“Christianity Is the Invention of Satan”
A Life in the Underworld
“I have read what I must call the most monstrous of all the polemics that have ever been written against me, A Life in the Underworld. The author is anonymous, but in reality it is Rasmus Nielsen, just as surely as I am the person writing this letter.” The person writing the letter was Martensen; the letter was addressed to Gude; the date was February 21, 1853. “I am the person who is depicted as ‘A Soul after Death’—naturally, without naming me by name—and I am found guilty of having done absolutely nothing for the sake of Christ, while I was alive, but of having sought only to advance my own reputation…. He [Nielsen, the “anonymous” author] himself appears in the work and encounters me in the person of ‘a rag,’ who confronts me with the assertion that it was only with the assistance of worldly weapons and cliques that I was able to best him in literary combat. Paulli, Mynster, and others also appear in the work without being mentioned by name. For example, Paulli speaks at my funeral, et cetera, et cetera … This odious business falls outside all categories…. [I] am really concerned about him. If only he had a friend who could bring some peace to his soul!” Martensen also reported that Mynster did not want to read the book, while Paulli, on the other hand, had read it but, like Martensen himself, had sent it back to the book dealer because he did not want to lend support to such terribly trashy business. “It is a dreadful scandal, and I dare say quite frankly that the very best thing for him would be for this book to go its way unnoticed…. Oh, the things one has to experience—it is truly appalling…. He has gone out on Kierkegaardian thin ice, far from all human assistance, where he must slip and fall—if he avoids falling in! Naturally, Kierkegaard is not the man who is willing or able to take care of him and give him some guidance. How will it all end?”
The occasion of all this fuss was Rasmus Nielsen’s newly published book, A Life in the Underworld, which had appeared under the pseudonym Walther Paying. The book, just under two hundred pages long, is a sort of roman à clef, displaying rather more imagination than talent, but it is entertaining reading and—as the furious Martensen put it—with its “infinite number of allusions,” it crackled with polemics directed at various aspects of ecclesiastical and cultural life in Copenhagen. Martensen himself was the unnamed principal figure in the book, its first-person narrator. After a moving funeral (where Paulli gives the “funeral oration” Martensen had written for himself), the Martensen figure is sent down to the underworld, which he tours with his Dogmatics—“the unsullied doctrine”—under his arm, searching for the New Jerusalem. No sooner does he escape from a number of ferocious snakes and lizards—over whose sinful heads he had waved his Dogmatics so that “light had leapt forth from the gilded letters”—than he hears a voice that commands him, “Stand back!” The voice emanates from a “simple man wearing a shirt and cap,” and this strangely dressed man turns out to be none other than Kierkegaard, who in the three ensuing chapters appears as an apocalyptic figure, urging Martensen to be more sober-minded and presenting him with a number of subjective truths. Thus one of the first questions he puts to Martensen is: “What are you?” Martensen replies: “Esteemed Sir! Who I am and what I am are things you yourself will be able to state when you see that I am a man with a Dogmatics and an image of Christ. It is rather I, who should ask you, What are you? Who are you? And who has authorized you to address me in such a manner?” To which Kierkegaard replies: “Man, look where you are standing!” Martensen sees that he is standing on a narrow, rickety bridge over a dark chasm. The bridge collapses shortly thereafter, but he is rescued and comes to a ravine in the mountains, where he sees that he is surrounded on every side by white marble statues depicting figures, each of whom, like Martensen, is standing on a granite column and bearing a book: “Men of all confessions in the Church—Greeks, Romans, Calvinists, Anglicans, Lutherans—who became fossilized in what they termed the unsullied doctrine.” Martensen himself feels fossilized and is uncertain whether he has been addressed by an actual spirit or merely by Kierkegaard. “Demon, angel, power, might, potency, I do not know what you call yourself,” he exclaims, both scandalized and fearful, “You wish to condemn me to stand on this column like a stone because I cling to the unsullied doctrine; this judgment is unjust…. Perhaps these fossilized spirits have only had the doctrine, but of course I have both the life and the doctrine.”
