his death in January 1854.

“When I Look at Mynster—”

This, then, was the powerful man who had made Kierkegaard wait in the anteroom without suspecting that in so doing he was contributing to a catastrophic depreciation of his own posthumous reputation. There were obvious differences between the two, the old ecclesiastic inside, and the brilliant little fellow waiting outside; the most marked of these was that Mynster regarded Christianity as a great source of reassurance and relief, while Kierkegaard saw it as a scandalous reversal of all human and cultural values, a permanent conflict with the world. But if the differences are striking, the similarities are as well. Indeed, it almost seems as though we are dealing with two similar lives, parallel, but displaced laterally with respect to one another: Each bore the profound stamp of a stern father; each stood in the shadow of a capable and dominating elder brother, from whom each distanced himself only many years later; each was sensitive almost to the point of delicacy, burning for wild, always impossible love; one spoke of his inner darkness, the other of his melancholia; both often felt misunderstood, isolated; from an early age, both were ambitious and had an itch to write; both had an aristocratic temperament that hovered in the oddest way between distinguished bearing and hypochondria, between radical feelings of inferiority and sky-high self-esteem; both looked with disdain upon the political revolt then taking place; both were monarchical conservatives, Mynster on the right side of the right wing, Kierkegaard on the left side of it; both felt an antipathy, bordering on hostility, toward Grundtvig and the babblings of popular Grundtvigianism; both were negatively inclined toward Hegel and toward the speculative philosophy favored by Copenhagen elite culture.

Despite all these similarities, they only followed each other warily and at a distance—at any rate until 1846. Mynster had read Fear and Trembling, the first collections of Edifying Discourses (which he in fact praised), and the occasional discourses Kierkegaard published in 1845, which in their tone and form were remniscent of his own earlier sermons and therefore won his approval. And that of others. Thus in a letter to Mynster, dated December 27, 1847, Carsten Hauch expressed his thanks for some sermons Mynster had sent him that he had just finished reading: “I have also read Kierkegaard’s Edifying Discourses with great interest. They would be even better if they were not marked by so much dialectical web-spinning, and if they had the noble simplicity of yours.” Whether Kierkegaard sent Mynster his earliest writings or whether the bishop bought them himself is not known, but there are surviving copies, containing dedications by Kierkegaard, of the Postscript, Works of Love, The Lily of the Field and the Bird of the Air, and The Sickness unto Death. The dedication is repeated almost stereotypically: “To His Excellency, the Right Reverend Mr. Bishop Mynster, Knight of Dannebrog and Member of Dannebrog, et alia, with Profound Veneration from the Author.” There was also respect, even if it was mixed with a daring little dash of irony, when Kierkegaard mentioned Mynster in print for the first time, in the sixth of his Prefaces, which solemnly thanked the bishop for his edifying writings. “The firm Kts,” Mynster’s alias, was also acknowledged politely three times in the Postscript, just as The Point of View contains praise for this same “firm” because it had understood Fear and Trembling as “a special sort of aesthetic production.”

So much for externalities. Internally, things were quite otherwise and had long been so, particularly after the difficulties with The Corsair. The two of them never spoke of the episode itself, but Kierkegaard was deeply disappointed that Mynster did not so much as lift his little finger in this connection. And after all, on March 6, 1846, The Corsair had dragged the bishop into the affair by poking fun at Kierkegaard because he refused either to be criticized or praised by anyone—with the exception of Mynster, who on the other hand, had been granted “a monopoly on praising him.” Moreover, the same journal had treated Mynster’s supplement to the Evangelical Christian Hymnal quite rudely the very moment it appeared, yet Mynster had pretended not to notice.

But it was not only in connection with The Corsair that Kierkegaard felt he had been left in the lurch. The plans Mynster had suggested for Kierkegaard’s future also indicated differences between the two men. As early as November 5, 1846, Kierkegaard wrote in his journal: “When Bishop Mynster advises me to become a country pastor, he obviously does not understand me. It is certainly true that this is what I want, but our premises are entirely different. For he assumes that in one way or another I want to get ahead by doing this, that, after all, I want to be something. And there’s the rub: I want to be as little as possible; that is precisely the idea of my melancholia.” As time passed, it became clear to Kierkegaard that what had at first looked like a misunderstanding on Mynster’s part was in fact a tactical maneuver. January 20, 1847: “Even though Mynster has a certain goodwill toward me—in his heart of hearts perhaps even more than he admits—it is evident that he regards me as a suspect and even as a dangerous person. That is why he wants me out in the country.” Kierkegaard went on to explain that it was of course true that somewhere, deep down, he had always been set on becoming a pastor out in the country, but that the increasingly confused situation in the capital—in the literary, social, and political worlds—had created an absolutely acute need for an “extraordinary” person. “Now the question is … whether there is anyone in the kingdom suited for this other than me.”

During the following months Kierkegaard stuck to this position, elaborating it into a principle. At one point in the summer of 1848 he noted: “Reduplication is what is truly Christian…. From a Christian point of view, what is continually asked is not only whether what one says is true with respect to Christianity, but what kind of a person is saying it? So when a men dressed in silk and covered with the stars and decorations of various orders says that the truth must suffer persecution, et cetera, these circumstances produce only an aesthetic situation…. True, this silken man does say, ‘Remember, you do not know when the moment will come when you must suffer for the truth.’ And then the silken man weeps (for he imagines himself a martyr), but the listener merely thinks: Forget it.” This falsification was not only a phenomenon of the big city: “On Sundays out in the country, in quiet rural surroundings, when a Reverend swears and thunders and crosses himself in speaking of how the world persecutes the Christian (His Reverence included), it is obvious that this is a rogue flattering his own vanity by imagining himself persecuted in this safe, rural setting, in the company merely of peasants and the like, who pay him due respect. No, old fellow, this, too, is a comedy. If it is to be in earnest, then please be good enough to go to the capital and out onto the big stage.”

The rural “old fellow” fulminated against here was to a great extent Kierkegaard himself, just as his metaphor of the city as a theatrical stage opened the way to a major theme in his critique of Mynster, who in one journal entry after another was accused of alternating between self-deception and theatrical self-promotion—an idea that suggested other and broader theatrical comparisons. In a journal entry from the early summer of 1848 we can see the contours of the bishop, once so unshakable for Kierkegaard, were beginning to dissolve before his very eyes: “The whole business is so indescribably painful to me. When I look at Mynster—oh, he looks like earnestness itself. That masterful Erscheinung [German: ‘appearance’] will always be unforgettable to me. And yet, I would regard myself as an irresponsible dreamer if it were ever to occur to me to conduct myself in such a manner.”

