“And Why, Then, This Concealment?”
Eight Ways Not to Say Good-Bye
After the summer’s exchange of letters with Rasmus Nielsen, the remainder of 1849 settled back into the regular ritual of Thursday strolls, but on January 17, 1850, the professor had to beg off, “seeing as and inasmuch as it has pleased an esteemed head cold to dictate that I be placed under several days’ house arrest.” On February 22 Nielsen was again unable to walk with Kierkegaard, though this time he did not indicate a reason, just as (“embarrassingly enough!”) he had to miss their walk on April 4. On Thursday, April 11, they were able to take their stroll, however.
It was not a very pleasant walk. Kierkegaard said quite bluntly that in his opinion Nielsen’s three most recent books had been written more for the sake of attracting attention to their author than for any reason connected with their subject matter. Furthermore, Kierkegaard continued, Nielsen’s polemic against Martensen was a blunder that was in no way connected with Kierkegaard’s cause but rather was rooted in Nielsen’s personal disagreements with his university colleague, the professor of theology, who to Nielsen’s dismay had snatched away the membership in the Scientific Society that ought to have gone to him. And finally, Nielsen was told that his plagiarizing of Kierkegaard had reached the point of embarrassment; indeed, even the conversations they had had over the years had made their way directly into print. Nielsen protested and said that Kierkegaard was being unfair to him; Kierkegaard merely replied that if that were the case, he was not the worst person to be treated unfairly by. This did not make matters much better: “He became somewhat angry, or, rather, testy. But I changed course and spoke of other things and we strolled home in bona caritate.”
The following week, on April 18, Kierkegaard had planned to discuss the subject further during their walk, but only if Nielsen was “willing to listen to reason and accept the truth” and would “do something for the cause as a reviewer and that sort of thing” while refraining from producing any more of those weighty tomes. Just when Nielsen was supposed to have turned up for their walk, a messenger arrived with a note for Kierkegaard: “Dear Mr. Magister! First of all, owing to circumstances, I must give up our Thursday walks, and for that reason I must ask you not to expect me today. When the situation is once again such that I am again able to have the pleasure of doing so, I shall permit myself to send you a message inquiring as to whether it might possibly be convenient for you as well. Yours, R. N.”
The reaction came swiftly: “Presumably this letter is yet another bit of coyness intended to make me give in—for he has also taken advantage of my hypochondria, in addition to having simply sought inspiration, time after time.” The seven drafts that preceded Kierkegaard’s final reply make it clear that he did not set much store by Nielsen’s reasons for not showing up—that nonsense about “circumstances.” The first four drafts, each one shorter than the one other, say the same thing in more or less identical language: “How remarkable! The day before yesterday and yesterday, I was really afraid that owing to circumstances (I had in fact caught a cold in the process of moving to a new apartment, so that I daily expected to become ill) I would have to send you a message calling off today’s walk, and then today I received a note from you in which I learn that you, ’owing to circumstances,’ et cetera.” Kierkegaard did not want to question Nielsen about the aforementioned “circumstances,” but he felt obligated to make it clear that it would be completely unreasonable for Nielsen to break off their relationship—just because he had had a “little jab.” Kierkegaard argued: “If there is a relationship between us, I regard it as my obligation to use my own criterion for once; I am also of the opinion (assuming we do have a relationship) that I don’t exactly have a lot to thank you for.”
This was perhaps not the best way to reestablish the relationship. And in fact Kierkegaard did not send the letter, but started all over again with these words: “During the years I have conversed with you, the situation has been more or less as follows: Regarding your public work (your writings), I have told you quite emphatically that from my point of view I was unable to approve of them. I have furthermore explained why this was so. You have expressed yourself in such a manner that I believed I had been understood. What is more, in private conversations you have always expressed yourself very differently than in your public utterances. At the same time, you have always said that I would see, that your next book would be different. And for this very reason, I have continued to wait. But now this must come to an end. I must hereby—entirely without any anger whatever—break off a relationship that was begun with a sort of hope, neither am I abandoning it without hope right now. This means that I can no longer take walks with you on a regular, agreed-upon basis. If fate or providence should cause our paths to cross, that would be something different; in that case it would be a pleasure for me to speak with you as with so many others.”
Kierkegaard was not satisfied with these lines, however, and therefore wrote another draft that was more sympathetic and gentler in tone. He regretted that in his last letter Nielsen had deprived him of “the opportunity to be what I am, burdening me with seeming to be what I am not.” But Kierkegaard did admit plainly that in their last conversation, when he had introduced the matter that concerned him “a little clumsily, perhaps offensively,” he had done so with the expectation that they would see each other the following Thursday and pick up where they had left off. But if there was a little opening here, Kierkegaard quickly closed it by labeling Nielsen’s most recent note bizarre and then going on to explain in detail how it could have been done more felicitously.
Nor did this draft suffice. Kierkegaard made change after change, and then—in the last and shortest of the seven drafts—he regretted the sudden interruption of their Thursday walks, which was now, in more diplomatic fashion, attributed to a “misunderstanding.” Kierkegaard noted that he, too, did not want their meetings to be forced into a rigid framework: “Let it depend upon chance and inclination; after all, I am not so difficult to find.” And, amazingly enough, this draft—the last of the series—concluded with these words: “My proposal is … that we meet tomorrow at the usual time and place in order to see where we stand.” On the upper margin of the letter, Kierkegaard noted that it had actually been sent, though it is not certain exactly when, apart from the fact that it was on a “Tuesday.” Nielsen’s reply was also undated, but had the heading “Thursday”: “Dear Mr. Magister! Let me thank you. Oh, let me thank you, for having been willing to call upon me. I will arrive soon—in silence—for I have noticed that with you a person must be very quiet in order to be able truly to hear what you say. Yours, R. Nielsen.”
There is something approaching the sweetness of infatuation in this feeble reconciliation, but when the two men met at the agreed place on Wednesday, April 30, the intimacy had vanished. “I told him that I wanted a freer relationship,” the journal reports drily. And that was that: “It is a good thing that it happened. I bear no grudge against him, not in the least, and I am very willing to involve myself with him again, though it would scarcely be of any service to me, because his sensual robustness is a poor match for my scrupulosity. He has grown, but there is still something of the assistant professor about him.” In his journals during the years that followed, Kierkegaard often reverted to “the Nielsen business,” as he called the problem, but as time passed, his accounts of the relationship’s development and decline became no more nuanced. Again and again, he wrote that he had established the connection with Nielsen because he had believed it his religious duty to do so, but that Nielsen had been a disappointment and had soon revealed his kleptomaniac tendencies both with respect to the pseudonymous writings and to the conversations they had on their Thursday strolls, during which, incidentally, he would merely put Kierkegaard off with small talk. Thus, Kierkegaard had not had any benefit from the philosophy professor, who was “too ponderous, too thick-skinned, too corrupted by the age of Christian VIII.” Contact between the two was not broken off definitively, however, as can been seen from various bits of evidence, including a couple of short notes from February and June 1852, in which Nielsen expressed his regrets that he was unable to go for a walk; significantly, in the second of these two notes, Nielsen did not sign himself “Yours, R. Nielsen,” as previously, but merely “In friendship, R. Nielsen.”
