ATheological Village Idiot
“That Line about Goldschmidt Was Fateful”
Kierkegaard knew well that with Practice in Christianity he had gone too far, and he imagined that Mynster would perhaps reprimand him with a “little dig in a sermon.” He was mistaken about this. The bishop chose another tactic. In mid-March 1851 Mynster entered the debate on civil marriage with a fifty-page essay titled Further Contributions to the Negotiations concerning Ecclesiastical Relations in Denmark, a copy of which he sent to Kierkegaard, whom he had cited a couple of times. Kierkegaard immediately read it and saw himself mentioned as “the gifted author.” And in a way that was fine. What was not so fine, however, was that a few lines earlier Mynster had alluded to Goldschmidt. True, Mynster did it indirectly and as an aside, but he did allude to Goldschmidt when he wrote, “Among the more fortunate appearances [Danish: Fremtoninger]—we adopt this word from one our most talented authors—that has manifested itself during these negotiations, et cetera….” This word for “appearance” was a new word in the Danish language and Mynster therefore gave credit to Goldschmidt, who had coined it, not by mentioning his name but simply by referring to him as “one of our most talented authors.”
Merely a bagatelle, perhaps, but trifles are not always trifling. And Goldschmidt was quite definitely not just anybody: He had been the editor of The Corsair. After selling the journal in October 1846 he had set out on a sort of delayed grand tour, and since his return he had served as editor and publisher of the periodical North and South, which he founded in December 1847. With these activities Goldschmidt had tried to put the sins of his past behind him, but when Kierkegaard read the article in the first issue of North and South, where Goldschmidt made a programmatic declaration of the new journal’s intentions, he thought its author gave the “impression of a confirmand” who knew his “lessons by heart,” but who, beyond this, hadn’t the faintest idea of what he was doing: “What an unbelievable difference between the cheeky Goldschmidt who took shelter behind a wall of privileged contemptibleness and the awkward, self-conscious little Goldschmidt. It is like when you see someone, who started out as the leading lion in all the low-life bars and dives, turn up in aristocratic society, standing there fussing with his cravat.” Once a knave, always a knave, Kierkegaard was fully convinced: “Goldschmidt—once the tool of contemptibleness, now the virtuous one, the goody-goody! Once the grinning mountebank—now the ethicist! Once, hiding behind the knaves, the darling of the mob—now the aristocrat, the fine, fine aristocrat, who hobnobs at the dinner table with barons and counts—and yet despite all the transformations, essentially the same.”
Here, without knowing it, Kierkegaard was, for the first and last time, in agreement with P. L. Møller, who shortly before his final departure from Denmark had encountered Goldschmidt (and had heaped scorn upon him for his opportunism.) In his first issue of North and South, Goldschmidt, the Jew, had praised the historical accomplishments of Christianity in glowing terms, and Møller, who was in an unusually bad mood that day, satirically congratulated Goldschmidt, telling him that he would surely be cited by Bishop Mynster, perhaps, indeed, even canonized, so that the faithful would make pilgrimages to the shrine containing his obviously so Christian-spirited bones. In his fury, Møller had said that by giving up The Corsair Goldschmidt had failed himself. Goldschmidt, Møller argued, had absolutely no natural tendency toward playing any positive role in public life. As Goldschmidt later recounted Møller’s words: “The corrosive Jewish nature required hatred, and it was in hatred that I had my strength.” Even though (according to Goldschmidt) Møller’s words had been devoid of any trace of “vulgar hatred of Jews,” the two had just barely managed to avoid parting on hostile terms.
The appreciative words about Goldschmidt that Mynster published in 1851 were thus a fulfillment of Møller’s prophecy from 1848, but in Kierkegaard’s eyes they were also a calculated provocation, because they gave tacit approval to the bestial treatment he had been accorded by The Corsair some years earlier. After all, the word “appearance” wasn’t that wonderful! Mynster could have written “phenomenon” if he had wanted to. But he didn’t, he wrote “appearance,” and he did it only so he could squeeze the two old enemies into the same sentence.
In no time at all there were a great many journal entries dealing with the notorious comparison with Goldschmidt, and there is some truth to the claim that in publishing his essay, Mynster had inaugurated a “second Corsair Affair.” Nor was Kierkegaard in doubt about the consequences Mynster’s remark would have, both in human terms and theologically: “That line about Goldschmidt was fateful. (1) It provided a sad insight into Mynster’s evil side. (2) It gives me precisely the hard evidence against Mynster that I would have to have if I were to attack. I have long been aware that his entire person was rather close to worldliness…. But this plain fact betrays the whole thing.”