Mynster’s Erscheinung, his almost awe-inspiring appearance, also made an impression on people other than Kierkegaard. Professor H. N. Clausen, for example, wrote in his memoirs: “In Roman cardinals, I have occasionally encountered a similar combination of a fine, polished, social tone and an unctuous priestliness.” Rasmus Nielsen shared Clausen’s point of view and his impression: “In Bishop Mynster’s personality and his character there was something calculated to engender awe for the man, respect for the old man.” But no one went as far as Kierkegaard, making the aesthetic side of Mynster’s activities into a theological problem. Kierkegaard was capable of measuring Mynster’s distance from the ideal merely by looking at him, so to speak: “Every true imitator of Christ must come as close as possible to letting his existence express this same thing: that lowliness and despisedness are inseparable from being a Christian. Christ must certainly be preached, but always by being presented existentially. As soon as the least little bit of worldly advantage is gained by preaching Christ, there is trouble brewing.”

There was plenty of trouble of this sort brewing in the Church of Our Lady, where Mynster had quite definitely gained worldly advantage from his preaching activities. On moving into the episcopal residence on May 3, 1835, Mynster had been presented with a “splendid set of furniture, a sofa and ten armchairs,” charmingly upholstered with the embroidery work of female confirmands and other friendly persons. On the same occasion, a marble bust of Mynster, sculpted by H. W. Bissen, was unveiled, and the so generously gifted bishop was also presented with financial securities worth one thousand rixdollars for the purpose of establishing an endowed fellowship bearing Mynster’s name.

Mynster was neither a monk nor a martyr, but then again, he had no theological reason to apologize for not being so. While A. S. Ørsted—who played cards together with Mynster and Oehlenschläger (the preferred game was ombre)—called the normal standard of living at the episcopal residence “modest,” this did not mean that Mynster did not put on quite fashionable dinner parties, as on the occasion when his friend P.C.F. von Scholten sent him a turtle from the West Indies. Things could get “a little too luxurious” at such dinners, as one guest wrote after having partaken generously of the various dishes. The elderly lexicographer Christian Molbech had been among the guests at a dinner party in December 1853, and in a letter to his son he mentioned that he had had “a wonderful, first-class dinner, really quite splendid, and I had to pass on four or five of the courses, really exquisite ones.”

Kierkegaard was never invited to these extravagant dinners—he had to be satisfied with hearing about them—and he spent several pages of his journal imagining how they were gorging themselves over there at the bishop’s residence. “Now, for example, there is a turtle soup banquet at Privy Councillor H.’s—the Superintendent is also included,” he wrote in an entry in which this very same “Superintendent” (the primate of the Danish Church) is first grilled over a slow fire and then served in a spicy sauce. Kierkegaard puts a quite theatrical stamp on the hypocrisy: “Julie and Fanny are the Privy Councillor’s daughters. They are discussing the feast, … and Julie says, ‘Believe me, it is very burdensome and inconvenient for the Superintendent to participate in feasts like this. He would much rather live in poverty—did you hear him last Sunday?” And Fanny (who of course had the same name as Mynster’s wife!) had indeed heard him preach, and therefore she is doubly delighted that the Superintendent now “deigns to be with us—and with the turtle.” Fanny and Julie are full of religious rapture: Oh, that Superintendent, he is really something! And Kierkegaard concludes: “That is how to have turtle in a really uniquely piquant sauce—no wonder it has such exceptional flavor.”

Kierkegaard, too, appreciated a good dinner, and he did not subscribe to a double standard of morality that would have forbidden Mynster to do what Kierkegaard himself did to excess. Mynster would not have been a better Christian if instead of turtle and vintage wines he had dined on a quarter piece of zwieback and a little lukewarm water. Rather, Kierkegaard’s critical point was to emphasize the hypocritical doubling of pleasure that takes place when one starts out the day preaching poverty and finishes it off slurping up turtle soup—and lets it be known that one would really rather not!

The distaste awakened in Kierkegaard by this hypocrisy was accompanied by the worry that worldliness had been given free rein quite as a matter of course, so that the prevailing culture would triumph without any resistance. The tale about the turtle feast was thus actually a tale about the triumph of history—about the final conquest of Christianity by cultivated society. And this was exactly the terrain in which Kierkegaard situated the highly polished Mynster: “What is great in him is a personal virtuosity à la Goethe. This explains why he has a certain dignity of bearing, but his life does not actually express anything…. For Mynster, preaching in the marketplace would be quite impossible—indeed, the most impossible of all things. And yet this business of preaching in churches has become something close to paganism and theater, and Luther very rightly gave eager support to the notion that there really should not be preaching in churches. In paganism the theater was divine worship—in Christianity the churches have generally become theater. How so? Like this: People find it pleasant and not without a certain enjoyment to commune with the Most High via the imagination once a week like this. But nothing more. And this has actually become the norm for preaching in Denmark. Hence, this artistic distance—even in the clumsiest of sermons.”

To put it mildly, Kierkegaard’s description was ungenerous, but he was far from wrong to situate Mynster closer to Goethe, the refined epitome of cultivated society, than to Luther, the sturdy reformer of Christendom. The key concept is cultivation, and Kierkegaard was the first of the cultivated to empty the concept of its original contents and refill it with new, negative contents. “Cultivation” would no longer be a term for the complicated process of the genesis of the self; it would no longer mean one’s individuation in keeping with and in harmony with one’s natural capacities and with the surrounding culture. No, Kierkegaard associated cultivation with elitism, with good manners and good taste; he slipped a certain snobbism into the concept, attributing to it the dubious odor of the hoity-toity and the artsy-fartsy, which it has never quite lost. “Bishop Mynster’s service to Christianity is really that his considerable personality, his cultivation, his superiority among the circles of the distinguished and the most aristocratic people, enabled him to expound the fashion—or, more solemnly, the agreed principle—that Christianity was something that no really deep and serious person (how flattering for them!), no cultivated person (how very pleasing!) can do without.”

Here Christianity had been made into something presentable and normal, but it had thus been deprived of its radicality and its scandalous character, its alpha and omega. For indeed, if “Christianity is cultivation,” then “being a Christian is more or less what a natural man would wish to be in his happiest moments”—which means that we are, “as it were, three-quarters of a million miles away from the language about the Redeemer who had to suffer in the world and who requires the crucifixion of the flesh.” Kierkegaard showed no noticeable hesitancy about drawing his conclusion: “But Mynster’s religiosity is approximately this: One lives essentially like an honorable pagan; one makes one’s life comfortable and good, enjoys its amenities—but then also confesses that one is very far from having attained what is highest. It is this confession that he actually regards as Christianity…. It is a rather bargain version of Christianity—one can easily make this confession.”