The voice asks Martensen to name the most important thing in his life, and when he replies “the cause of Jesus Christ and his congregation,” he is required to give an accounting of what he has done for the sake of Christ, exclusively and solely for the sake of Christ. Martensen is unable to do so, and in any event certainly not in a single word, because it would require a “coherent, edifying lecture,” and he therefore asks for time in order to write a sermon. For this purpose he is given access to a comfortable study, complete with a Bible and collections of sermons, but just as he is provided with the necessary paraphernalia, everything disappears and he finds himself at the entrance to a garden surrounded by a high wall with an iron gate. A liveried footman appears and lets him into the garden. “High up on a terrace that lay some distance away, there was a solitary building, half modern villa, half monastery. The surroundings had the appearance of a lovely place in the country, seen on a clear, moonlit evening. The building itself was brightly illuminated from within. Through the windows I could clearly see the form of a man moving quickly from one place to another, like someone who has something to do.” In this description we easily recognize Kierkegaard’s house by Sortedam Lake. The pretty garden is depicted as a real labyrinth: “The path bent and twisted and turned so sinuously that it took a while before we reached the end.” Might this be a metaphorical depiction of the convoluted and serpentine canon of Kierkegaard’s works? It certainly seems so. And indeed, as Martensen makes his way up to the house, he remarks to himself, “a curious style, a complex, fantastic arrangement.” “Scattered about were the leafy but exceedingly varied crowns of tall trees looming above the bushes and smaller plants, their trunks covered with ivy and wild vines. Countless little patches of light played across the slender branches, and the dew glistened on the fresh grass. Everything was teeming, lush with blossoms and with scents; it was the most luxuriant vegetation I have ever seen.”
Our terrified main character mounts a spiral staircase and enters a brightly lit room where a librarian confronts him with “two elegant bookcases, placed on either side of the door”—just as in Kierkegaard’s apartment—and Martensen now had to choose between Kierkegaard’s works, on the one side, and Mynster’s, on the other. “In the collection on the left can be found a number of edifying discourses as well as some penitential and Lenten sermons, which in my view are very Christian, but they are absolutely subjective,” the librarian informs him. “I attribute no importance to the author’s name; they are more or less anonymous.” On the right there are some lyrical sermons of the opposite type, inasmuch as they have an “objectivetheological-ecclesiastical character that has made them very beloved by the congregation.” “Your Reverence,” the librarian exclaims, “please choose, either the bookcase on the left or the bookcase on the right.” Predictably enough, Martensen chooses the bookcase on the right, which is subdivided into sections containing ancient and modern literature, and when the librarian pulls out a little “funeral oration” that has attracted attention both among the living and the dead, Martensen sees his own name on the title page!
Now he must compose his sermon, and the librarian promises him that the congregation will appear as soon as he is finished and pulls on the bell rope. Martensen is just about to thank the librarian, when all the lights are suddenly extinguished. This, the librarian explains, is because the master of the house is an extraordinarily punctilious man who is of the opinion that a “genuine and capable personality always has light within himself.” After all these hindrances, Martensen finally gets down to his religious task, his sermon, but it eludes him. He really believes that everything has already been said in the excellent “funeral oration,” from his own funeral, and he thumbs frantically through the New Testament without finding anything appropriate for himself, because the whole book is too subjective. Tucking his unfinished sermon, his image of Christ, and his Dogmatics under his arm, he wanders out into the garden, which appears to be a moonlit wilderness, blanketed in fog: “It continually seemed to me as though there were someone walking behind me, but when I looked back, there was no one there…. It is unpleasant enough to be afraid of something, but to be afraid of nothing is terrifying.” Martensen argues with himself and with his damnable surroundings, which do not at all measure up to his notions of proper proportion: “Everything is baroque, ornate, twisted, curved, convoluted, contorted…. I’m being made a fool of; I’m being deceived.” He takes refuge in his Dogmatics and its definitions of the Devil, but he comes to the desperate conclusion that the present case is more a matter of deviltry: “After all, the Devil as such is something one can get away from, but sheer deviltry is so cunning that it scoffs at all dogmatic speculation. This makes it clear, furthermore, that sheer deviltry is worse than the sheer Devil.” Martensen is forced to fall to his knees, and in this kneeling position he offers a repentant confession: “What I am, and what I have done for the sake of Christ is something I cannot say in words, neither in a few words nor in a sermon. But this much I can say, that the main thing is that I was born objectively, baptized objectively, and died objectively, and therefore I humbly pray that you save me from all subjective verbosity!” He leaves the mysterious house through an open wrought-iron gate. “I did not want to look back. I had the definite feeling that the shadow was right at my back, that he stood at the gate—and bowed.”