Kierkegaard wrote a sketch containing an official declaration of hostility toward Nielsen, a lengthy article titled “Public Legal Case” in which “Joh. Climacus, on behalf of himself and of several other pseudonyms,” was called as a witness to testify against “Mr. Lic. Theol. R. Nielsen, Professor of Philosophy and Knight of the Dannebrog.” We must hope that the heading was written ironically, with tongue in cheek, and we must be especially thankful that the article remained in Kierkegaard’s desk drawer. No less embarrassing is the article titled “Prof. R. Nielsen Stands Alone!—” cryptically subtitled “A Three-Quarter-Length Portrait”—which entails a rather weird allegory: “When one makes a drawing in which a one-eyed person is depicted from the side on which his eye is located, it would never occur to anyone to think that he had anything other than two eyes. And when the person portrayed is depicted only down to his knees—when the person who provides support is concealed—then it does look as if Prof. Nielsen stood alone.” But no, he was not standing alone; he was standing on the shoulders of Kierkegaard and the pseudonyms, which meant that his “standing alone is a fraud.” In the second version of a “Literary Revision Article” from early 1853, Kierkegaard ruled out any future relationship: “Now the point has been reached that if, for example, I were to die now, Prof. N. would be the person I would least of all wish to be regarded as having the true understanding of my efforts.”
Being Kierkegaard’s disciple was no easy business. Or, rather, it was nobody’s business. Kierkegaard was so punctilious about being Kierkegaard that he was absolutely unable to endure the thought of being reproduced by any disciple, who merely by being a disciple was of course a potential thief, as had been the case with his “little secretary Mr. Christensen,” who had snuck about and scribbled in the newspapers with illegally borrowed Kierkegaardian expressions. And a couple of years later, when Grímur Thorgrimsson Thomsen defended a dissertation On Lord Byron, the literary pilfering was repeated: “My, but Grimur Thomsen must be a very learned man; this can be seen from the many works he cites in his dissertation. And yet it can also be seen from the dissertation that he must have read still more works—for example, Fear and Trembling, Anxiety, Either/Or—which he does not cite.” There was even a kleptomaniac in his immediate family: When Peter Christian began to write for and to edit the ecclesiastical journal Continuations from Pedersborg, the younger brother ascertained to his horror that Peter Christian “is borrowing a bit from me,” and it irritated Søren Aabye that he was the only one who noticed it, inasmuch as Peter Christian was of course viewed as a Grundtvigian. “They have treated me in shabby, disgusting fashion; a national crime has been committed against me, treason by the contemporary generation,” Kierkegaard wrote in his journal in 1848. He had no one to whom he could turn for understanding, and he had become a more or less superfluous person. All the while, however, other authors were plundering him and publishing the stolen property in various pieces that were reviewed and praised, though no one would dream of mentioning the name of the man who was the source of their ideas: “My name is never mentioned. Of all the authors now living, I am the only one without any significance, the only one who is not the source of a new trend—because the others are.”
One of these others was Magnus Eiriksson, who presented his daffy deftness in a work with a lengthy title that was typical of this Icelander: Is Faith a Paradox “by Virtue of the Absurd”? A Question Occasioned by “Fear and Trembling, by Johannes de silentio,” Answered with the Assistance of the Confidential Communications of a Knight of Faith, for the Common Edification of Jews, Christians, and Mohammedans, by the Brother of the Aforementioned Knight of Faith, Theophilus Nicolaus. Kierkegaard quite correctly sensed that even in the title Eiriksson had produced a nasty bit of kitsch, insinuating himself into Kierkegaard’s style : “See, this is what happens when such clumsy bungling ventures an opinion on a work of art…. Alas, how sad it is to live in such petty circumstances, where there is virtually no one who really has an eye for an authentically executed work of art. Keeping track of all the strands in that subtle design—something that has cost me days of assiduous work, enormous effort, an almost sleepless dialectical perseverance: For other people, this does not exist at all. I am simply identified with my pseudonyms.”
Moving Days
On April 18, 1850, Kierkegaard left his expensive apartment on Rosenborggade and moved to Nørregade, where he had also lived in the early 1840s. This time, however, he was on the opposite side of the street, in number 35, and he had to make do with a five-room apartment plus kitchen, maid’s room, hallway, storeroom, and other minor appurtenances. The annual rent was 280 rixdollars. He did not have the time to inspect the premises himself and therefore left the matter to his servant Strube, who despite Head Physician Seligmann Meyer Trier’s success in “getting him more or less on an even keel,” was nevertheless not quite all there. For Kierkegaard of course wanted to live on the belle étage, the second floor, as he had always done, but since Strube concluded that the apartment on that floor “really wasn’t any good,” Kierkegaard had to move up one flight, something that would soon turn out to have frightful consequences.
“And the way things are in my home, nowadays!” he wrote shortly after he moved in. “Last summer, when I was at the tanner’s place, I suffered indescribably from the stench. I did not dare risk spending another summer there, and furthermore the whole business was too expensive for me. Where I now live, in the afternoons I suffer so much from reflected sunlight that I at first feared I might go blind.” Although Kierkegaard always lived on the sunny side of the street, he would keep the sun out by hanging curtains, blinds or awnings; he was quite a consumer of these goods, something attested to by the auction catalog of his personal effects, which served up a real cornucopia of “jalousies,” “nettle cloth curtains,” “chintz curtains lined with shirting,” “moreen curtains with velvet trim,” “roller shades and hardware”—red, green, or striped. Sometimes Kierkegaard simply had the windows painted over. But this did not work in Nørregade; the apartment was too high up, and the afternoon sun was merciless. And, to complete the disaster, there was the tenant upstairs, or rather, that tenant’s tenant: “In the place where I am now living on Nørregade, the lodger upstairs could certainly be called a quiet, peaceable lodger: He is out of the house all day long. Unfortunately he has a dog that is at home all day long. It lies by an open window and takes an interest in everything. If a man walks past and sneezes unusually loudly, the dog instantly barks and can go on barking for a long time. If a coachman drives past and cracks his whip, it barks; if another dog barks, it also barks. Thus there is not the least little incident in the street that I do not receive in a second edition, thanks to this dog.” Kierkegaard had no doubt—it was absolutely awful: “There are few outward things that have depressed me as much as this apartment.”
Emil Boesen, Kierkegaard’s friend from the days of his youth, had also moved—not a couple of hundred yards down the street and around the corner, like Kierkegaard, but all the way to Horsens, in Jutland, where he had been appointed resident curate and hospital chaplain in late October 1849. On March 7, 1850, he wrote to Kierkegaard and told him a little about his new, somewhat depressing circumstances. Here the source of irritation was not a little lapdog but an entire “horse market” that was situated directly outside Boesen’s windows, and there was also “continuing traffic through the house from early morning until late in the evening.” So it was not so strange that Boesen already felt that he needed a vacation. He had recently lost his beloved mother; his elderly father had had a fall and was bedridden; and to top it all off, the young curate was busier than the Devil: “On Sundays I am generally in my clerical vestments from nine o’clock in morning until half past seven in the evening; first confession, then communion after the parish pastor has preached, then I have to preach at the hospital, then to vespers in the main church…. I have an odd congregation at the hospital chapel: a couple of harmless old women, some half-dotty drunks, usually a couple of members of the count’s family, … and then a few townspeople. The homilies I give at confession make more of an impression on me than on anyone else.” His colleague was a tough old cleric, distant and irritable, and he made Boesen do the bulk of the boring and bothersome paperwork. Even so, Boesen assured Kierkegaard that he was “glad and grateful that I became a pastor.” Those were the days when it was still a calling.