There was shamming in this “confession”—which, by the way, was indistinguishable from the “admission” proposed by Kierkegaard himself (though especially by his comfortable yes-men) as a possible defensive position when the Christian demands made by the late Kierkegaard seem too inhuman. This sort of thing was thus a “bargain version of Christianity” and would not do. The real alternative to this soft Christianity, this effeminate religiosity that sticks its tail between its legs as a matter of principle, was fraught with an almost shrill radicality: “Being a Christian is neither more nor less, absolutely neither more nor less, than being a martyr. Every Christian—that is, every true Christian—is a martyr…. This is the situation. Becoming a Christian is an examination established by God. But for this very reason, it must at all times (in the year 1 and in the year 1848) be and continue to be equally difficult to become one…. So let us once again, in the noble Christian sense, have threadbare pastors, poor people, clad humbly, despised people, ridiculed and mocked and spat upon by everyone. I hope and I believe that with God’s help I myself would be able to preach fearlessly even if someone spat in my face when I mounted up into the pulpit. But if I were to be cloaked in a velvet robe with stars and ribbons—and then to speak the name of Christ, I would die of shame.”

The scene is dramatic; a journal entry like this practically boils over. Once again, what the reader notices is that the true pastors are knowable by their straightforward recognizability, their threadbare clothing and the poverty of their appearance, which is in glaring contrast to the velvet-clad reverend’s solemn and noncommittal twaddle: “O, woe, woe unto these 100,000 professional pastors, whose preaching does nothing but get people mired in nonsense.” Or even more shamelessly: “Therefore, nowadays the sermon is essentially nothing but a lie. The pastors are like the athletics instructor who cannot swim himself, but who teaches people how to swim while he remains standing on the dock, shouting, ‘Just strike out briskly with your arms.’ ”

Kierkegaard had no doubt about the direction one must move: “The communication of Christianity, however, must finally end in ‘witnessing.’ The maieutic cannot be the final form.” Thus the time when communication could be practiced indirectly and the communicator could conceal himself in the costume of a pseudonym seemed long past. “What Christendom needs at every moment is someone who articulates Christianity absolutely recklessly,” was one of the maxims that had come to stay. And to avoid any doubts that the person who put forward this requirement was himself existentially included in it, but was also aware of his own limits, Kierkegaard added: “In many ways Christendom might benefit (and in fact, this is probably the only remedy) from the experience of putting someone to death for the sake of Christ—in order, finally, to have its eyes opened about what Christianity is. But I do not have the physical strength for it, nor, perhaps, that sort of courage, and finally, I am a dialectician who is certainly capable of doing a great deal by way of thinking and inwardness and can also have an awakening effect, but not in a situation that is not really intended for the dialectical.”

Thus, martyrdom would be a nondialectical situation. Unlike dialectics, death is in fact irreversible.

Two Ethical-Religious Essays

This conflict between dialectical thinking and dramatic action constitutes the principal theme of one of the two peculiar treatises that were published on May 19, 1849, bearing the common title Two Ethical-Religious Essays. The essay in question was entitled “Has a Human Being the Right to Allow Himself to Be Put to Death for the Truth?” and was accompanied by the essay “On the Difference between a Genius and an Apostle.” The two essays were, respectively, the third and the sixth pieces included in A Cycle of Ethical-Religious Essays from 1848, which in turn consisted of six usable sections from The Book on Adler. Kierkegaard considered publishing the remaining essays—excepting the fifth one, “the one about Adler”—under the title Three Ethical-Religious Essays, but nothing ever came of it.

While the second of the two essays was taken from The Book on Adler without major changes, the first essay was reworked separately and was only finished at the end of 1847. During his final editing of the manuscript, Kierkegaard left himself (and posterity) a little, impressive piece of information: “N.B. This book must be handled very carefully in writing up the fair copy, because I was lucky enough to be able to write it in the course of eight hours. Gratitude thus requires that the really routine part of the work be done all the more carefully.” The Ethical-Religious Essays total eighty-five small pages, and the press run was the usual 525 copies. The book’s typographical design was borrowed from Mrs. Gyllembourg’s books, for in the final copy Kierkegaard gave the following instructions to the typesetter: “Format as in Stories of Everyday Life, but more closely printed and in a smaller font.” And lastly, in this same note, Kierkegaard requested “six copies on vellum.”

The Two Essays were authored by “H. H.” He was a determined gentleman and was not at all marked by the throbbing jollity we generally encounter in Kierkegaard’s characters. At one point in the draft of the first of the two essays, Kierkegaard made the mistake of letting H. H. say the word “frivolousness,” but he regretted this soon after, adding the note: “N.B. The tone of this line is much too profane.” In other words, H. H. bears the stamp of the seriousness of his subject matter and he thus does not expect a large readership; this is also clear from his preface—which amounts to one and one-half (yes, 1#) lines—where he states that the essays “will probably only be of interest to theologians.”

And H. H. was right about that. The topics he has decided to treat are indisputably so specialized that even among theologians there are only a very few people—perhaps, in the final analysis, only one person, namely Kierkegaard himself, who was not an apostle but was nonetheless (or perhaps for that very reason) a genius—who might have an interest in reading an explanation of the extent to which a genius may allow himself to be put to death for the truth. At the very least, it takes a willful lack of imagination to keep from associating the problem posed in the essay with Kierkegaard himself, and, like Practice in Christianity, the Two Essays were originally to have been published in Kierkegaard’s own name. At the last moment Kierkegaard instead chose the letters “H. H.,” which were more a sort of personal cipher than a new pseudonym. He justified the arrangement dialectically: “The little book by H. H. was completely right. One cannot oneself simply adopt a position such as this, which is so difficult and also so full of responsibility. So one dangles a little invitation in order to make the present day into one’s partner. If someone stumbles over this little book he will raise an enormous hue and cry—and he is right to do so, because it is an extremely strange little book. But in that case it is he who raised the hue and cry; now I am the ‘other.’ Therefore this little book had to be published—either in my name (and with the greatest possible emphasis) or as it actually was published.” The purpose of publishing it in H. H.’s name was, first of all, to avoid giving the impression that Kierkegaard regarded himself as a martyr, and second—as a cunningly contrived possibility—to serve as an occasion for someone else to take on that role in Kierkegaard’s stead.