On May 2, 1851, following a good many weeks of contorted reflections, Kierkegaard had a conversation with Mynster just prior to the bishop’s annual visitation journey. At first they spoke a little about the political situation of the day. Then Kierkegaard touched on his tactical use of Anti-Climacus, without which, he said, he would have been unable to criticize Rudelbach; Mynster agreed that this was so. Kierkegaard repeated that whatever Mynster might think of Practice, the book was and remained a defense of the established order. Then Kierkegaard suddenly turned the conversation to Mynster’s essay and said directly that the reason he had not thanked Mynster for it earlier was that it contained something he could not accept, the business about Goldschmidt. At this, the bishop was somewhat nonplussed and tried to smooth things over by explaining to Kierkegaard that it was much finer to be “gifted” than merely “talented.”
Kierkegaard was furthermore of the opinion that Mynster’s praise could be understood as putting the episcopal seal of approval on Goldschmidt’s behavior, and he reminded Mynster that he had enemies who might perhaps take advantage of his incautiousness. Kierkegaard again and again insisted that he was especially concerned for Mynster’s reputation and for any possible damage it might suffer—it must not be forgotten that Goldschmidt was an “expert at insidiousness.” Mynster ought to have demanded that Goldschmidt issue a retraction, and by the same token, now that he had been praised by Mynster, Goldschmidt himself ought to recant his past activities as an editor. “Then I said to him, ’It might seem strange to you that a younger person speaks in such a manner to someone older, but all the same, you will surely permit me to do so and will let me give you some advice: If there is anything about me that you disapprove of, if you would like to give me a slap, do it, do it. I can certainly take it, and I will surely take care to see that you do not suffer for it. But above all, do not do it in such a manner that your own reputation comes to suffer because of it. It is your reputation that concerns me.’” Kierkegaard was anxious to have Mynster grasp this point; he leaned across the table and practically wrote his words on the tabletop, so that Mynster would have no doubts about what he meant, and at the same time he was careful to give the bishop the opportunity to make a couple of comments as indications that he had understood what Kierkegaard had said. It was as though Kierkegaard were addressing himself to himself, as if Mynster were his shadow, his dopplegänger.
“In other respects, my conversation exuded all the devotion to him I have from my father,” Kierkegaard concluded. In a gesture somewhat unusual for Kierkegaard, he also chatted a little about Mynster’s family and his daughter’s pending wedding. Mynster, who generally played hard to get whenever Kierkegaard would broach the subject of future visits, was for the most part unusually open that day and told Kierkegaard that he was always welcome. They parted on the friendliest of terms: “He really does have my devotion, though of course it would do little good for me to proclaim in print how devoted I am to him, nor would it ever be understood.” It isn’t that easy to love someone else.
But in the margin opposite this journal entry, Kierkegaard added some lines that make it clear that this devotion was beginning to evaporate. For in his marginal comment, Kierkegaard considered whether Mynster had nonetheless in fact wanted to “affront me by placing me together with Goldschmidt.” Indeed, at the point in the conversation when Kierkegaard had insisted that Mynster compel Goldschmidt to recant “what he had done in the past,” Mynster had replied that of course, in that case, he would first have to read all of Goldschmidt’s books from cover to cover. “Yes, but Goldschmidt’s books are not the problem!” Kierkegaard had almost wanted to shout; he hadn’t been thinking of the books, but rather of the fact that for six years Goldschmidt had been editor of The Corsair and in this capacity had contributed to damaging Kierkegaard socially. Either Mynster had been completely naive when he talked that nonsense about having to read all of Goldschmidt’s books, or he was a cynic who enjoyed the fruits of power by pretending to be sympathetic. Kierkegaard could think of no third possibility, and his assessment of the situation was dramatic: “Perhaps Mynster is counting on my being too weak to be able, singlehandedly, to attack the entire established order. But he had better watch out…. I am not too weak to attack…. And I will be able do it in such a way as to induce both Martensen and Paulli to lean toward my side.” Though spurned, Kierkegaard’s devotion to Mynster retained its passion as it was transformed into hatred: “As I now understand the situation, I must regard Bishop Mynster as my most dangerous and most zealous opponent.”