A tempestuous sequence follows. Martensen puts out to sea and falls into the clutches of a “ragged, spiritless, coarse, unimaginative crab, a dilettante of a monster,” who in fact has the nerve to gobble up his Dogmatics. Next, he is compelled to endure the company of a number of Hottentots who, to his absolute disgust, are positively steaming with carnality. Finally, he is subjected to a most agonizing cross-examination by an elegant “catechist” who just might be Mynster. After all this and quite a bit more, the sorely tested Martensen suddenly finds himself on a barren moor, where he meets a man who is searching for a bill from a tailor, which has fallen out of his coat pocket. The man claims that he is a “rag” and is (according to Martensen’s subsequent identification) Rasmus Nielsen himself. In any case, Martensen is extremely eager to enter “into the heavenly Jerusalem with full pomp,” and since he would like to have company, he is compelled to beat his own drum a little. So he asks, “Do you know what I am?” “No, Good Lord, how should I know that?” Nielsen replies impertinently. This irritates Martensen so much that he completely loses control: “Now, listen here, and I will tell you in direct communication. I am, in my view, dogmatics incarnate, objective, essential churchmanship.”
Nielsen “the rag” still does not understand all this dogmatic hocus-pocus, but he unhesitatingly proposes that the two recognize one another: “Now, understand me well. You are a hero, I am a rag. You are a great hero, I am a great rag. You are great in your field, I am great in mine. Shouldn’t we two great men agree to recognize one another?” Martensen does not feel tempted to participate in this sort of dialectic of recognition, and Nielsen therefore provides assurances that he has always been hardworking and that deep down he is “full of ferment.” Indeed, he confesses, “even though I have never found repose in any abiding form, I have nonetheless continually searched after some contents.” This is rather bluntly put, but Nielsen goes a step further in the painful genre of confessions, telling Martensen that no matter what he wrote or when he wrote it, “experts were immediately able to see that I am a tiresome imitator, and every literary huckster congratulated me on my talents as a copycat.”
Terrified at this display of penitence, Martensen wants to know how things went for Nielsen in the underworld. So Nielsen recounts how, shortly after his death, he came to a “great, wide, deep river that I ultimately had to cross. Finally, when I could not find any way for a person to get across, I cried out for help. A man who stood on the other side …” “Was it someone with a cap?” Martensen interrupts rather frantically. But Nielsen doesn’t know, he remembers only that someone called out in a demanding voice, “Soul, what are you?” to which Nielsen humbly replied: “Lord, in the world I was nothing and am nothing to God. Have mercy upon me and help me across the river.” The man on the other side of the river commanded Nielsen to remove his clothes and jump into the river; then he would be received with open arms. But Nielsen hesitated. The river was deep and wide, and when he dipped his fingertips into the water, flames flared up, completely covering his hand. “Then I whimpered and begged the man please to have mercy upon me, because I could not do it and I did not dare to throw myself into such a stream of fire.”
Martensen supposes that the man became annoyed and chased Nielsen away, but no, Nielsen replies, he did not: “He threw a bridge across the river and ordered to me to come as I was. And I did so, profoundly grateful for his assistance. But as I was on my knees and about to thank him, he seized me in his powerful hands, took a glistening basin, dipped it into the river, and held my hands in the flames…. I begged, I wailed, I accused him, I cried out to Heaven, but the strong man was implacable. When he had held me like this for as long as he wanted, I finally had to beg forgiveness, and then he let me go. My fingers were glowing, but I was freezing cold because I was naked!”
Martensen has listened to all this with bated breath and wants to know whether Nielsen ever got his clothing back, to which Nielsen answers that the unnamed person had thrown his clothing into the river of fire. “Did he give you an old coat?” inquires Martensen. No, replies Nielsen, he did not give me his coat, he only lent it to me—for the time being. “Good Lord, so you really are, …” and Nielsen gets the final word, “a rag.”