Thus the author had significant expectations for his Essays, all the more so because they were the very “key to the greatest possibility of all my work.” Naturally, Kierkegaard had to attribute a special status to a roman à clef of this sort: “The Two Ethical-Religious Essays are thus not a part of the canon. They are not an element in it, but a point of view. If the canon were to come to a stop, they would be like a point one projects ahead of oneself in order to come to a stop there. They also contain the virtual and the actual high point: a martyr, indeed, an apostle—and a genius. But if one looks in the essays themselves for some information concerning me, it is of course this: that I am a genius—not an apostle, not a martyr.”

Kierkegaard had a very peculiar way of being modest.

The Will to Powerlessness

“Has a Human Being the Right to Allow Himself to Be Put to Death for the Truth?” takes the form of a meditation on two questions. The first is whether, in his love for the human race, Christ could be permitted to sacrifice his life, thereby inflicting on the human race the guilt of having put him to death. The second question is whether, out of love for Christ, a human being may permit himself to do what Christ permitted himself to do. The answer to the first question is as simple as it is paradoxical: Christ’s atoning death was itself an atonement for those who executed him.

The second question is much more difficult to answer, because in the end it involves taking a position on the question of the extent to which “a human being, in relation to other human beings, can be assumed to be in absolute possession of the truth.” In other words, can anyone be said to have privileged access to the truth? At first blush Kierkegaard was inclined to answer the question in the negative, and he therefore had the idea of ending the piece in a rather bluff manner, making use of this “little, humorous concluding flourish”: “And as for the question that causes or has caused this person so many troubles, my answer is easy: Oh, God no! a person does not have the right to do this!”

Kierkegaard abandoned this “concluding flourish” for a number of reasons, but then he was left with the main problem: Doesn’t a person incur more guilt by repressing his knowledge of the unchristian condition of Christendom than by allowing other people to become guilty of murder? Kierkegaard has H. H. answer the question in the negative: All people are sinners, and therefore one individual has no sovereignty over others. This appears to have decided the matter, but in the same breath H. H. asks: Where, then, would “awakening” come from, “if a person does not dare use the only true means of awakening?” Nor is H. H. satisfied with stopping here: “So—now with respect to the derivative relation to Christ—if one is a Christian and relates oneself to pagans, isn’t one then in absolute truth in relation to them? The difference between them is absolute, and being put to death is precisely the absolute expression of the absolute difference.—To my way of thinking this cannot be denied.”

With this slightly incoherent argument, H. H. carries out a shift in perspective that is obviously attributable to reflections that Kierkegaard does not display directly to his readers. “Here, just as in Fear and Trembling, I can say that most people do not have the slightest idea what I am talking about,” he sighed when he was well into the draft of the work. What had been written was thus of a profoundly personal character and inaccessible to the general public. The reference to Fear and Trembling is also noteworthy for other reasons, however. H. H.’s reflections on the theme of sacrifice can in fact be read as a New Testament variation on the Old Testament sacrifice theme presented in Fear and Trembling. Now, of course, the perspective had been reversed: The problem is now the sacrificed person’s right to permit himself to be sacrificed and not, as earlier, the sacrificer’s right to sacrifice.

We are not told with certainty what befell H. H. in this connection, but the subtitle of his essay is worth noting: “A Solitary Man’s Posthumous [Literary] Remains.” This seems to imply that the question the essay treated theoretically had been answered by H. H. in practice—in the form of his own martyrdom! In particular, section C of the essay appears to indicate this, stating: “Of the many ludicrous things in these foolish times, perhaps the most ludicrous is the utterance I have often enough read, where it is labeled ‘wisdom,’ and have heard spoken of admiringly as ‘fitting’: that in our times a person cannot even become a martyr, that our times do not even possess the energy to put someone to death. Sie irren sich! [German: “You are mistaken!”] It is not the times that must have the energy to put someone to death or make a martyr of him; it is the martyr, the martyr-tobe, who must have the energy to give the times the passion, in this case the passion of indignation, to put him to death.” As we can see, there are indications that the provocation has succeeded and that the martyrdom has become a reality: H. H. is dead.

The times took no notice of it, however. On Saturday, July 21, 1849, when the Two Essays were finally reviewed in the Danish Church Times, the review was brief and negative. The reviewer was of the opinion that they must have been written by a “quite young author who has read Mag. Kierkegaard.” “Good, what critics!” was Kierkegaard’s disgusted reaction. After his irritation had subsided a little, he considered coming to “the defense of that ‘young person’ ” by announcing that he, Kierkegaard, “had read the little book with quite unusual interest.” Indeed, perhaps he ought to come right out and say: “Keep on writing, young friend. You are absolutely the person I would entrust with the task of being my successor.” Kierkegaard might have had fun with this “little amusement,” but he decided to look the other way instead. After all, it could not be entirely ruled out that the whole business had been a “little feint by the reviewer in order to lure me out onto thin ice.” But it wasn’t.

Things were no better the following year when the book was reviewed in the New Theological Journal (under the heading “B”: “Doctrines of Faith and Morals”!), where the reviewer wrote that the “unknown author makes it clear that he is a disciple and an imitator of Mag. Kierkegaard.” In a manner not exactly calculated to stimulate sales, the reviewer opined that the subject of the first essay had been treated in “long-winded phrases.” Nonetheless, the reviewer continued, the work bore evidence of “thoughtfulness and logical clarity, … and one might wish that these talents could be employed on more promising subjects and in a more natural manner.” And that was the end of the twelve short lines the reviewer had set aside for that book.

If he had written in his own name, Kierkegaard would probably have been spared this humiliating comedy of mistaken identities. On the other hand, now that the damage had been done, he did not have to reveal his identity. But he was nonetheless unable to resist the temptation to write a long article, full of indignation because his works were never reviewed in the New Theological Journal but were merely listed every once in a while, accompanied by a “note in which the reader is informed that the editors had not received a free copy.” Kierkegaard concluded from this that “if the editors do not receive a free copy, they do not review the book.” He wrote a good deal more in this vein, but ended up consigning the result of his rage to “the middle drawer of the desk.” If we think Kierkegaard was overreacting yet again, all we need do is flip back one page in the New Theological Journal, where The Sickness unto Death was in fact reviewed exactly as Kierkegaard described: The basic bibliographic data concerning the book are indicated, plus the price, “1 rixdollar.” That was that. Not even the number of pages in the book was indicated.

Apart from these incompetent reviews, the only reaction to H. H.’s Essays was when Mynster rather ambivalently mumbled “dear friend, probably six or seven times”—after Kierkegaard had finally been permitted to enter. This was the “enormous hue and cry” H. H.’s Essays caused. It was insufficient, but it was understandable, if for no other reason than that the action H. H. proposed to take would only have made sense if it were to take place outside the text, in the real world, perhaps right in the center of Copenhagen, in the middle of Amagertorv.