Kierkegaard’s next visit to the episcopal residence took place on August 9, 1851. Mynster had just recently returned from a visitation journey during which he had been able to see things for himself and get a firsthand impression of the clerical and pastoral situation of the country, which in some places was quite dismal. Kierkegaard had sent him copies of Two Discourses for the Communion on Fridays and On My Work as an Author, both of which had been published on August 7, only two days previously, and he was thus able to make his entré with a pert observation: “Welcome home from your visitation journey. Your Reverence has of course already visited me as well, [in] the two books I have sent you.” This was a daring remark, bordering on the saucy, but Mynster had in fact “visited” Kierkegaard—not the Two Discourses, which Kierkegaard supposed he had read, but On My Work as an Author. “Yes, there is a thread that runs through the whole of it,” Mynster commented, “but it was spun after the fact—though, of course, you yourself say as much.” Kierkegaard replied that what was especially noteworthy was that throughout all the years and all the works, “[I had solely] devoted myself to one thing and that my pen had never deviated, not once.” Mynster objected that A Literary Review could probably be labeled as one such deviation, but Kierkegaard would not comment on that because the circumstances surrounding that work had already been explained in On My Work as an Author. “The sense I then had of Mynster was that, all in all, he had been impressed by the little book and that he was therefore at a loss for words.”
Despite the scant praise, the atmosphere was positive. Mynster was “pleased and satisfied,” which was particularly welcome since Kierkegaard had genuinely looked forward to talking with him “because today was the anniversary of my father’s death, and I wanted everything to be as it should be on this day.” He related this to Mynster, who apparently did not know what to make of this sentiment, but all the same the conversation was “extremely friendly” and “not without emotion.” Still, Kierkegaard did not refrain from once again “speaking a few words in which I expressed my disapproval of what he had said concerning Goldschmidt in his most recent book, something I especially felt the need to mention, since I had expressed so much devotion to him. Then we parted, he with his usual ‘Good-bye, dear friend.’ ”
This conversation was, if not his last with Mynster, then in any event the last one Kierkegaard recounted in detail. In a journal entry—“The Possible Collision with Mynster”—dating from mid-1852, Kierkegaard wrote that despite all their differences of opinion he was “devoted [to Mynster] with a hypochondriacal passion and on a scale that he has never suspected.” It could scarcely be better formulated—“a hypochondriacal passion!”
The ambivalent passion Kierkegaard felt may have been mirrored to some extent by a similar passion on Mynster’s part. At one point, when Mynster’s wife Fanny had become annoyed at Kierkegaard’s unending visits and advised her husband not to receive the bothersome guest so often, Mynster had merely replied, “Oh, well, just let me go out to see him—he may be the only person who really likes me.” Mynster had been able to sense his profound kinship with Kierkegaard, who for his part, even after the most fatiguing of encounters, never wearied of his refrain: “And yet I do love Bishop Mynster. My one desire is to do all I can to strengthen his reputation. For I have admired him and, humanly speaking, still do. And every time I can do something for his benefit, I remember my father, whom I believe it pleases.”
In a journal entry from June 29, 1855—“Some Historical Data concerning My Relation to Bishop Mynster”—Kierkegaard provides a compressed version: “During the final year I scarcely saw him at all. The next-to-last time I spoke with him was shortly after New Year’s Day, when he came out into the anteroom and said in the presence of the staff that he could not speak with me, that he had too much to do and that his eyes were bad. Then the last time I spoke with him was sometime in the early part of the summer. It was a long, unusually animated conversation. Contrary to his custom he followed me all the way out into the anteroom, still talking with me. When I left, I said to myself, ‘This will be the last time,’ and it was.”
It is impossible to determine the exact dates of these last two conversations, because “shortly after New Year’s Day” could refer either to 1852 or 1853, as could “sometime in the early part of the summer.” Kierkegaard nowhere related the contents of the “animated conversation,” yet we just might permit ourselves to suspect that he had given Mynster a foretaste of the attack that had been raging in his journals for a long time, but that would only be officially launched after Mynster was dead and buried. Despite what may have been a rupture in their relationship, Kierkegaard nevertheless continued to attend church when Mynster preached—every time he preached—with the exception of his final sermon at the Castle Church on December 26, 1853. Kierkegaard’s absence on that occasion was not owing to illness or because he had been prevented from attending for some other reason; rather, on that day he went to Holy Spirit Church to hear E. V. Kolthoff preach because he wished to “break with Father’s tradition.”