The novel keeps going, over literary sticks and stones, but we will stop here. A Life in the Underworld is not a brilliant work of art, but if we bear in mind that it was written by a professor of philosophy, the visionary leaps and the flickering scenes are in fact quite impressive. Clearly the most important motive behind the novel was animosity toward Martensen, a distaste for his polished, affected manner, for his elegant unnaturalness, his artificiality, and for his ludicrous and superstitious belief in a dogmatic system. But the novel was also—albeit rather naively—Nielsen’s attempt at reconciliation, at compromise, an effort to make himself comprehensible to Martensen, whose recognition he sought. The novel is certainly not a piece of confessional literature, but it is nonetheless very open and indiscreet, and it is clear that Nielsen felt oppressed and unable to resolve the conflicts he himself depicted between Kierkegaard and Martensen. Kierkegaard had demanded that Nielsen show a determination that he could not summon up, and Nielsen openly confessed to his copying: He was nothing but a rag; he had wrapped himself in Kierkegaard’s cast-off coats, and even those were only on loan. But at the same time, we sense Nielsen’s fear of Kierkegaard’s undertaking, which with its extreme subjectivism also had a demonic dimension, at times actually coming close to violating Nielsen’s integrity as a person.
Nielsen later filled out his portrait of Kierkegaard in several drafts of a lecture that he had apparently wanted to deliver at the university in one of the series of popular lectures that were offered in the evenings for the general public. On a large sheet of paper under the heading, “Movements of Ideas,” Nielsen wrote straightforwardly that “Kierkegaard was our greatest Christian thinker.” But then he added that this same Kierkegaard, “with an obstinate zeal, with a penchant for paradoxes, with a nervous melancholia, had wanted to revive Christianity and to whip himself up into being a Christian (a genuine imitator of Christ). But what did he discover?—that Christianity is and remains dead (only a semblance of life and something imaginary), that not even he himself could become a Christian. An honest man who said this candidly.”
Nielsen: A Demonic Scoundrel
The weeks following the publication of Nielsen’s underworld novel were dramatic. Martensen did everything he could to avoid Nielsen, and he thought even guttersnipes ought to do the same. Somewhere around town Paulli had spoken with Kierkegaard, who (according to Martensen) “was extremely critical of the product,” finding it “frightful that a person could be so ‘thin-skinned’ that such a polemic could still pain him three years later.” Martensen could report, further, that Kierkegaard claimed to have provided no encouragement whatever in support of Nielsen’s attack: “Paulli remains convinced that all this was honestly said. Of course, this is possible. And as far as possible one ought to believe the best, particularly in this matter. But it is nonetheless certain that Kierkegaard has assumed an arrogant, ambivalent, and equivocal posture throughout this entire affair.”
Gude had read the book and called it anti-Christian, which Martensen thought was a quite appropriate description, because Nielsen had of course “profaned Scriptural passages by weaving them into his persiflage.” Quite simply, Nielsen had taken “what is holy” in vain; this was Martensen’s version of Mynster’s remark that Kierkegaard’s Practice in Christianity had been “blasphemous toying with what is holy.” Nielsen was furthermore a “scoundrel,” only a hairsbreadth removed from “something demonic.” That he called himself “a rag” was only “disgusting cynicism”; indeed, there was “in general something cynical running through the whole of that monstrous product.”
The day after writing these lines, Martensen was in church to hear Paulli deliver an “edifying sermon” about Peter’s denial of Christ. It was Paulli’s birthday, and Martensen spent most of the day with a “pleasant little group of people at the episcopal residence in the company of our beloved bishop.” On Monday, Fædrelandet carried a rather harsh review, four columns long, which Martensen found “relatively satisfying, inasmuch as it at least declared the entire project flawed and also rebutted [Nielsen’s] shameless views.” Naturally, Martensen would have preferred that the book be ignored to death, with Nielsen receiving a sound drubbing so that people would realize “what a coarse and wretched fellow he is.” What ought to have been made clear was that “from now on [Nielsen] has lost all respect as a scholar and as a public teacher at the university,” because such an “attempted assassination” must necessarily result in “the most dishonorable sort of bankruptcy for a professor and a member of the Faculty of Philosophy.” If something like this had taken place in Germany, the students would have boycotted his classes. Martensen also attended a birthday celebration for W. H. Rothe, Dr. theol., parish pastor at Trinity Church. Nielsen had been invited as well, but as Martensen wrote, “Naturally, I took absolutely no notice of him.” There are true prophets and there are false prophets, and Martensen enjoyed the privilege of never having any doubts about which were which.