In his previous letter Kierkegaard had written that if Boesen ran into any difficulties that he could help resolve, he should just let him know. Now Boesen asked Kierkegaard to visit his bedridden father and then to convey his greetings to his fiancée, Louise Sophie Caroline Holtermann, whom the lonely curate would come to Copenhagen and fetch as soon as he was finished with this year’s confirmation class. She truly made Boesen “happy and proud of her every day, and happier with every letter she writes to me; it was really a shame for you that you did not get to know her before I did.” There was a little hint of defiant glee, a sort of tit for tat, in this final line, which almost seems as if it could continue on in a more potent vein, echoing the correspondence between the two friends in the days when Kierkegaard had been down in Berlin, directing Boesen’s Copenhagen comings and goings in the service of a higher eros. The day after writing these lines, Boesen had cooled off, however, and he added: “Can’t you teach me the secret of formulating a proper theme for a sermon? Take care of yourself! Dear friend, thank you for everything good! Fulfill the three requests soon!”
Apparently Boesen’s plea did not have an instantaneous effect on Kierkegaard, who waited more than a month, until April 12, before getting around to replying to “The Reverend Mr. Pastor E. Boesen, Resident Curate,” whose difficult handwriting he commented upon, as usual: “This is certainly not handwriting, but tiny pinpricks on extremely thin paper; I could use a microscope to read it.” Kierkegaard had to disappoint Boesen with respect to at least two of his three wishes: He had met Louise by chance in the street and had told her plainly that her fiancé had asked him to visit her, but that he had decided not to do so. Nor would Kierkegaard visit Boesen’s sick father; it had been a long while since they had last seen each other, and thus “it would take some coincidence to get me going again.” On the other hand, he could certainly give Boesen a little advice about the art of finding a good theme for a sermon. One ought not attempt to do this sort of thing in a direct manner—no, “for this sort of thing, you must arrange your life in reasonable fashion. Every day you must set aside at least half an hour’s free time for incidental reading in the N. T. or a religious writing. When you go for a walk, let your thoughts wander aimlessly, snooping about here and there, experimenting first with one thing, then with another. That is how you should organize your housekeeping.” The advice was well-meant and would surely have worked, but for the fact that there was an entire “horse market” whinnying right under the windows.
A couple of weeks later, on April 29, a reply arrived from Boesen, who had apparently been reunited with the Louise of his life: “Dear friend! I hereby wish to invite you to my wedding on Wednesday afternoon (May 1) at six (or seven) o’clock in the Church of Our Lady. I am not calling on you myself, because I have caught a serious cold and must see to it that I get over it quickly. R.S.V.P. and it would give us great pleasure if you would come. Yours, Emil Boesen.” It cannot be denied that this was a rather confused invitation, and Kierkegaard was not in fact among the wedding guests. He had conveniently enough caught a cold of his own and was therefore legitimately excused. As we know, at that time Rasmus Nielsen was also going around with the sniffles, so that summer there must really have been something in the air that had a powerful effect on thoughtful theological minds. Or perhaps they all simply had allergies.
While the newlyweds celebrated their honeymoon and so on, Kierkegaard celebrated his thirty-seventh birthday in complete obscurity. Several days later (though bearing the date “May 5”) an empty little greeting arrived from Henrik Lund, who was then living in Odense. That was all. Kierkegaard himself commemorated the day by attending vespers at the Church of Our Savior, where the preacher was a theological graduate named Clemmensen. The sermon he preached was certainly no great piece of theology; Kierkegaard called it “simple,” but on the other hand, he added, this unostentatious and ordinary style was exactly what a sermon ought to have. Happily, as a special little birthday gift to Kierkegaard, a “bit of highly poetic beauty” had crept past the preacher. Clemmensen had preached about “life as a going-forth from the Father and a going-home to the Father, as in the Gospel text. Then came the usual stuff about life as a path. Then there was a metaphor about a Father who sends his son out into the world, very pretty. Then the metaphor was abandoned and became reality, our relation to God. And then he said: And when the hour of death finally comes and the pilgrim’s cloak is cast off and the staff is put down—and the child goes in to the Father. Superb! I would bet that Clemmensen came to say it quite unwittingly; indeed, if he had thought about it, he might perhaps have chosen to say ’the soul’ or ’the transfigured person’ or something of that sort. But no, ’the child,’ is masterly.”
Kierkegaard was discerning, but all the same perhaps something eluded his analysis here—and it eluded him precisely because it concerned himself. When he had been so dazzled by the metaphor of the child who goes in to the Father, it might have been because of a sudden déjà vu, a brief glimpse of himself as a child, many years earlier, on his way in to his own earthly father, whom despite everything, he continued to love.
Practice in Christianity
And there was in fact a child of this sort present in the manuscript Kierkegaard was completing during these very weeks. The manuscript had been sitting there, waiting for the finishing touches, for almost two years. The first draft of the section titled “Come Here, All You Who Labor and Are Burdened, and I Will Give You Rest” dated back to April 1848. On June 4, 1850, Kierkegaard decided to publish the work pseudonymously, reminding himself that the three sections of the book “must be gone through, to see that my person or my name or anything of that sort is not included, as is the case in the third of them.” The third section consisted of seven discourses, the first of which was essentially identical with a sermon Kierkegaard had delivered in the Church of Our Lady on September 1, 1848, as a homily following confession and preceding communion. Kierkegaard, in the person of Anti-Climacus, therefore had to append an explanatory footnote to his text: “This discourse was delivered by Mag. Kierkegaard in the Church of Our Lady…. Since this was what actually gave me the idea for the title, I have published it with his permission.” It is a question of personal taste whether one prefers to call this gesture a sophisticated maneuver or in fact the beginning of the collapse of pseudonymity, but in any case, after some editing in early August, the typesetting and proofreading moved along very quickly, and on September 27, 1850, the Adresseavisen carried an advertisement for Practice in Christianity, nos. I, II, III, by Anti-Climacus, edited by S. Kierkegaard.
The third discourse of the third section begins with a prayer: “Lord Jesus Christ! A human being can feel himself drawn to a great variety of things, but there is one thing to which no person has ever felt naturally drawn—suffering and degradation. That is something we human beings believe we ought to flee from, as far away as possible, and in any case we must be forced into it. But you, our Savior and Redeemer; you, the degraded one; you, who compel no one—and least of all compel us to be what of course is and must be a human being’s highest honor, to dare to want to resemble you: Would that the image of you in degradation might remain before us, so vividly, with such awakening and persuasiveness, that we feel ourselves drawn to you in your lowliness, drawn to want to resemble you in lowliness, you, who from on high will draw all unto yourself.”
The prayer is not merely a prayer. It also contains elements of the tactics the text itself employs to overcome the resistance with which the natural self encounters suffering and degradation. The text wants to overcome this sort of resistance by means of an “image” that makes suffering and degradation not only “vivid” and “awakening” but also so “persuasive” that the reader is drawn to want to resemble the degraded one. In keeping with this, the text continually addresses itself to the reader’s gaze, forcing the reader to look at what the text intends to make visible. After a macabre exhibition of the degraded Savior, the text makes its appeal: “Aren’t you moved by that sight? … So, look yet again at him, him the degraded one! What an effect that sight produces—shouldn’t it be capable of moving you to want to suffer in some fashion as he did …?”