In their conversations Mynster had often said that it was not a question of who was stronger, but of who could hold out the longest. Kierkegaard was basically in agreement with this sentiment. Nor was he in doubt concerning the paradoxical outcome of the battle: “That I am right is something everybody knows, deep down—including Bishop Mynster. That I will not get my rights is something everybody knows—including me.”
Kierkegaard in the Citadel Church
A little event that took place amid Kierkegaard’s various visits to Mynster and his theological reflections provided a striking demonstration of the distance between Kierkegaard’s principles and his person, the gulf between the ideal he cherished and the physical reality of his own body. Kierkegaard had preached a couple of times at the Friday communion services at the Church of Our Lady, and this time—Sunday, May 18, 1851—he was to preach at the Citadel Church. He had considered using the occasion to read one of Mynster’s sermons aloud, thereby demonstrating that “edification is something quite different from a possible interest motivated by curiosity.” If he kept to that intention, he would also have taken the opportunity to say “a couple of words about the useful English custom that requires that sermons be read from a prepared text (because spontaneous speech can easily have an intoxicating effect and intoxicate the preacher himself), and about the beneficial effect of reading someone else’s sermon aloud, which reminds the speaker that he, too, is being addressed. I would also have said a couple of edifying words about the significance of Mynster’s sermons for me, something I inherited from my father.”
He abandoned this idea, however, and decided instead to preach on “my first, my beloved text, James 1.” This is the text about every good and perfect gift coming from above, coming down from the Father of Lights, in whom there is neither change nor shadow of change. Kierkegaard had used this text as the basis for the second of his Two Edifying Discourses from 1843 as well as for the second and third of his Four Edifying Discourses, also from 1843, so when he called it his “first” text, it was not without reason. And when Kierkegaard further termed it his “beloved” text, he was referring to the particular significance it had had during the period of his engagement. Moreover, he also acknowledged (“I confess it”) that he had “thought of ‘her’ ” when he chose these very verses from James as the text for his sermon that Sunday in the Citadel Church—he in fact had entertained the slight hope that Regine might come to the church that day, “if it would please her to hear me.” On September 3, 1855, when he published the sermon, titling it The Unchangingness of God, the brief preface—dated May 5, its author’s birthday—matter-of-factly told when the sermon had been delivered. But in the original draft Kierkegaard had told a different story, which brushed up against Regine in unmistakably erotic fashion: “I could call this text my first love—to which, of course, one always returns.”
The thought of Regine in the congregation did not make the sermon any easier to write: “Beforehand I suffered greatly from every sort of strain, as is always the case when I have to use my physical person.” In the morning, prior to his sermon, he prayed to God that something new might be born in him, and he became preoccupied with the notion that, just as parents raise their children and lead them to confirmation, the impending religious service was a sort of confirmation to which he was now being led by his heavenly Father.
The day after delivering his sermon the thirty-eight-year-old preacher felt so enfeebled that he promised himself that he would never take the pulpit again: “It went reasonably well, but my voice was so weak that people complained about not being able to hear…. On Monday I was so faint and weak it was frightful…. Then I became really sick.” One of those in the Citadel Church that Sunday was Peter Christian Zahle, an author and subsequently a pastor himself, and he had not been the least bit dissatisfied with Kierkegaard’s voice; on the contrary: “No one who has heard him preach will forget that extremely weak, but wonderfully expressive voice. Never have I heard a voice that was so capable of inflecting even the most delicate nuances of expression.”
And indeed, immediately after the church service Kierkegaard himself had felt fine, almost elated, but his plans of preparing and delivering several sermons in the course of the summer seemed unrealistic to him, for he realized that this sort of thing required “an abnormal amount of time.” Instead, he considered that he might perhaps preach extemporaneously, without a written text, which not only would save him time but would provide him the opportunity to put an absolute emphasis on existential matters. The more powerfully he pushed this idea, however, the weaker he became: “Then I understood things differently, that I had once again wanted to venture beyond my limits. And now, I repose in this thought: ‘Let My grace be sufficient for you’ [see 2 Corinthians 12:9]. My task is that of inward appropriation.”