The Ventriloquist Who Said “I”

As the “work as an author” grew, the distance between “author” and “work” diminished. As time passed, Kierkegaard realized how indissolubly he was linked to his works, which turned out to be his own “upbringing” and his “development”—as he put it in The Point of View.

Up to and including H. H., the textual figures had appeared as “characters.” These characters had appeared in Kierkegaard’s stead; that is, since he himself was unable to assume the character, he had a poetic “character” do so instead. Kierkegaard increasingly came to view this arrangement as an evasion of the requirement for existential self-actualization. This is clear from the “excuse” he made in the first of his lectures on indirect communication, written in 1847 but never delivered: “I must probably make an excuse for the way in which I use ‘I’ in these lectures…. To my way of thinking it is my weakness and imperfection … that I do not venture more daringly to use my ‘I.’ One of the unfortunate aspects of modern times is precisely that ‘the I,’ the personal I, has been abolished. And for this very reason it is as though genuine ethical-religious communication has disappeared from the world. For ethical-religious truth is related essentially to the personality and can only be communicated by an I to an I. As soon as the communication becomes objective, truth becomes untruth. Our destination must be the personality. And I would say that my merit is that by having produced poetically created personalities who say ‘I’ in the midst of the reality of life (my pseudonyms), I have contributed to getting the times accustomed once again to hearing, if possible, the voice of an ‘I,’ a personal I (not that fantasy of a pure I and its ventriloquism).”

Thus ethical and religious truth can only be communicated personally, and this was why Kierkegaard had his pseudonyms say “I” in the midst of “the reality of life.” So far, so good. His own countermove, however, is a markedly modern one inasmuch as the “reality” in which the pseudonyms say “I” is precisely not “reality,” but text. Thus, properly understood, wanting to reinstate the “I” in its rightful place by using pseudonyms is such a paradoxical practice that the result will necessarily lead to more “ventriloquism.” If Kierkegaard was going to succeed in reestablishing subjectivity—the true “I”—then he himself would have to take the place of the pseudonymous “character.”

This was gradually taking place, but one day in the early summer of 1847 Kierkegaard believed that he had received orders to the contrary: He must act as a sort of agent provocateur in the service of a higher cause. “Just as I was about to dismantle the dictatorship in Copenhagen, orders arrived, informing me that I was to appear in a new role: the persecuted. I must make every effort to play it equally well. It has been said that in our times a person cannot succeed in being persecuted. Now we will see. But I am sure that if I succeed, people will say ‘it is his own fault’—and they will be the same people who fault the times, saying that one cannot even be persecuted. O, human stupidity, how inhuman you are!”

The voice was that of H. H., but the hands were Kierkegaard’s. And this division of labor is typical of a great many journal entries from the late 1840s, where the pseudonyms constitute authorities to whom Kierkegaard compares himself, sometimes positioning himself above a pseudonym, other times below. “Like the river Guadalquivir,” he wrote, recycling the metaphor he had used in 1839, “at one point I plunge under the earth, so there is a stretch, the edifying, that bears my name. There is something lower (the aesthetic) that is pseudonymous, and something higher that is also pseudonymous, because my personality does not measure up to it.” Regardless of where one situates Kierkegaard along this stretch of the river, the pseudonymity was motivated more by personal than by maieutic considerations: Here it is not a question of the reader, but of Kierkegaard. This is made more than clear in a commentary to Practice in Christianity, where he formulated the relationship between the writing and the writer as follows: “In the present work, the requirements of ideality are placed so high that they include a judgment upon my own existence…. Therefore it is a pseudonym who speaks and who dares, with the freedom of the poetic, to say everything—and to say everything as it is.”

Kierkegaard continually adjusted his writings so that they corresponded as precisely as possible to his own position. Writings that were supposed to have been published in his own name were changed at the last moment—sometimes on the manuscript given to the printer—into pseudonymous writings. Practice, which was originally subtitled “A Friendly Address to These Times. By S. Kierkegaard,” thus ended up with Anti-Climacus on the title page, because Kierkegaard’s own “existence” did not live up to the radical Christian requirements in the work. When he revised the work with the intention of publishing it pseudonymously, Kierkegaard quite characteristically wrote: “N.B. Cannot be used, because the book is of course by a pseudonym, and here it is as though I myself were the author.” And he was and remained an author, despite the many de-authorizing protestations of tutelage insisted on in the corrections he made in deference to the authority he very authoritatively told himself he did not possess: “N.B., N.B., N.B. What a hypochondriacal oddity I am! Today I took out my most recent work to see if it was true that too much had been said. And there it was, already written on it: Poetical, without authority.”

The Poet of Martyrdom: The Martyrdom of the Poet

When one struggles through the hundreds of journal entries in which Kierkegaard monomaniacally brooded on violence and victimhood, one sometimes gets the feeling that his project was about to become seamlessly self-enclosed, with no connection whatever to reality—not only to the muchcelebrated reality out there, but also to juridical reality. Since the ratification of the Constitution of 1849, which was very latitudinarian in religious respects, citizens were allowed to worship God in accordance with their convictions, as long as the latter did not conflict with propriety and public order.

But the point here is not the lack of proportion between Kierkegaard’s worried thoughts and the way things actually were in the real world, but rather that Kierkegaard drew personal conclusions on the basis of textual premises: He wanted to actualize writings whose basic theme was deeply, sometimes obscurely, connected to the idea of sacrifice. This is developed in a cycle of journal entries from late April and early May 1849: “N.B., N.B., N.B., N.B. Oh, but how strangely melancholia and religiosity can mingle with each other…. I have, however, considered the possibility of going a step further, now, and of steering systematically onward, step by step, keeping in mind the possibility of being put to death. The aim and everything was right…. The conflict was the right one: to succumb to a mob that is egged on by the envy of the upper classes…. I do not doubt for a second—or, rather, I am absolutely convinced—that it is certain that Christendom could use this sort of awakening…. I understand that from a human point of view this would be the maximal result of my life…. That my life should take the turn it has taken, much less that it should end in martyrdom, has not occurred to a single one of my contemporaries. I am the one who cunningly guides the intrigue—and in accordance with my tactics, my contemporaries were not to become aware of it before it happened—…. But in this there is also an injustice toward people; after all, people are only children, so to permit them to incur guilt on that scale is as unfair to them as it is impermissible for oneself. Thus I have taken the final look at my life. Now I turn aside, remaining true to myself and to my origins: I am, after all, essentially a poet.”