This sort of imagistic writing is meant to move the reader, not to tears or to other sentimental outbursts, but away from the text to an action outside the text itself. Such action would in fact be the true conclusion of the reading. The text resembles a hypnotic formula: “If possible, forget for a moment everything you know about him. Force yourself out of what may indeed be the lazy, habitual way in which you have knowledge of him. Let it be as though it were the first time you heard the story of his degradation.” And if this gesture does not have the desired effect, the text is again ready to help: “Now, then, let us help ourselves in another way. Let us have a child help us, a child, … who now hears the story for the first time; let us see what effect it produces even if we only tell it tolerably well.”
Then an experiment is conducted: When positioned in the right time and place, the juxtaposition of the familiar and the alien can produce a violent collision. A child is confronted with various pictures—one of Napoleon, one of William Tell, and so forth—each accompanied by an interesting explanation. Just as the child is moving along from one picture to another in “unspeakable delight,” the child suddenly sees a picture “which was deliberately placed among the others, and which depicts someone crucified.” At first the child cannot associate anything with the image, but he is profoundly affected when he learns that it depicts an execution. And all at once the image seizes hold of the child’s field of vision so totally that he becomes “anxious and afraid of the adult and of the world and of himself,” forgetting everything about the other pictures which, “as the folk song says, will turn their backs, so different is this image.”
When this picture has forced its way in front of the other pictures, positioning itself in first place, the narrator must now explain the exemplar’s specifically religious significance. Anti-Climacus takes charge of the situation: “See, this is the moment. If you have not already made too strong an impression on the child, now is the time to tell the child about him, the lofty one, who from on high will draw all unto himself. Tell the child that this lofty person is the crucified one. Tell the child that he was love, that he came into the world out of love, that he assumed the form of a lowly servant, that he lived for one thing only, to love and to help human beings, especially all those who were sick and sorrowful and suffering and unhappy. Tell the child how that person’s life went, how he was betrayed by one of the few people who were close to him, how the few others denied knowing him, and how all the others insulted and mocked him until they finally nailed him to the cross—as can be seen in the picture…. Tell it to the child in lively fashion, as though you yourself had never heard it or told it to anyone before. Tell it as though you had made it up yourself, but do not forget to relate every detail that has been preserved and handed down—except that when you tell it, you should forget that it has been handed down.”
At the sight of this gory image the child loses his sense of “time and place” so entirely that he quite forgets that the event itself, the crucifixion, took place “more than 1,800 years ago.” Transported almost hypnotically into this contemporaneity, the child begins to wonder why God does not intervene to prevent the death of this loving person. And when the inevitable has taken place, the child is deeply affected by it and can “think and talk about nothing but weapons and war—because the child has resolved that when he grows up he will kill all these ungodly people who had treated the loving person in this manner.” But this is not how things turn out: “When he becomes older and reaches his maturity, he will not have forgotten this childhood impression, but he will understand it differently. He no longer wishes to lash out, because, as he says, in doing so I will not attain any likeness with him, the degraded one, who never lashed out, not even in retaliation when he had been struck. No, now he wishes only for one thing, to suffer approximately as he [the crucified one] suffered in the world.”
The story goes on to explain that this early “sight” of the crucifixion never eases its grip on the child’s view of the world, but accompanies the child and shapes his understanding of life: “Through the power of his imagination, the youth is drawn … to that image, or the power of his imagination draws that image to him; he falls in love with that image …; he does not loosen his grip—not even in his sleep—on this image that has made him sleepless.” And the more this youth looks, the more visible he himself becomes: “One sees it in his appearance, his eyes see nothing of what lies closest to him—they seek that image alone; he walks like a man asleep, and yet he is wide awake, as can be seen from the fire and the flame in his eyes; he walks like a stranger, and yet he seems to be at home, for through the power of the imagination he is always at home with this image, which he wishes to resemble.”
Anti-Climacus does not doubt for a moment that as a result of this, the youth’s relation to the world is of necessity filled with suffering, and this is precisely his point: “In a certain sense, the youth has been deceived by the power of his imagination, but truly, if he himself wills it, it has not deceived him in a detrimental manner, it has deceived him into the truth—by means of a deception, it has played him into God’s hands, as it were…. It is certainly true that he may shudder for a moment in taking stock of the situation, but let go of that image?—No, that is something he cannot persuade himself to do. On the other hand, if he cannot persuade himself to let go of the image, he cannot escape the suffering, either…. So he does not let go of the image, but he walks intrepidly into the suffering into which he is led…. He himself became the image of perfection that he loved, and truly the power of the imagination did not deceive him any more than did Governance.”
Even though the deception has here been embedded in an artful dialectic, Anti-Climacus himself must have sensed how the narrative has suddenly become disturbingly similar to the story of a seduction, and he therefore inserts an authoritative comment into his story: “If the power that governs human life were a seductive power, at that instant it would mockingly say of this youth, ’Look, now he is trapped.’ ” This does not happen, however, because “the power that governs human life is love.” This is of course an edifying thought, but strictly speaking it is nevertheless no guarantee that the text that makes light of the dangers of seduction does not itself possess seductive power, perhaps practicing seduction most effectively by denying that it does so.
It is this pictorial or aesthetic rendering of Christ in particular that encourages the young man to follow—to imitate—Christ, demonstrating quite clearly how the aesthetic is an active principle within the religious. And it is scarcely an exaggeration to say that Kierkegaard has here presented us with a sort of religious autobiography in a nutshell. In 1849, when he produced a piece he titled “The Accounting,” which was a condensed version of The Point of View for My Work as an Author, he appended to it an “Accompanying Note” that informs us: “Even as a little child I was told as solemnly as possible that ‘the mob’ spat upon Christ, even though he himself was the Truth…. This is something I have preserved deep within my heart…. Christ, who was indeed the Truth, was spat upon. And even if I were to forget everything, I would never forget—just as I have not forgotten it to this day—what was said to me as a child and the impression it made upon that child.”
Of course we do not know with certainty whether the episode did in fact take place in Søren’s childhood home, but there are more than a few things that speak in its favor, and even as an adult, Kierkegaard could shudder when he looked into a shop window and suddenly came upon a picture of the crucified Christ hanging amid a number of amateurish “Nuremberg pictures” [inexpensive popular illustrations].
“Blasphemous Toying with What Is Holy”
On October 22, 1850, Kierkegaard was particularly ready and eager to call upon Mynster. The day before, he had spoken with the bishop’s son-inlaw, Just Paulli, who had told him how upset the old bishop had been by Practice in Christianity. “The book has made me very indignant,” Mynster supposedly had said on entering the parlor, “it is blasphemous toying with what is holy.” And when Paulli asked whether he might repeat these words to Kierkegaard if he saw him, Mynster had replied, “Yes, and he will probably come up to see me sometime, so I will say it to him myself.” For a brief instant, Kierkegaard was paralyzed by Paulli’s account of what had transpired at the episcopal residence, but then he became almost giddy. Now he no longer needed the pretext of seeking a position at the pastoral seminary to call on Mynster, or for that matter to subject himself to Mynster’s oddly farcical theatricality. No, he could go right in and request that he be subjected to what his respect for an authority such as Mynster’s required—that he be reprimanded.