Fan Mail
Fredrika Bremer had called Kierkegaard a “ladies’ author,” an epithet that had caused him to snort in contempt, but when we read the letters that arrived in response to his sermon in the Citadel Church, we are tempted to conclude that there was something to Bremer’s description. The erotic rhetoric that had been intended for Regine also had its effect on others. There was, for example, a letter, dated May 21, from a Miss “e-e” who called herself a “grateful reader and listener.” “I have heard that you are courteous and friendly to young people and indulgent with those who have gone astray, and I therefore turn to you confidently,” confessed e-e, who did not hesitate to tell her life’s story to the recipient of her letter. In keeping with the foolish spirit of the times, she had long failed to take God seriously. This, however, soon turned out to be a very bad idea. She had therefore sought “consolation in prayer,” but she nevertheless did not feel that God would listen to her. When she went to church she was unable to collect her thoughts and remain focused on the pastor’s sermon, and she also found it difficult to find peace for her soul in the available philosophical literature. “I had read Either/Or with profound admiration and I tried to borrow several of your works, because I could not afford to buy them. I obtained the Christian Discourses from 1848, which were not what I had wanted, but I read them—and how can I ever thank you enough! I found in them the source of life that has not failed me since.” Miss E-e enlarged on this at considerable length, but then she got to the point: “Last Sunday you were listed as the preacher at the Citadel. What could I do but walk out there? And I was not disappointed. It was not one of those sermons that I have so often heard and forgotten before it was finished. No, the speech issued forth from a warm, generous heart, terrifying, but also edifying and reassuring; and it penetrated to the heart, never to be forgotten, but to bear eternal fruits, rich with blessing.” Finally, Miss e-e noted that she would view it as a “gift of love from a person on whom God has conferred all the riches of the spirit” if Kierkegaard would “set aside his anonymity” by announcing himself as something more than merely a “theological graduate” and by providing advance notice of when he intended to speak in public. To judge from her request, e-e had not read the May 17, 1851 issue of Adresseavisen, because the list of preachers carried in that newspaper for the next day, the fourth Sunday after Easter, included, “the Citadel, Mr. Mag. S. Kierkegaard, 9:30 A.M.”
Another female fan also wrote a letter dated May 21. This was a Miss S. F., who infused four closely written pages with an enthusiasm the likes of which Kierkegaard could scarcely have seen before. She begged his pardon that a “woman” such as herself had the audacity to take up a pen. If she had been a “man, and thus capable of thinking and writing coherently,” she could of course have published “something about you and would not have needed to intrude upon your privacy.” She was contacting him because her “personal thanks to you are no one else’s business.” But she promised that this would be both the first and the last time that she wrote him a letter, “and if you burn this as soon as you have read it, then you will hardly notice it at all.” She had had an unforgettable day at the Citadel Church. “For me the day was a holy day of edification, and I believe that many others had the same feeling I had,” she wrote, employing a juicy metaphor: “When a cup is too full, it runs over. But when a poor heart is overfull, what is it to do? It must either burst or, like the cup, run over. That is what my heart is doing now. For truly, I cannot without fear and trembling approach this extraordinary situation, when I dare, in spite of your strict prohibition, to set pen to paper in order to thank you—oh remarkable man!—for the infinite wealth I owe to you…. I will not take up much of your time, or of mine, with what I know you consider a waste of time and the most superfluous of things, but I cannot die without having said to you that you are absolutely without peer. — I know very well that you do nothing but put a person in the right position, sharpen one’s vision, broaden one’s field of vision [and] delight the soul with your mastery of language and ideas—and that the things you proclaim are not really new discoveries of your own, but have existed as eternal truths since—yes, since eternity, of course. But all the same, inasmuch as, before you did so, no one had proclaimed these truths to me in such a manner that I could hear them (with the ears of my soul, that is) so that they took up their dwelling place in me and became my eternal possessions—I must surely be permitted to feel grateful to you, who awaken and enrich my thoughts! … And then this enchanting irony that makes you so indescribably superior and has an almost intoxicating effect on me…. I thought that I knew what it meant to laugh even before 1843, but no, only then, when I read Either/Or, did I get a notion of what it means to laugh from the bottom of one’s heart; and for the most part it was with my heart that I came to an overall understanding of the whole of what you said…. Now you mustn’t think that the only thing I have learned from these books is how to laugh. Oh, no, please believe that you have again and again awakened me so that I see myself and understand my task more clearly…. But I do hope that you will concede that it is no easy task to alter the whole of one’s inborn nature…. Now, if you think that I have managed to say one-twentieth of what I had to say to you, you are in error, but as a matter of form I shall come to a close, happily and gratefully signing myself one of your devoted female readers, S. F.”