In a letter dated March 15, 1853, Martensen finally found something to be pleased about: “[Nielsen’s] product is making no headway and has won no sympathy.” The previous day he had spoken with young Rothe, who quoted Nielsen as having said that he “had high hopes that the whole matter would come to a favorable conclusion and that he now had the most exquisite peace of mind,” harboring “the most charitable feelings” for Martensen. For his part, Martensen termed Nielsen’s remarks “rather frightful rubbish” and found it typical of Nielsen that he wanted to “argue away his own words.” Martensen did insist, however, that he had “absolutely no feelings of hatred toward Nielsen,” whose natural talents he had always acknowledged; but it went without saying that it was impossible for Martensen “to respect him, particularly after this latest piece of villainy.”
In his conversation with Rothe, Nielsen had intimated that if Martensen would speak with him about their personal disagreements and display the requisite respect, he would not only view himself “as someone personally vanquished,” but he would also “make a public statement to this effect, by which the scholarly question would be absolutely separated and set aside as an open matter for future discussion.” The notion of such a statement might well call to mind the admission that Kierkegaard would demand from Martensen a little more than a year later, but Martensen had absolutely no plans to do any such thing. “But isn’t this quite obviously the Devil’s own nonsense?” he remarked to Gude, at the same time taking the opportunity to encourage Gude to criticize Nielsen, who as a “scoundrel” really “needs to be taken to task.” Gude ought to criticize Nielsen in writing and in the form of “direct communication,” something that should really “be regarded as a work of love,” because, despite everything, Nielsen was “too good to lose.” But, Martensen also insisted, if Gude wrote in this connection he would have to do so in such a manner that Nielsen “would not be able in any way whatever … to see in it any indirect communication from myself.”
On May 23 Kierkegaard encountered Martensen on the street, and according to Martensen, Kierkegaard utterly “disavowed” Nielsen. Shortly after this encounter, Martensen expressed his fervent desire to be able to pay a visit to Mr. and Mrs. Gude down in his “beloved Lolland” for a few weeks in the latter part of the summer. In his subsequent letter, dated July 22, Martensen inquired about developments with respect to “cholera in Lolland,” unhappily noting its “violent spread in Copenhagen.” Gude apparently replied to Martensen that he was very welcome, but Martensen nonetheless decided to prolong his stay in Slesvig “right up to the end of the vacation.”
And that was probably the most intelligent thing to do. For while these clerics were quite furiously writing about, to, for, with, and against one another, there were people who had something entirely different to think about.
“One Day I Saw the Corpse Bus Come”
For twenty years the Asiatic cholera had been lying in wait just beyond the Danish border, reaching Berlin, Hamburg, and Holstein in 1831. Precautionary measures were taken—people arriving by sea were quarantined, and the border in southern Jutland was closed. An Extraordinary Health Commission was convened in Copenhagen, cholera wards were set up in the naval hospital and in the workhouse affiliated with the Church of Our Lady, and instructions about how to deal with the illness were circulated. But the danger passed, the Health Commission was disbanded, and the other arrangements came to nothing.
In the course of 1848, the disease reached Saint Petersburg, thence to Helsingfors in Finland, and in Denmark a few cases appeared in Dragør, southeast of Copenhagen. In 1850, the southern Swedish city of Malmö, just across the Sound from Copenhagen, and the north German city of Lübeck reported cases of cholera, and there were a few cases in Denmark, specifically in Bandholm, a small town on the southern island of Lolland, and in Korsør, a market town in southwest Zealand. These cases prompted new mobilizations. The old arrangements were trotted out once again, the Health Commission was revived, and a quarantine ward, headed by an industrious physician named Dr. Hjaltelin, was set up in Klampenborg, about eight miles north of Copenhagen. But there was still little in the way of reforms in the sanitation system, and even the most modest proposals—for example, having courtyards swept and gutters cleaned—were met with disapproval and inertia on the part of the landowners represented in the city government. No one really believed that such arrangements would do any good, and they were suspended once again in 1852.