So he called on Mynster the very next day. Over the years Kierkegaard had become acquainted with the “virtuosity in aristocratic reserve” that the bishop had perfected and had used in receiving him—only to snub him and immediately send him packing. So Kierkegaard had formulated his words in advance and was practically still reciting them to himself as he entered Mynster’s house: “Pastor Paulli told me yesterday that as soon as you see me you intend to reprimand me for my most recent book. I beg that you regard it as yet another expression of the respect I have always shown you that as soon as I heard this, I came to see you.” Kierkegaard himself was of the opinion that his opening move had been quite successful: “The situation was arranged well; there was no opportunity for either vehemence or sarcasm, both of which seem to me unworthy in these circumstances.”
Kierkegaard had completely miscalculated the situation, however. Mynster, who was always a Gibraltar of self-esteem, did not want to issue any reprimands at all that day, and he merely made the banal remark that every bird must sing its own song. And Kierkegaard had come here for a sound thrashing! Mynster did, however, add that it was hardly likely that the book would do any good, particularly inasmuch as the first section was an attack on Martensen and the second section an attack on Mynster himself. This latter comment alluded to the book’s critical remarks to the effect that Christianity ought not be made the object of anything so remote as “observations,” since this was of course precisely the opposite of Christianity, which observes us to see if we in fact do what we say. No matter how one twisted and turned the matter, preaching was bound to remain “observations,” Mynster believed, and Kierkegaard did not wish to go into the matter any further, “for fear of getting into existential issues; I did, however, explain what I meant by giving several general examples.” Mynster was nevertheless certain that “the passage about ‘observations’” was aimed at him. He had every reason to take offense. For the title page of Observations on the Doctrines of the Christian Faith—first published in 1833, reprinted for the fourth time in 1855, and the most widely read devotional book of the era—bore the name of none other than Jakob Peter Mynster!
But even though it was beyond dispute that the word “observation” was indeed polemically directed at Mynster, Kierkegaard did not want to acknowledge publicly his view that the superannuated bishop was existentially unaffected by his own preaching. If Kierkegaard had said what he really believed about Mynster, he would have called him a man lacking in character, for this was precisely the designation that recurred most frequently in the catalog of episcopal vices that Kierkegaard was furiously busy compiling during this period. Because a man who does not convert his words into actions, his preaching into practice, is in fact a man without character. Kierkegaard’s preoccupation with this unfortunate situation was due, first and foremost, to his very particular way of reading and interpreting the Bible, but it was also attributable to his general distaste for every sort of pretended piety. And this could get him to go berserk and display an invidious inventiveness: “Even though I generally hate machines, I would really like it if someone would invent a machine (a sort of music box that could be set up in a church pulpit) that could be wound up, so it could deliver these enchanting and uplifting sermons. Then every congregation could get one of these machines. In that way we would at least be spared a scandalous situation, because there is nothing scandalous when a preaching machine does not practice what it preaches.”
Kierkegaard was simply beside himself with delight over this marvelous machine, and he added an instructive note in the margin, explaining that the machine could handily be operated by a sexton, who could be trained to accompany the canned Sunday sermons with the requisite “gesticulations”—so that at regular intervals the sexton would “blow his nose, mop the sweat from his brow, and in brief, behave as he had surely seen the pastor behave.” Kierkegaard concluded: “It would be amusing to hear a music box say, ‘Even if everyone else fell by the wayside, I would be faithful to Christianity, the gentle doctrine, the consolation and cure for all sorrow, that gives joys their true savor. It is my innermost conviction that et cetera.’” The noncommittal chattiness of a music box was a perfect parody of Mynster’s art of preaching, a blasphemous toying with His Reverence.
The Idiot God—and His Times
Thus, according to Mynster, the second section of Practice was aimed at him, while the first section was a sustained critical rejoinder directed at Martensen. This observation is probably a bit too heavy-handed, but in any case Martensen did read the book, and in a letter dated November 26, 1850, he presented his judgment of the book to Ludvig Gude, who for his part had felt more demoralized than edified by the work. “I am in complete agreement with what you say about Kierkegaard’s work,” Martensen wrote. “His arguments are immediate and direct communications—they of course are dependent upon patent sophisms and wordplays. Very few have noticed the polemics. The book has had the further consequence that the Bishop has now totally abandoned Kierkegaard’s work. Naturally, he is indignant about the shameless remarks regarding the church’s sermons. There is certainly something true in [Kierkegaard’s] remarks, but criticizing the Church like this does not strike me as having any sort of reforming intent, but must rather be called Mephistophelian criticism, which of course always contains some truth.”
As usual, Martensen was writing with an icicle, but he had seen something quite clearly. Practice is, in fact, a radical and daring book, in places satirical to the point of blasphemy, and thus not without an element of the Mephistophelian, of the satanic. Not only does Anti-Climacus launch a harsh critique of the “everlasting Sunday nonsense” that might more appropriately “end with ‘Hurrah!’ than with ‘Amen,’” he also writes (as he puts it) “quite unrestrainedly” about Christ. And this is certainly not an understatement. The text has representatives of the bespectacled bourgeoisie of the Biedermeier era—including a burgher, a pastor, a philosopher, and a politician—take the floor one after another, commenting on that odd fellow, Jesus, who called himself God. Page after page, this Jesus, the idiot God, is mocked and practically spat on by the text—this Jesus, who, if he had been unable to do anything else, had at least made it clear “that the writers of our day have been right on the mark in always representing the good and the true with a half-witted person or with someone dumber than a stump.”
The sensible burgher is skeptical about Jesus’ miracles, but what he simply cannot fathom is that Jesus could have been “so foolish, so benighted, so utterly ignorant of human nature, so weak, or so amiably vain, or whatever you want to call it, as to behave in such a way that he practically forced his good deeds upon people! … After all, he … must know what I could tell him right off the bat, using less than half of my brains, namely that this is no way to get ahead in the world—unless, disdaining intelligence, one honestly aspires to become a fool, or perhaps even pushes honesty so far that one would prefer to be put to death.” Feigning anxious concern about the future of this dreamer, another cautious burgher could not but voice agreement with the skepticism sounded by his colleague: “His life is quite simply fantasy…. A person might live like this for at most a couple of years in his youth, but he is already over thirty. And he is literally nothing…. What has he done about his future? Nothing. Does he have a steady job? No. What are his prospects? None. To mention merely this simple problem: How will he pass the time when he gets older, during the long winter evenings?—What will he do to occupy his time? He cannot even play cards.”
It is scarcely a surprise that the pastor is similarly unable to give his blessing to this difficult person. He will, however, grant that, for a demagogue, the fellow is almost pathetically honest, and this makes the pastor’s judgment a little more lenient: “It is a sign of honesty to try to pass oneself off as the Expected One while resembling him as little as he does—this is honest in the same way as when someone who wants to pass counterfeit currency does such a bad job of producing the bills that they can immediately be spotted by anyone who has his wits about him.” The pastor knows the way of the world, and he knows quite well how a proper God would behave and act: “The true Expected One will therefore be of an entirely different appearance and will come as the most splendid flowering and highest development of the established order.”