Not quite two months later, on July 12, another letter arrived from a female admirer. Her name was Petronella Ross. She was deaf and had spent a number of years as a housekeeper for Poul Martin Møller’s father, after which she decided to enter a sort of convent, a residence for unmarried women of gentle birth, on the island of Falster. When she wrote her letter, Ross was in Copenhagen visiting her brother, a captain of infantry who happened to be Kierkegaard’s next-door neighbor, and she asked Kierkegaard to lend her a copy of Christian Discourses or “another of your works that you are not in too much of a hurry to have returned.” She also wanted to speak with Kierkegaard, whose brother and sister-in-law Elise Marie (“Maria”) Boisen (now long-since deceased) she remembered from her youth. She confided in Kierkegaard that “I enliven my solitude by testing my skills at writing,” and had written a “couple of tales of country village life” which Professor Sibbern had helped her get published. Sibbern had issued them under the title Stories for Simple Readers but had alas had the most unfortunate idea of replacing her splendid name with the dreadful pseudonym “Miss Deargood.” And to make things worse, a great many typographical errors had found their way into the final portion of the work. Nevertheless, if Kierkegaard would be interested in seeing these “little pieces” despite her rather lukewarm recommendation, the deaf conventual would be happy to send him a copy. She had recently read several pages of Kierkegaard’s “The Cares of Lowliness,” which, in her, had found their intended reader: “Thank you, good doctor, for every glimmering of light you shed upon the darkened lives of your fellow beings.” In a letter to Sibbern dated November 5, 1851, she told of the continuing joy she experienced when reading Kierkegaard—and if he became too complicated for her, she would simply lay the book aside and darn a stocking instead!
Ilia Fibiger, an elder sister of the Danish feminist Mathilde Fibiger, also wrote to Kierkegaard. Toward the end of November 1851 she very humbly asked if he would read several plays she had written and and sent to the Royal Theater, where they had been rejected. She straightforwardly admitted that she was not intellectual enough to follow Kierkegaard’s writing. But when she put aside one of Kierkegaard’s books unread, she consoled herself with the thought that he must find it just as easy to understand other people as other people found it difficult to understand him. She requested further that when he was done reading her plays, would Kierkegaard please send the manuscripts and his reply to the mysterious cipher “S.S.M. No. 54” at the local “postal delivery office,” which would forward the confidential package in accordance with Fibiger’s instructions. It all came to nothing. Kierkegaard never had the time to read Fibiger’s plays—nor, so far as is known, did he even take the time to write a reply. When they were once again brought into contact with one another it was much too late: Toward the end of 1855, this same Ilia Fibiger served as a nurse at Frederik’s Hospital, where she attended to Kierkegaard as he lay dying.
The literary petitions did not only come from women. In an undated letter we read that “a person completely unknown to you takes the liberty of appealing to you, Good Sir,” and the anonymous gentleman requested that Kierkegaard use his spare time to read through the enclosed manuscript and perhaps write a foreword in which he would commend the work to its readers. “For a number of different reasons I wish that the strictest anonymity be observed in connection with publication,” the letter noted brusquely. Kierkegaard was advised in the strongest terms against trying to discover the identity of the letter’s author; he was simply to place the manuscript and his reply in a sealed package to be returned as soon as possible to “219 Nørrevold, second floor, the door just opposite the stairway,” preferably between noon and 1:00 P.M. Most respectfully signed “C. R.”—presumably the young C.F.T. Reitzel, the son of Kierkegaard’s publisher, who in fact resided at the very address that was shrouded in such secrecy.
We might be tempted to smile a bit at these appeals, with their occasionally naive exuberance, but they were in fact not entirely devoid of a certain understanding of the thirty-eight-year-old preacher and author Søren Kierkegaard.