Melancholia and religiosity can mingle with each other in the strangest fashion, but Kierkegaard and H. H. nonetheless appear to have mingled with each other quite straightforwardly. For as we can see, the problem Kierkegaard here formulated as his own personal problem was almost word for word what H. H. had presented in his essay. There was a fluid, open boundary between the works published under other people’s names and the journals written in his own name. And the tone was the same; the anxiety-laden, fervent, sometimes tragic emotion was the same, just as the man behind the texts was of course also the same. Kierkegaard realized that martyrdom was a maieutic necessity, but, as in H. H.’s case, Kierkegaard had such grave concern for the people who would be permitted to incur the guilt for such a martyrdom that he abandoned his plans and resumed his role as a “poet.” And his next journal entry—written sideways along the margin of the entry just cited, and dated April 25, 1849—was marked by a sense of relief and deliverance resulting from his decision to back off: “Oh, God be praised, now I understand myself…. Qua author I only have to receive one humiliation from God’s hand, … that is, that I myself must not dare to express in reality the things I present on the scale on which I present them—as if I myself were the ideal. I must make an admission in this connection: I am predominantly a poet and a thinker…. This, indeed—as I was aware, if not as clearly as now, at quite an early date—was a misunderstanding of the whole of my background. It was a superhuman task that will perhaps never be completed: for someone with my makeup, my imagination, my capacity for poetic productivity, also to want to be it existentially. Generally the hero or the ethical character comes first, and then the poet. I wanted to be both: At the same time that I needed ‘the poet’s’ tranquillity and distance from life and ‘the thinker’s’ tranquillity, I wanted—right in the midst of reality—to be what I poetized and thought about…. It had seemed to me that the world, or Denmark, needed a martyr. I had finished all my writing, and I actually thought of lending support, if possible, to what had been written in the most decisive manner, by being put to death. This—that I was not capable of it—this was where the misunderstanding lay, or this was probably what I needed to wound myself upon. And now everything is as it should be…. I remain the unhappy lover in relation to being the Christian ideal myself, so I therefore remain its poet. I will never forget this humiliation…. I do not have the strength to be a witness to the truth, who is put to death for the truth. Nor was my nature suited to it.”

Kierkegaard here made the humiliating admission that Anti-Climacus, among others, sought to compel “Christendom” to make: Using a term that would later be the focus of an enormous amount of attention, he confessed that he was not a “witness to the truth.” In this case, the distance from the ideal was indicated by the peculiar circumstance that Kierkegaard the poet was unable to realize the ideals that Kierkegaard the theologian neither could nor would abandon. The poet of martyrdom would not yield his place to the martyrdom of the poet, so to speak. And then, as a way out of his powerlessness, Kierkegaard pointed out the superhuman aspect of his own idea: Scarcely had he rejected the idea of supporting the maximal demand of the works through his own martyrdom before this very rejection was interpreted as a requirement by Governance that Kierkegaard continue being the poet of martyrdom. And so everything was once again (made) to be as it should be.

Things did not go that easily, however, and as early as May 4, 1849, the situation had been reversed: “The thing is, I have wanted to be so terribly clever…. I was going to get myself a secure future, and then sit at a distance and—poetize. Oh, phooey! No, God will surely see to things. And furthermore, the times certainly do not need yet another ‘poet.’ … This is why I have suffered so frightfully. It is my punishment. I have also suffered because I did not want to bind myself but wanted to be free and shrink back from what was decisive. This, then, was the cause of all that hypochondriacal nonsense about having positioned myself too loftily in any of my writings, something that is so alien to my soul…. Now the two essays—“Has a Human Being the Right to Allow Himself to Be Put to Death for the Truth?” and “On the Difference between a Genius and an Apostle”—will be published, but anonymously…. If I let this ‘moment’ pass me by, the point and posture of the entire productivity will be forfeited, and then everything will be overwhelmed by the second edition of Either/Or. But I wanted to play lord and master, governing things myself, justifying myself to God with hypochondriacal evasions.”

Here, as in the two previous journal entries, Kierkegaard described the relief he felt in acknowledging the failure of his plans—“Oh, phooey!”—but what he had rejected ten journal entries previously as melancholic hypochondria was now greeted as a requirement by God that he assume his character. Kierkegaard’s fear that he would himself take on the role of Governance was thus well-grounded, for in these journal entries this very Governance is a peculiarly flexible entity, which, not without reason, was just as indecisive as Kierkegaard and was therefore able to justify first one interpretation, then another. But if he was not to forfeit “the point of the productivity,” he would have to repeat H. H.’s textual martyrdom existentially; that was the only way the productivity could attain its “virtual and actual high point.” Onward! Onward! This was the direction, and Kierkegaard knew it: “Oh, phooey, phooey! that because of fear of the dangers, because of hypochondria, because of a failure to trust in God, I have wanted to make myself into something far less than what has been granted me. It is as if I simply defrauded the truth…. And yet it had seemed to me [that I was being] so humble. Oh, hypochondria, hypochondria! … The outlook is dark, and yet I am so much at peace. This, my birthday, will be unforgettable to me!”

It was the master thinker/martyr’s thirty-sixth birthday! He celebrated the day by giving himself a good scolding, admitting that he had defrauded the truth. To symbolize his new posture, he had the two Essays brought over to Giødwad, who was to deliver them discreetly to the publisher Gyldendal. Kierkegaard regarded the action as decisive and definitive. Now all he lacked was the physical opposition of the mob, because such opposition was of course necessary if there was going to be a martyrdom. And there really ought to be one, inasmuch as there “is only one consistent understanding of Christianity, … to become a martyr.”

We must grant that with his own thin-skinned heroism, Kierkegaard had striven to be consistent ever since his fateful collision with The Corsair, and that in 1847 he could sketch his own, fragile, academic figure into the urban scene of Copenhagen: “The day when the mob here in the city takes a poke at my hat (and that day may not be long off) is the day I will have won.” He insisted rather snobbishly on this requirement of being put to death, and this—from the point of view of the ideal—turned out to be his misfortune. His times did everything except the one decisive thing: People sneered at him, the elite classes envied him, fewer and fewer read him; but no one, absolutely no one, had the idea of taking a poke at the magister’s hat, so he died a natural death. People were no longer executed because of their religious convictions, after all. And, if they were geniuses, never.

Kierkegaard therefore had to learn to adapt himself to yet another paradox: being a martyr without the martyrdom associated with being a martyr. It was perhaps not so paradoxical that he ended in this paradox, since he was certainly the first martyr in world history to have his treatise on martyrdom printed on vellum—the heavy, smooth, parchment-like paper that is also called calfskin.