But then came the summer of cholera, 1853. The first cases were reported on June 11, and the first deaths four days later. During the following week eight more died, and on June 24 the city was officially declared to be infested with the disease. The next day the Health Commission was convened, and reporting centers were established at various places in the city; these were to remain open around the clock, reporting on deaths from the disease. The first deaths were in the old naval district of Nyboder and neighboring areas in the eastern part of the city. In Adelgade, a densely populated street, 514 people were infected with the disease, of whom 331 died. But even an aristocratic street like Amaliegade—not far away from Adelgade—was hard hit. This was not surprising because the entire neighborhood had been built atop old sewage pits, which provided ideal growing conditions for bacteria.
The mortality rate was highest among those who lived in the back premises that were tucked away in courtyards, in cellars, or in garrets and lofts. At the outbreak of the disease, Captain Herforth, the chief administrator of the General Hospital, took no other measures than to order two hundred coffins. Before the cholera outbreak, the hospital had housed close to twelve hundred patients, crammed together under truly dreadful circumstances. It took two weeks for the disease to find its way into the hospital, but when it did, it found nearly perfect conditions. In the course of only five weeks, 538 people died. No one had any idea of what to do with all the corpses, and it was necessary to apply to the Ministry of War to borrow tents, which were set up in the cemeteries and served as temporary morgues. Special shelters for corpses were set up on the potter’s field at Assistens Cemetery and at the cemetery just outside Amagerport. Under normal circumstances, a corpse was to be transported in a hearse from the home of the deceased to the cemetery. After the plague of 1711, a group of university students residing at Regensen College had been granted a monopoly on this work, but under the extreme circumstances of the 1853 cholera epidemic, these “corpse bearers” could not keep up. In a letter dated August 7, 1853, Hans Brøchner provided the following sketch of the primitive and macabre scenes unfolding before his eyes as he strolled about in Copenhagen: “At every hour of the day, from the earliest morning until late in the evening, when I walked toward the city I could see funeral processions, and on the short walk to the gate [Nørreport] (I live just beyond the lakes) I would encounter three different processions. People have used the most amazingly varied means of transport: old, rickety hearses, commercial wagons, farm carts, buses, and furniture wagons—though I have not seen the wheelbarrows mentioned in the Kjøbenhavnsposten. At the cemetery, matters are handled with a minimum of ceremony. One day I saw the corpse bus come out there with six coffins. One of the grave diggers opened it and crawled in behind the coffins, which he shoved out as though they were freight, and the other fellows took hold of them, uttering all sorts of cheerful remarks…. The coffins were flat, made out of six blackened boards, and were so poorly constructed that the lid of one came off when it was unloaded, which one of the fellows took care of by banging it back in place with his fist.”
The epidemic spread during July, culminating at the end of the month. Its ravages continued throughout the whole of August, became more sporadic in September, then started to decline, with the last case reported on October 13. By then the pestilence had lasted four months. Of the city’s 130,000 inhabitants, 7,219 had fallen ill from the disease and 4,737 had died. One of the more prominent victims was the painter C. W. Eckersberg.
The cholera marked the end of the old, “snug and cozy” Copenhagen. It was clear to most people that the inner city had to be relieved of the burden of some of the population that had been crammed into it. So the dismantling of the city’s picturesque ramparts was begun, permitting the population to move into the territory beyond the old gates and giving the city some fresh air. Most of all, the cholera had served as a somber reminder that something had to be done about sanitation. The uninvited guest had not visited the city in vain.