There were others who never took the opportunity to contact Kierkegaard and had to make do with noting their gratitude in their diaries for the benefit of posterity. Thus, for example, the painter Johan Thomas Lundbye wrote the following in his journal, dated October 31, 1847: “When my spirits are depressed and I almost tremble for what the immediate future may hold—ah, then I take consolation in Søren Kierkegaard’s newest book, Works of Love.” The following year Lundbye was killed during the war over Slesvig; a stray bullet entered his mouth and exited through the back of his head.
The Dedication to Regine
“Now they are being printed. Oh, I feel so inexplicably, unspeakably happy and relieved and confident and overwhelmed. Infinite love! I have suffered much during these days, terribly much. Ah, but still it comes back—an understanding of my task once again confronts me, but in an intensified form. And even if I have got it wrong seventeen times, in its grace, an infinite love has nonetheless made everything turn out for the best.” This was Kierkegaard’s reaction to the final publication of the manuscripts of On My Work as an Author and Two Discourses for the Communion on Fridays.
The preface of the Two Discourses contained a passage that has subsequently been quoted very often: “Progressing step-by-step, an authorial activity that began with Either/Or here seeks its decisive resting point at the foot of the altar, where the author—who is himself personally most aware of his own imperfection and guilt—by no means calls himself a witness to the truth, but only an unusual sort of poet and thinker who is ‘without authority’ and has had nothing new to say.” The little expression “witness to the truth” pointed toward events that would take place four years later.
With this, the canon seemed to be officially concluded. Kierkegaard had decided to dedicate the whole of his published work to Regine, but whether the dedication ought to appear in On My Work as an Author or in the Two Discourses long remained a painfully undecided question. He finally chose the latter work and then set sail on a small ocean of possible dedications—seventy thousand desperate fathoms of them:
Dedicated to an unnamed person, / whose name must not yet be mentioned / but which history will someday name, / and, for however long or short a period it may be, / it will be just as long as my own / et cetera.
*) Because of circumstances, the name in this dedication cannot / yet be added; but even so, it must nonetheless / be granted its place now.
With this book, an authorial activity, / which belongs to her to a certain extent, / is dedicated to R. S. / by someone who belongs to her entirely.
With this little book, the / entire authorial activity / is dedicated, / as it was from the beginning, / to a contemporary / whose name must not yet be mentioned, but which / history will name, for however / long or short a period it may be, / as long as it names my name.
Kierkegaard went on for quite a while longer than this, but then the final version turned up:
With this little book, the entire / authorial activity / is dedicated, / as it was from the beginning, / to an unnamed person / whose name will one day be named.
Kierkegaard most often had dedication copies of his works bound in white moiré or in shiny black paper covers and with gilt-edged pages, but the copies for Regine were the most sumptuous, printed as they were on very special paper—heavy vellum—as was the case with the Postscript, for example, which was bound in brown velvet and richly decorated with gold on the spine and the covers.
Regine never received her gift. It was simply put away in the shelfless mahogany cabinet.
ATheological Village Idiot
Both books, the Two Discourses and On My Work as an Author, were reviewed in Flyve-Posten on August 7, 1851, the very day they were published. The anonymous reviewer, who flatteringly referred to the author as “highly gifted,” drew the perhaps not unreasonable conclusion that Kierkegaard “now regards his work as an author as essentially concluded.” This was apparently not the case: “That is very amusing! I must have a friend, a benefactor, who has an interest—who has perhaps had this interest for quite a long time—in seeing that I stop being a writer pretty damned soon!” Kierkegaard’s mood was not improved when he learned—“quite by accident”—that the same review had been reprinted a couple of days later in the provincial newspaper Fyens Avis, though with the minor alteration “that the words ‘highly gifted’ are omitted.”
A little more than a month later, on September 16, 1851, there was yet another article on Kierkegaard in Flyve-Posten, in which a gentleman who signed himself “4651” more or less cautioned his readers against purchasing On My Work as an Author. Kierkegaard’s commentary on this: “The only thing I find noteworthy is … the signature, ‘4651.’ It is impressive, convincing, and overpowering. If the dreadful thing happens, and someone now comes along who signs himself ‘789,691,’ I would be crushed.”