And priced accordingly.

“Dr. Exstaticus”

In the early spring of 1848, probably in mid-May, Kierkegaard dipped his poet’s pen in ink and wrote: “Think of someone in love. Yes, he can talk day in and day out about the bliss of being in love. But if someone were to demand that he speak and set forth three reasons that proved his love—or indeed, even that he defend his love--wouldn’t he regard that as a crazy suggestion? Or, if he were a little shrewder, wouldn’t he say to the person who suggested this to him, ‘Aha! You certainly don’t know what it is to be in love! And you’re probably a bit convinced that I’m not.’ ” Or, to say it with blood as well as with flowers: “The only true way of expressing that there is an absolute is to become its martyr or to become a martyr for its sake. That is even the way things are with respect to absolute romantic love.”

Thus it is not a question of cool calculation, of sober-mindedness. It is about passion, rapture, about ec-stasy, which means literally to be beside oneself. It was not without reason that when he started studying for his examinations in 1839 Kierkegaard playfully—but with a dash of seriousness—signed himself in his journal “S. K., formerly Dr. Exstaticus.”

Events of ten years later might well have caused him to be annoyed with himself for that 1839 signature. In the midst of all the hoopla that accompanied the publication of Martensen’s Dogmatics, Peter Christian had managed to get himself involved in the discussion at the expense of his little brother. On October 30, 1849, Peter Christian was at the Roskilde Pastoral Convention. It had actually been his intention to comment on a declaration that had been issued by some rebellious pastors down in Slesvig, but instead he hit on comparing “two peculiarities of our recent literature, Magister S. Kierkegaard’s well-known works and Professor Martensen’s Dogmatics and his work on dogmatics generally.” The talk was a sort of improvisation, and Peter Christian started out by asking his audience to excuse him, because “I now must offer you something that first came to mind yesterday evening and that I prepared in haste.”

The comparison between Professor Martensen and Magister Kierkegaard was daring for a number of reasons, but Peter Christian went whole hog: The professor was made the representative of “sober-mindedness,” while the aforementioned magister was the exponent of a purely subjective conception of the faith in which he came close to “ecstasy.” Basing himself on 2 Corinthians 5:13 (“For if we are ‘beside ourselves,’ it is for God; if we are in our right mind, it is for you”), and occasionally making use of Fear and Trembling and the Postscript, the elder brother pointed out how his little brother was so captivated by “the power of passion” that he avoided everything that did not involve “exertions requiring the greatest energy.” And this was why his younger brother maintained “faith’s independence from compelling proofs” and continually insisted that “faith is tried in battle and strengthened in danger.” Consequently, as Peter Christian noted in an attempt at wit, “he is glad to cool off now and again (especially when the blood rises to his head and the thoughts within crisscross one another with dizzying speed) by a leap from the mainmast of speculation in order to swim in ‘70,000 fathoms of water.’ ”

On this same occasion, Peter Christian gave assurances that he had nothing against having an “ecstatic monastery brother,” nor was he blind to the merits of his brother’s writings, even though at this point the writings had a quite negative effect on him—which, however, he turned into a positive point: “An hour of reading those writings has, in fact, almost exactly the same effect upon me that a shower used to have upon my physical constitution. For a moment, it is as though the life in me were gasping for air, and then I am breathing deeply and freely again in the fresh breezes of faith, while the legions of the intellect retreat to their subordinate position as the servants of life, and the head is again satisfied to be a head instead of wanting to be the entire person.” There were many ways to twist and turn if one wanted to say that Søren Aabye had too much intellect and too little body—and this was Peter Christian’s venture in the genre. And now that he was speaking of things that were distorted and baroque in their disproportions, he would not shrink from pointing out one of the slightly droll paradoxes that accompanied his younger brother’s efforts to find “that single individual”: “He indeed seems to be on the point of gaining adherents who admire his instructions about sticking to life and not to theory, and who out of sheer admiration clearly do not do what is required, but write about it. And even now we can detect the harbingers of these strange views, held by people who make life’s protest against theory into a new theory.” These words sent a friendly shot across the bows to Rasmus Nielsen, P. M. Stilling, Magnus Eiriksson, and H. H.—and the first and the last of these were even mentioned by name!

Søren Aabye suspected nothing of this attack, which only came to his attention when Peter Christian paid him a visit in early December 1849. Peter Christian furthermore led him to believe that he had fired his salvos at Rasmus Nielsen and at a strange little book—by “a certain H. H.”—whose actual author was unknown to him. Søren Aabye was then compelled to remark soberly, “H. H. is myself.” Peter Christian was naturally somewhat taken aback by this, but after a painful interval the two brothers did manage to talk a little about the book. “Then Peter said, ‘Well, there isn’t much point in our talking about it any more now, because first I have to write up the talk.’ So he wrote up the talk.”

So he wrote up the talk, or rather, a summary of it. And he had to hurry if it was to appear, as scheduled, in the next issue of the Danish Church Times, which was published on December 16. Søren Aabye immediately read his brother’s account of the talk; he was deeply pained by it and said as much in a letter to Peter Christian. He did not want to go into details, but merely to insist in a general way that if he absolutely had to be compared with Martensen, such a comparison ought to note that while Kierkegaard, in being an author, “had sacrificed to an extraordinary degree,” Martensen, on the other hand, had “profited to an extraordinary degree.” Next, it should have been pointed out that Martensen “has nothing primal or original, but permits himself simply to appropriate the whole of German scholarship as his own.” Finally, the notorious comment about “the ecstatic” either ought to have been omitted entirely or modified so that it applied at most to “a couple of my pseudonyms”—but under no circumstances to Kierkegaard as an “author of edifying discourses.” The letter is undated, presumably because it was never mailed. Nor was the “Protest” he intended to send to the Danish Church Times. In this latter note Kierkegaard requested that he not be confused with his pseudonyms, which was exactly what the reviewer—“the Grundtvigian known for his unusual competence, Pastor, Lic. Theol. Kierkegaard”—had done. The tone is muted, academic, almost subdued.

It would be difficult, however, to apply those same adjectives to a larger sketch done at about this time, titled “Dr. Kierkegaard’s Half-Hour Lecture at the Recent Convention.” It is a savage parody of the joviality that typified Grundtvigianism: There had been an extra half-hour at the convention, which Dr. Kierkegaard had filled with some diverse observations; he gazed on church history and discovered that there are two paths, that of ecstasy and that of sober-mindedness. Søren Aabye continued: “Actually, however, there is a third path: the path of garrulousness, which is far more traveled—it is really the main highway that leads, from beginning to end, through both the history of the Church and the history of the world.” Peter Christian had set out on this broad highway of garrulousness, and the unanswered question was whether he “had been impaired by the social delights at the convention and at other places, and also whether he had not become spoiled by occupying himself with those easy, rewarding little tasks that are so beloved and appreciated in our times, which lust after candy and goodies, are envious of genuine competence, and hate seriousness and rigor.”