Then it is the philosopher’s turn. He of course sees no sign of the System, and therefore he simply cannot abide the megalomania that has possessed this dreamer: “That an individual human being is supposed to be God is an abominable, or rather, an insane fantasy the likes of which has never been heard of before; never before has anyone seen this form of pure subjectivity and sheer negation pushed to such an extreme. He has no doctrine, no System. When all is said and done, he doesn’t know anything: He continually repeats or rings changes on a number of aphoristic sayings, a few maxims, and a couple of parables, using them to dazzle the masses…. If the mad proposition that an individual human being is God were possible, then of course, it would logically follow that one would have to worship this individual human being—a greater piece of philosophical bestiality cannot be imagined.”
And now the pragmatic politician chimes in with his comments: “It cannot be denied that at the present time this person is a power—quite apart, of course, from his delusion about being God. That is the sort of thing one simply ignores as a private quirk…. Does he want to fight for the national cause? Or does he have a communist revolution in mind? Does he want a republic or a monarchy? Which party will he support, and which will he oppose? Or does he want to get on well with all parties or stand in opposition to all of them? Get involved with him?—No, that’s the last thing I’d do.”
Many others take the floor to speak a few words at this diabolical symposium where the participants sing the praises not of woman but of foolishness. It is thus entirely proper that the final speaker is a “scoffer”: “An individual human being, someone exactly like the rest of us, says that he is God: This is truly a priceless idea from which all of us can of course derive direct benefit. If this is not benevolence toward humanity, then I don’t know what benevolence and charity (or charity and benevolence) are…. Long may he live, the maker of such an extraordinary discovery! Tomorrow I will announce that I, the undersigned, am God…. This is the most ludicrous thing imaginable; the comic element always resides in the contradiction, and here it is the greatest possible contradiction … : that a human being exactly like the rest of us, though not nearly as well-dressed as the average person—a poorly dressed person, then, who is practically … an inmate of the poorhouse—is God.”
Anti-Climacus is not the Antichrist, but the Antichrist could scarcely have done better—or worse, if you will—than him at blasphemous satire. In any event, the point is that the text makes its times contemporary with the god’s times. And it makes the god contemporary with the text’s times. Anti-Climacus was not satisfied merely with presenting us with the haute bourgeoisie of the streets and alleys of Nazareth circa the year 30. He goes further, situating his idiot God somewhere in Copenhagen in the year 1848: “on Amagertorv in the middle of the daily hustle and bustle of a workday.” And he does so to confront his reader with the following question: “If you cannot endure contemporaneity, if you cannot endure seeing this in actuality, if you could not go out into the street—and see that the god is right there in that appalling spectacle, and that this is what would happen to you if you were to fall to your knees and worship him—then you are not essentially a Christian.”
The Voices of the Scandalized
A while later, Kierkegaard met someone on the street, and it wasn’t exactly the god, nor was it just anybody. It was Just Paulli, whose smarmy, smiling face folded into creases of clerical concern, confiding in Kierkegaard that all sorts of people had been interpreting his remarks as nothing but foolishness, as “fun and games.” Kierkegaard could not endure the prissy mixture of sanctimony and sensationalism that had enveloped Paulli in its glutinous grasp; Paulli was an “old gossip,” he sneered. Nevertheless, Kierkegaard began to have some doubts about whether his literary behavior was defensible and felt compelled to provide further explanations in his journals. At first he tried to view the whole matter as a trifle: “Well, even if it were true—so what? Everything that is genuinely beneficial and new can lead to abuses of this sort.” Then he put forth a more principled argument based on a parallel with classical antiquity: “Believe me, the person who first began to introduce comical roles into tragedies had to put up with people finding it offensive.” It was important to make use of the comic in religious matters, because in its attempt to resemble the ideal, the age lacked sufficient childlike naïveté: “Christianity has come to a standstill in a worldly shrewdness that doesn’t give a damn about the ideal and regards as dreamers those who strive to attain it.” Thus the comic is important because it is only by using the comic that one can draw attention to the “disparity between this Sunday solemnity and everyday life.”
In fact, there had been an awareness of this disparity for a very long time, extending all the way back to the three medieval ecclesiastical traditions—the Feast of the Ass, the Feast of the Fool, and the Easter Comedy—that Kierkegaard had already touched on when writing On the Concept of Irony. In the first of these festivals, an ass participated in processions and theatrical scenes; the second was a carnival-like New Year’s feast that parodied ecclesiastical ceremonies; and the third took its name from the comical stories that were narrated from the pulpit during Easter week. “I am well aware of what I am doing,” Kierkegaard wrote in complete agreement with Anti-Climacus, “and believe you me, this secondhand, rote, lazy, world-historical habit whereby one always sort of speaks of Christ with a certain veneration, seeing as, after all, history has sort of gained some knowledge and has sort of heard so much to the effect that he had sort of been something sort of great—this veneration is not worth a hill of beans; it is thoughtlessness, sanctimoniousness, and thus blasphemous, for it is blasphemous to have thoughtless veneration for someone one must either believe in or take offense at.”
There was an implicit dig at Grundtvigianism contained in this critique of world-historical habits. And indeed, Peter Christian was also among those who were unhappy with the work and believed that Søren Aabye had gone much too far by including remarks such as those cited here, and that he ought merely to have hinted at them. “Good Lord, that is supposed to be so wise,” replied Søren Aabye, who had attempted to employ artful hinting in Works of Love, and had thus learned from experience that this sort of thing did not work. If Peter Christian was unhappy, it was only because he preferred to ignore all searching questions: “Peter always sticks to the insignificant things with which he has frittered away his life. And so, as always, there is no difficulty at all in writing big books like those I write—that’s something anyone can do…. Mediocrity can really have a merry old time, since Denmark has no standards whatever.” So Kierkegaard had to state his case yet again: “The various representations of what the sensible people, the statesman, et cetera, say in passing judgment on Christ in a contemporary setting are merely renditions of the judgment passed by finitude on the Absolute. Most of them contain something prophetically crazy, inasmuch as the absolute maddest of them speak of Christ in terms expressing exactly what Christ himself wants—for example, when the shrewd fellow says ‘unless he intends to get himself put to death.’ But in a certain sense that was precisely Christ’s intention. And so on, at quite of number of points.”
Kierkegaard had the blasé bourgeoisie speak their lines as demonstrations of their scandalized reactions to the idiot God. Later, when Kierkegaard addressed his own contemporaries, his readers, these remarks would recur as strangely delayed echoes; they should almost have been included as a postscript to the second edition of Practice when it was published in May 1855. Merely the titles of these respectable personages would have done the trick: “the editor,” “the archdeacon,” “the philosopher,” “the physician,” “the reviewer,” and “the rural curate.”
Thus “the editor”—Giødwad, that is—said that Kierkegaard, “by presenting the ideal so powerfully, had probably scared off a few theological graduates from becoming pastors.” Then people should probably not read my works at all, Kierkegaard replied, because if a person had such a violent reaction to ideal presentations, how would things go when Kierkegaard presented the ideal human state? Wouldn’t this then “scare him away from being a human being, so that it might end in suicide?” Kierkegaard went to explain that “this sort of sickliness was rooted in the fact that a person egotistically loved himself instead of loving the ideal.”