In late October, Kierkegaard sounded what was to all appearances an unusually hopeful note: “But now my star is in the ascendant in Denmark. A special little book has appeared, a sort of review.” It soon becomes clear, however, that Kierkegaard was being ironic and that he had every reason to be. For what occasioned his feigned jubilation was the appearance a couple of weeks earlier of an anoymous piece entitled On Magister S. Kierkegaard’s Work as an Author. Observations of a Village Pastor. The village pastor was actually Ludvig Gude, who was a close friend of Martensen, which did not bode well. And Kierkegaard was not exactly delighted. True, Gude often employed civil enough language, calling Kierkegaard an excellent, brilliant, noble, and singular author: “Indeed, he practically lavished flattering adjectives upon me as an author.” Despite this, however, Gude generally took a rather superior and standoffish view of the works, and his approach was marred by a series of blunders that Kierkegaard commented on in such detail that his own remarks soon constituted a fifty-page manuscript!
First of all, the village pastor had not read the works systematically at all—which, incidentally, he himself had admitted as early as page five—so that the title of his little work was misleading, at the very least. Second of all, the village pastor had not been able to differentiate between the pseudonymous works and those in Kierkegaard’s own name and had thereby failed to appreciate the finely honed dialectic that runs through the canon: “It is easy to see how someone who wanted to have (as it is called) a little fun and games in the literary world has only to take a hodgepodge of quotations, some from ‘the Seducer,’ some from Johannes Climacus, some from myself, et cetera, print them all together as though they were all my words, point out the contradictions among them, and thus produce a confused and motley impression, as if the author were some sort of a lunatic. Hurrah!” This sort of maneuver has also been practiced in more recent times under the banner bearing the device “deconstruction.” Third of all, the author had the obsessive notion that Kierkegaard supposedly valued direct communication higher than the indirect variety, a view that Kierkegaard—very directly—opposed, invoking an almost Nietzschean authority: “Indirect communication is the highest communication. But it really only exists in the category of the superhuman. Therefore, I have never dared to use it under my own name.” Fourth of all, it was outrageous for this village pastor—if it really was a village pastor, which Kierkegaard had many doubts about—to publish an anonymous polemic: “At one point in the book, the village pastor anonymously confronts me, naming my name, arguing heatedly—in an enchanting lecture! objectively!—against concealment. Look, this is nonsense. And I do not want to get involved in nonsense. This is precisely the sort of objective nonsense I am constantly battling against. And all the bluster to the effect that they are anonymous for the sake of the cause, et cetera—all these oncepopular slogans are already well on their way out.”
This having been said, the matter ought to have been made reasonably clear, even to a narrow-minded village pastor. As had happened so often before, Kierkegaard’s polemical rejoinders became less and less suitable for use as he injected more and more aggressive bombast into his sentences, draft after draft. Therefore, on a couple of new pages he produced a fractional and compressed version of the original manuscript. Here he put forward a “few preconditions” for future discussions, stipulating that, for one thing, the village pastor would have to alter the title of his piece; for another, he would have to indicate precisely which of Kierkegaard’s books he had read; and finally he would have to reveal his name. Kierkegaard concluded: “I dare say that I am … both accommodating and willing. But there is one thing I want: The situation must make sense, it must be orderly, there must be some decency—or I won’t get involved.” Like so many others, these lines never reached their intended reader.
The conclusion of Kierkegaard’s canon was a waiting game. For Self-Examination: Recommended to the Present Age was published on September 10, 1851—the eleventh anniversary of the day on which Regine had agreed to Kierkegaard’s proposal of marriage. Kierkegaard had conceived the idea of the book in May 1850, and the manuscript had taken shape quite quickly. The book was formed out of three sermons he had at one point considered delivering—before he had been overwhelmed by his sermon at the Citadel Church. The first of these sermons was thirty-eight pages long, however, and had it actually been delivered as a sermon, it would have needed to be reworked, while the other two were each seventeen pages long and thus of a length that would have permitted their use as actual sermons. In this work he once again gave Mynster a little prod: “Permit me to state exactly where I stand, so to speak. There is in our midst a very reverend old man, the leading prelate of this Church. What he has wanted, what his ‘sermons’ have wanted, is the same thing I want, except that I want it in a major key, something that can be explained by the difference between my personality and his and by the different requirements of the times.”
For Self-Examination was well received in the literary world and, like the Two Discourses for the Communion on Fridays, it enjoyed the unusual fate of appearing in a second printing in the year immediately following its original publication. It took five years for Works of Love and Practice in Christianity to appear in a second printing, while Stages on Life’s Way had to wait thirteen and Fear and Trembling all of fourteen years.