“The Prices Must Be Jacked Up in the Salon”
It was a strange reminder of the concept of “contemporaneity”: While Copenhageners were dying in droves, Kierkegaard was considering the question of whether—and, if so, how—a person could defend allowing himself to be put to death for the truth! Although it is true that his immediate neighborhood had not been especially hard hit by the ravages of the cholera epidemic, it is nonetheless striking that at the time he made no mention of it at all in his journals. It was not until a year later, in October 1854, that he wrote an entry with the heading “The Significance of Cholera,” in which he explained that the disease had managed to “drill into people the fact that they are individuals, which neither war nor any other calamity manages to do; rather, they herd people together into groups. But pestilence disperses people into individuals, teaching them—corporeally—that they are individuals.”
But Kierkegaard was far from indifferent about the society that surrounded him, and in his final years he developed the rudiments of something that could, for want of a better designation, be called a sort of Christian socialism. Surprisingly enough, in some places his ideas are so similar to those of the socialist thinkers that we could be tempted to believe that he had secretly read them, though such a suspicion would be unfounded. His library did include Sibbern’s Some Observations concerning the State and Church, published in October 1849, but he had long since abandoned Sibbern—quite bluntly labeling his old teacher as a fool—and therefore it is hardly likely that he had read Sibbern’s brief but pointed criticism of the negative effects of rapid democratization and the principle of competition—effects Sibbern wanted to alleviate by implementing fundamental social reforms.
On the other hand, it is not inconceivable that Kierkegaard might have had some acquaintance with the work of Frederik Dreier, a young socialist writer whose works he could have borrowed from the Athenæum library, which he visited quite frequently during these years. However that may be, deviating wildly as they did from the naive and all-too-optimistic expectations of Biedermeier culture, Kierkegaard and Dreier stand as two radical exceptions to the Danish intellectual life of the period. If Kierkegaard had read Dreier’s Belief in Spirits and Freethinking from 1852, he would have recognized many of his own views, but in mirror-image, so to speak. Dreier criticized religion from the standpoint of a natural-scientific, positivistic, and socialist view of man, repudiating various religious notions and tenets as manifestations of ignorance, superstition, and an outdated belief in authority. In the introduction to his book, Dreier subjected the clergy and theology to an attack that was a remarkable anticipation of what Kierkegaard would later produce: “It scarcely takes great daring to say that we shall soon see people laughing pastors, professors, and other phrasemongers out of their roles. Laughter is a powerful weapon, and we shall soon see that those who laugh last, laugh best.” His prophecy was to be fulfilled three years later. In his polemic against clerical conservatism, Dreier emphasized that “Christ did not shrink from talking to the common man on the street and in the marketplace, teaching him about the villainy of the ruling class and the uselessness of inherited ceremonies.” In April 1855, Kierkegaard would write: “So preaching should not take place in churches, but on the street, in the midst of life, in the reality of the daily workaday world.”
Dreier directed his criticism at Christian intolerance and especially at the social injustices to which the establishment of a state church inevitably leads. Thus he stressed that, for Christ, the main thing had been “social justice,” which was why Christ had been hostile to “the extortions of capital…. The rich man was supposed to give all that he had to the poor.” There were not many people who wrote this sort of thing in 1853. One of the few was Kierkegaard, who noted: “The matter is quite simple. The N. T. [New Testament] is extremely easy to understand. But we human beings, we are really rather cunning rogues, and we pretend that we cannot understand it…. I open up the N. T. and I read, ‘If you wish to be perfect, then sell all your goods and give it to the poor and come and follow me.’ Good Lord, all the capitalists, the big government officials, and the pensioners, too—just about the entire race excepting the beggars—we would be done for, if it weren’t for scholarship,” by which Kierkegaard here means New Testament scholarship, exegesis, which turns everything into something problematic, thereby cutting the roots off every form of radicality.
Dreier certainly read Kierkegaard. “The time is not so far off,” Dreier wrote, “when the same thing will happen to the pastors as happened to the Roman augurs: When they encountered one another in their black cowls and their ruff collars—oh, what a tasteful getup!—they could hardly keep from laughing at one another.” This venomous little aphorism might well have been inspired by Kierkegaard, who had written something similar in Either/Or. The specific criticism of those who earn their living as pastors was Dreier’s little twist, however—and it was precisely this detail that reappeared in Kierkegaard’s writings three years later, as a remarkable sort of thank-you: “When paganism was disintegrating, there were some priests called augurs. It was said of them that one augur could not look at another without grinning. In ‘Christendom’ it may soon be the case that no one will be able to look at a pastor—or indeed, it will soon be the case that one person will not be able to look at another—without grinning: for, of course, we are all pastors.”