Other people might perhaps have called all this a tempest in a teapot, but during the weeks that followed, Kierkegaard whipped it up into a veritable typhoon that threatened to swamp everything, including sober-mindedness. “Fuddy-duddy,” “clumsy oaf,” “nonsense messenger,” and “slobberer” are merely a modest selection of the abusive names that rained down on Peter Christian, who was accused of “whining,” “pusillanimity,” “superficiality,” “triviality,” “cowardice,” “criminality,” “garrulousness,” “carelessness,” “literary larceny,” and “sham heartiness.” In connection with this last accusation Søren Aabye noted: “I, too, have a heart. And I have tried to keep on having a heart and have therefore tried to keep it in the right place—so that I do not have it on my lips at one moment, in my trousers the next, but never in the right place—so that I do not confuse heartiness with chattiness and nonsense.” Perhaps that was where the trouble was, right down there in Peter Christian’s trousers—after all, his wife was sick or crippled or whatever it was, but in any case not really available. So, Søren Aabye began to think, maybe all Peter Christian needed was a little diversion: “He has always been something of a fuddy-duddy. Recently he has been rather devoid of ideas. But now it seems almost as though he has seen the light—he will find success as a cheerleader for mediocrity, triviality, and heartiness. It is true that he has needed diversion. I can understand that he is tired of living out there in the country with a sick wife—but what a diversion! …—He is intelligent and many-talented, but he is disintegrating into a vapid gadabout, taking part in everything.”

In the middle of his fury, Søren Aabye deftly turned the criticism to his own advantage, because it suddenly occurred to him what he had been accused of was precisely what the times needed: “The misfortune and fundamental defect of the times was—reasonableness. What was needed was indeed—the ecstatic…. I daresay what was required, then, was my brilliant sober-mindedness and cunning in order to dupe the times into it.” Or, as he wrote two days before Christmas, still smarting about the “confusion created” when the passage by Saint Paul had been applied to Martensen and himself: “The Martensen-Peter [Christian Kierkegaard] notion of sober-mindedness is to some extent an irreligious notion of bourgeois philistinism and complacency…. For mediocrity, worldly deal making, et cetera, are precisely what predominate in it.” Compared to Martensen, Saint Paul would thus have to represent total ecstasy. And in any event, as Kierkegaard kept in mind, he himself was no Saint Paul, and the mere fact that he employed pseudonyms pointed beyond ecstasy, in the direction of soberminded deliberation. Fortunately, he had spoken with Grundtvig, who was “duly scornful in his pronouncements regarding Peter” because in his opinion, when all was said and done, that talk at the convention had been the offthe-cuff, on-the-one-hand-this/on-the-other-hand-that sort of thing that anyone could have come up with. True, Grundtvig’s remarks did provide a bit of consolation, but they were utterly insignificant as regarded the general public, those nameless “numbers,” who had almost no feel for nuance and whose psychological sense was as flat-bottomed as a pram: “This brother, the ‘numbers’ say, is not at all strange or eccentric like that other brother; he is not proud and haughty, but is lovable and hearty, a serious man.”

All in all, the episode at the Roskilde Pastoral Convention had provided close to perfect conditions for pharisaism: “See, that’s how it goes when one brother—silently, and in obedience to God—works quietly, making every sacrifice, and then the other brother—in a superior manner, after a half-hour’s preparation—frivolously takes it upon himself to provide a profound interpretation of the signs of the times.” And there was more spleen where that came from: “My brother’s pettiness and envy, then, has been the only thing my family has done for me. His sole preoccupation has been to get free copies of what I wrote. Then, when I hurled myself at The Corsair, he was satisfied, because he now found that everything that happened to me was God’s punishment. The name of God can be misused in many ways.” This same level of indignation is evident in a retrospective entry from the same period, which builds in part on the parable of the prodigal son: “Deep down, Peter has always looked upon himself as better than me, regarding me a little like the prodigal brother. And he was right about this. He has always been more upright and honorable than I. His relationship with Father, for example, was that of an upright son—mine, on the contrary, was often blameworthy. But, oh, Peter never loved Father as I did. Peter was never a source of grief to Father, much less a source of grief such as I was. But Peter has also long since forgotten Father, while I remember him every day, absolutely every day, since that ninth of August 1838, and I will remember him until our blessed reunion in the hereafter. And that is how all my relationships have been.” Søren Aabye ended the entry with a truly bitter astringency: “And then when I die, he will slink forward and will be—my brother, my brother who followed my enterprise with brotherly solicitude, who knows me so very well, et cetera.”

After 1849 the connection between the two brothers only became increasingly chilly. A single incident recorded in Peter Christian’s diary, serves as a microscopic but painful monument of the deterioration of the relationship between the two brothers. In June 1849 Peter Christian had had his “carriage remodelled into a one-horse calèche” so that his hypochondriacal spouse could get a little fresh air and have a look at something other than Pedersborg. His diary continues: “Søren came out with us, but returned to town the next morning.” He had apparently not wanted to drive around in a “one-horse calèche” with his difficult sister-in-law and his erratic brother any more than absolutely necessary.

Taking stock of the year 1849, it was a dreadful year, an annus horribilis like 1846, that could not but strengthen Kierkegaard’s sense of being a victim, a martyr: Bremer’s report card, the mess with Rasmus Nielsen, Mynster’s arrogance and oddly farcical behavior, Martensen’s Dogmatics (which went on to become a best-seller), Kierkegaard’s own problems publishing things and his economic difficulties, the death of Councillor Olsen, the approach to Mr. and Mrs. Schlegel and the painful disappointment of their rebuff, and finally—just in time for the end of the year—Peter Christian’s scurrilous lecture.

At one point during the depressing month of December, Kierkegaard cited a couple of lines by the poet Hans Adolph Brorson, famous for his hymns—“While the air is still so filled / With the shivering cold of winter snow”—and then added some words of his own: “On a day when the winter weather is so intimidating that you do not want to go out—and then, when an entire life like that lies before you, and the question is whether to go out into it!”

Kierkegaard was not going out. Nor was he up to it: “I am so weak that I have to use the strength of my spirit even with respect to the most insignificant things.”

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