Tryde, “the archdeacon,” also had a comment. In his opinion, Kierkegaard was exaggerating when he maintained that Christianity had been abolished through the making of “observations.” Tryde was furthermore sure that the remark about “observations” had been directed at himself, which he found utterly without justification, because “Søren Kierkegaard could not be more subjective than he [Tryde] was”—indeed, Tryde had even looked at Kierkegaard’s Edifying Discourses in order “to satisfy himself that this was so.” We might think that Kierkegaard would have found this sort of competition about who could be more subjective to be totally absurd, but no, he in fact picked up the gauntlet: “The Right Reverend did not see that there must always be this great difference: He holds an official post and draws a very considerable salary, and I have done it gratis. I have amounted to nothing, I have exposed myself to the persecution of the mob, I have lived on the street—all in accordance with the rules of subjectivity.”
“The philosopher” was Sibbern, and according to Kierkegaard he had come forth with the following “little oddity”: “The other day Sibbern told me that someone had read the remarks included in the first section of Practice in Christianity in a purely comic sense and was of the opinion that the matter was so serious that the clergy ought to intervene.” It had thus escaped this person’s notice that the presentation contained a deeper theological point. “Sibbern could not keep himself from laughing when he related this to me,” Kierkegaard wrote—most likely while laughing himself.
“The reviewer” was a Swede, the literary scholar and aesthetician Albert Lysander, to whom H. P. Kofoed-Hansen, pastor at the Church of Our Lady in the southern Jutland town of Haderslev, directed Kierkegaard’s attention. Lysander’s review had appeared in the Swedish periodical, Journal for Literature; Kofoed-Hansen had read it “without edification,” and, he assumed, Kierkegaard had done likewise.
On August 25, 1850, Kierkegaard’s “physician,” Oluf Lundt Bang, was much more—and quite volubly—delighted, and he wrote to thank Kierkegaard for the book by sending a rhymed epistle in 150 kindly verses, which out of kindness to Bang we will consign to oblivion.
And on December 20 of that year, when the “curate,” Emil Boesen, finally got around to writing a thank-you letter acknowledging receipt of Practice, he expressed great regret at his tardiness but also consoled both himself and Kierkegaard by pointing out that he was more delighted with this book than with the previous works of the same sort, “I suppose because now I am over here [in Jutland] and have missed you quite often—especially lately. But then when I received the book and read some of it, it was like going over to your place and talking with you.” The book had been published pseudonymously, but this obviously had not concealed its true signature. “Thank you for it. It looks as though it will have just as quiet a reception as its predecessors,” was the encouraging note from the provinces. And then Boesen left the subject of the book and turned to a detailed discussion of the commotion occasioned all over Jutland by a proposal to legalize civil marriage. Boesen was now involved with the nuts and bolts of practical theology; Christmas was coming, and the curate and his wife were busy: “Soon I shall once again have to deliver many sermons in a short period of time. I preach the best I can, but often it is pretty poor. Frequently I have to sit and bide my time until very late on a Saturday afternoon before things fall properly into place; then I have to let go of all my misgivings and endeavor to entrust myself to God. On Christmas Day I have to preach three times, the first of which is at six o’clock in the morning. I send greetings from Louise. She is quite well and these days is busy getting ready for Christmas. We live in rather cramped quarters and in very unsettled circumstances, but it is so difficult to find a decent place to live; still, we are doing our best to find one so that we can receive you when you come to visit us. We speak of you quite often.”
To Kierkegaard’s credit, dyed-in-the-wool idiosyncratic that he was, he never waxed ironic about Boesen’s letters, which now and again invite such treatment. Or, in fact, might Emil Boesen and his busy Louise have served as models of a sort for Ludvig From, theological graduate, and his little Juliane, subsequently parodied with such divine nastiness in Kierkegaard’s The Moment?
“And Why, Then, This Concealment?”
In connection with the same debate about civil marriage that had reached all the way to Boesen up in Horsens, Jutland, the Grundtvigian A. G. Rudelbach published a piece that included the following proclamation: “Indeed, in our times, it is precisely the highest and most profound interest of the Church … to be emancipated from what can rightly be called habitual and governmentally established Christianity.” Rudelbach appended a note to this remark: “This is the same as what one of the most excellent writers of recent times, Søren Kierkegaard, seeks to emphasize, impress upon, and—as Luther says—to drive into every person who will listen.”
Not only was it quite impressive to be compared to Luther, it was also flattering to have the comparison made by Rudelbach, and Kierkegaard made no secret of this fact when he responded with an article that appeared in Fædrelandet on January 31, 1851, under the heading “Occasioned by a Remark by Dr. Rudelbach concerning Myself.” “Dr. R. possesses an astonishing degree of erudition; from what I have heard, he is quite likely the most learned man in Denmark,” Kierkegaard wrote, describing himself as “a poor wretch with respect to learning and ‘scholarship’, who knows enough arithmetic for domestic purposes.” This might be called higher-order flirtation. Kierkegaard did admit that he was indeed a “hater of habitual Christianity,” but habitual Christianity could assume various forms: “And if there were no other choice, if the only choice was between this sort of habitual Christianity—a worldly capriciousness that lives carefree, imagining that it is Christian, perhaps without even having any impression of what Christianity is—and the sort of habitual Christianity found among sectarians, the awakened, the hyper-orthodox, the party-liners: If things were as bad as this, I would unconditionally choose the former.”
Therefore, if it were a matter of the church’s emancipation from the state, Kierkegaard was definitely not interested, because he had never “fought for the emancipation of ‘the Church’ any more than for the emancipation of the Greenland trade, women, Jews, or for emancipation of any other sort.” For Kierkegaard it was very important to separate his cause clearly from all external institutions and organizations; his cause was internalization, not externalization: “To the best of the abilities granted me, I have worked diligently and honestly, and with more than a little sacrifice, for making Christianity a matter of inward appropriation, both for myself and for other people, to the extent that they are receptive. But precisely because I understood from the very beginning that Christianity is inwardness, and that my specific task was to make Christianity a matter of inward appropriation—for this very reason, I have taken care, with an almost overly conscientious scrupulousness, to ensure that no passage, not a sentence, not a line, not a word, not a syllable, not a letter has been included that tends in the direction of suggesting changes in external arrangements.”
This little army of synonyms that Kierkegaard mustered to reinforce his point was accompanied by the promise of a “reward to the person who can point out, in all these many books, one single proposal that tends in the direction of changes in external arrangements, or merely anything that might resemble an allusion to such a proposal, even to the most nearsighted person who looked at it from a distance.” These exhaustive assurances, which run the risk of defeating their own purpose, betray the ambivalence that was in fact present in Kierkegaard’s reply to Rudelbach. This was an ambivalence Kierkegaard went to extraordinary lengths to conceal, but it became obvious in a little postscript to his article: “I have only—and even so, only poetically—furnished what one might call an existential corrective to the established order, tending in the direction of inward appropriation by the ‘individual.’ … In the Acts of the Apostles we read that one ought to obey God rather than men. There are situations, therefore, in which an established order can be such that no Christian ought to acquiesce in it, situations in which a Christian ought not say that Christianity is merely this sort of indifference toward external arrangements.”
As is well-known, there are situations in which the most important point comes straggling behind in the footnotes or is shunted off into a postscript. And this postscript is one such situation. Kierkegaard had developed a massive mistrust of the sort of Christendom that made a habit of justifying itself by invoking hidden inwardness, and this put Kierkegaard in an ambivalent relationship to the ambivalence he himself had defended when he spoke of the incommensurability of inwardness. It might be surprising that as late as 1851 he was still capable of defending his old position, but he was not entirely successful in his defense—his rhetoric betrayed him.
It is true that the title page of Practice invites the reader to “awakening and inward appropriation,” but this invitation is to some extent retracted by the work itself. As much as anything else, Practice is in fact a criticism of the religious inwardness of its times. It was thus a brilliant stroke when Grundtvig referred to Practice in Christianity as “Practice of Christianity,” thus focusing on the demand for existential practice, for reduplication, that typifies the work and stands in sharp contrast to inwardness, which is always invisible: “Here we have the concept of established Christendom. In established Christendom we are all true Christians, but in hidden inwardness. The external world has absolutely nothing to do with my being a Christian. My existence as a Christian cannot be measured by its standards…. And why, then, this concealment? … Oh, naturally because I fear that if someone discovered how true a Christian I am, I would be rewarded with extraordinary honor and respect, and I am too much of a true Christian to want to be honored and respected because I am a true Christian. You see, this is why I keep it concealed in hidden inwardness…. All are true Christians—but in hidden inwardness.”
With this caricatured presentation, a new vision of inwardness makes its entrance in earnest. Someone is too much of a Christian to show how Christian he actually is and consequently keeps Christianity “concealed within his innermost being—perhaps concealed so well that it isn’t there at all.” In other words, the problem is that Christendom has occasioned a “complete change of scene with respect to being a Christian” because all “externality” has been abandoned and people have consigned “being a Christian to inwardness,” which means that “a universal ‘paid in full’ has been given and received for all of us. It is settled. We are all Christians, in exactly the same sense that we are all human beings.”
Anti-Climacus gives detailed consideration to how inwardness could be unmasked as nothing but the empty posturings of a pretended piety; to this end, he assembles entire catalogs of usable tactics and then settles on a relatively simple model: “Ought it not be possible to break this secrecy and make things somewhat manifest without presuming to become the Knower of Hearts [that is, God; see Acts 15:8]? Yes, indeed! How, then? Quite simply by letting a person, speaking only for himself, confess Christ in the midst of Christendom. He does not judge a single person, far from it; but many people will be made manifest by the way in which they judge him.”
If we ignore that fact that this entire business is not as easily done as we might think at first glance, the maneuver is dependent on a rather direct communication that is supposed to reveal indirectly the presence of the truth—or more likely—of untruth in “Christendom.” And if we object that, after all, this “confessing of Christ” has taken place Sunday after Sunday ever since Christianity was introduced into the country, then we have missed the point. For to confess Christ is in fact identical with being an “imitator, though not the sort of decorated, elegant imitator who brings profit to the firm, presenting Christ as someone who suffered many, many centuries ago. No, to be an imitator is to make your life as like his as a human life can be.” Therefore what the times need is not a Mynster, a Martensen, a Grundtvig, or any of the other ecclesiastical shopkeepers. On the contrary, they need a “witness, an informer, a spy, or whatever you want to call him, a person who in unconditional obedience and—in accordance with unconditional obedience, by being persecuted, by suffering, by dying—keeps the established order in suspense.”
We do not need to read the fine print in this job description to see that the person who fits the advertisement is a martyr. And if any doubts remain, the text provides additional information: “Everything that furnishes the standard of measure for unconditionality is eo ipso the sacrifice.” So there ought not be any further doubt about that. Things become more doubtful, of course, if we think a bit more about this advertisement, because even though Anti-Climacus’s idea is quite cunning, it is also marred by one little speck: The only way it can be put into practice is in real life—and with death as its consequence.
The problem is not only who is to be executed; it is also uncertain who will be the executioner. This is made clear in this fragment of dialogue: “‘How unreasonable,’ I hear someone say, ‘how unreasonable, it is of course impossible that we all can become martyrs. If we are all to become martyrs and be put to death, then who will put us to death?’” Anti-Climacus has to admit that when the matter is put this way, self-contradictions quickly develop. Nonetheless, he objects, this of course does not mean that an individual cannot take it upon himself to become a martyr. This is quite true, but it hardly solves the problem if no one answers the advertisement for martyrs. Anti-Climacus himself says thanks, but no thanks, with a somewhat ambiguous remark to the effect that he has “only purely formal knowledge of existential secrets” and is therefore not in fact obligated to actualize the maneuver.
What then? Well, then, nothing further. Nothing further, that is, if one bases one’s position on the “Moral” with which the first section of Practice concludes, where the following is stated: “And what does all this mean? It means that every individual, in quiet inwardness before God, must humble himself with respect to being a Christian in the strictest sense and admit honestly before God where he stands, so that he still might worthily receive the grace offered to every imperfect being—that is, to everyone. And then nothing further: then, for the rest, attend to his employment, happy with it, love his wife, happy with her, joyfully raise his children, love his fellow beings, take joy in life. If anything further is required of him, God will surely inform him of it, and will in that case help him further along.” This notion of making an admission is also present in a motto composed in June 1849 for use in connection with Practice, which Kierkegaard wrote, though he never used it: “I do not feel that I am strong enough to resemble you and in so doing die for you or for your cause; I content myself with something less, with worshipfully thanking you because you would die for me.”
So, nothing further. That’s all—at least for now. Thanks to this possibility of making an admission, a person may continue to live like some sort of Judge William with an enlightened false consciousness. Either mediocrity or martyrdom—that is the moral of the story. And therefore, more than anything else, the moral looks awfully much like so immoral a thing as hypocrisy, inasmuch as from beginning to end Practice had described one long movement in the direction of marginalization. And the individual’s inward “admission” is not sufficient to annul all those cunning plans about being a witness and a spy and whatever else one might call a martyr—all the less so because these plans had been so long in the making, and it would be a peculiar interruption of the trajectory if these plans were now to be called off by the “Moral” in Practice.
Nor were they called off. For while the reader might perhaps be satisfied with (as Grundtvig put it) “a humble, hearty, active life on earth” with his spouse and his little well-brought-up children, Kierkegaard went on criticizing inwardness as the hiding place of hypocrisy. This also had the effect of forcing him into a wide-ranging and sometimes problematic justification of his theological position vis-à-vis Luther, who, after all, had “made sheer inwardness his highest spiritual principle,” a principle that, according to Kierkegaard, “can become exceedingly dangerous, so that we could sink to the absolutely, positively lowest level of paganism.”
Kierkegaard’s quarrel with his Reformation colleague concerned the relation between faith and works, and it therefore particularly left its mark in a series of questions about the status of inwardness in a modern, secularized world where Christianity was no longer a scandalous reversal of all bourgeois values, but was invisibly concealed in the single individual—or more likely, repealed in the many! “Luther invented the idea that Christianity exists in order to provide reassurance,” a rebellious Kierkegaard wrote in 1854, when he also proposed his own unreassuring alternative: “If the New Testament is to decide what it means to be a true Christian, it would … be just as impossible to be a true Christian quietly as to fire a cannon quietly.”