The parallels with Dreier—which can be documented with many lengthy passages—themselves demonstrate that Kierkegaard’s social and political views had undergone an appreciable transformation since the mid-1840s, when his old-fashioned conservative notions had been dominant. His views from that era could serve as a defense of social oppression, but based on his new insights, he had now come to a series of far-reaching conclusions that revealed the one-sidedness and hypocrisy of his earlier opinions. Still, both in his earlier and in his subsequent writings, Kierkegaard’s declared solidarity with the common man remained intact: “Truly, truly, this, too, is something I have felt and acknowledged, and it has always been a source of indescribable inspiration to me that, before God, it is just as important to be a maidservant, if that is what one is, as to be the most eminent genius. This is also the source of my almost exaggerated sympathy for the simple class of people, the common man. And therefore I can get depressed and sad, because they have been taught to laugh at me, thereby cutting themselves off from the one person in this country who has loved them most sincerely. No, it is the cultivated and well-to-do class, if not the aristocrats, then at least the aristocratic bourgeoisie—they must be targeted, that is where the prices must be jacked up in the salon.”
This journal entry is from 1849 and is one of the first in which Kierkegaard has begun to jack up the ideological price. That same year he read A. G. Rudelbach’s work on the church constitution, and he fastened his attention on a few pages that dealt with the threat to the state constituted by the proletariat. Rudelbach maintained that the widespread poverty in the country had been occasioned by war, population growth, and exploitation, but he insisted that the real cause of the misery was that the church had failed those without means, abandoning them to public relief and the correctional system. Therefore, according to Rudelbach, in addition to the causes already cited, there was the fact that “the State Church, with all its worldly tendencies, is itself an essential cause of the formation of the modern proletariat.” Kierkegaard declared himself in complete agreement and stressed that the book’s “merit” was that it had shown “that the State Church had given rise to or contributed to giving rise to the proletariat.” In other respects, however, Kierkegaard felt that Rudelbach’s diagnosis had not been radical enough. “Rudelbach himself seems not to have realized how much is implied by all this,” Kierkegaard commented. “What is unchristian and ungodly is to base the state on a substratum of people whom one ignores totally, denying all kinship with them—even if on Sundays there are moving sermons about loving ‘the neighbor.’”
Once again, what Kierkegaard took exception to was the contradiction between pastoral eloquence and everyday reality, but now his critique was taking on a much more material “substratum.” In the same entry he remarked that, for him, this was a “dearly bought discovery.” The economic allusion that echoes in his metaphor is scarcely accidental. Years earlier, he had been a well-situated rentier with a high standard of living and relatively little understanding of social questions, but now his fortune was so diminished that in his darkest moments he believed that a beggar’s staff was already waiting impatiently at the door.
Thus Kierkegaard had come to the realization that clerical conservatism had enlisted Christianity in the service of social oppression, and that in so doing the clergy had been guilty of fraud, both with respect to social issues and with respect to Christianity. For Christianity is not primarily the religion of the establishment, but of vulnerable and marginalized people, outlaws: “If Christianity has any special affinity for anyone, … then it is for those who suffer, the poor, the sick, the lepers, the mentally ill and similar people, sinners, criminals. And look what Christendom has done to them, see how they have been removed from life so as not to create a disturbance—earnest Christendom…. Christ did not divide people in this manner; it was precisely for these people that he was pastor…. What has happened to Christianity in Christendom is like what happens when you give something to a sick child—and then a couple of stronger children come along and grab it.”
Kierkegaard also had a pronounced feeling for the psychological side of this repression mechanism. He thus made the following comment in connection with one of Mynster’s sermons (which spoke of sufferings, but which in Kierkegaard’s view was less a consolation to the sufferer than a pleasant reassurance to the fortunate): “In general what we have here is an entire field for psychological observation: the cunning with which human egotism, disguised as sympathy, seeks to protect itself against the impression made by life’s wretchedness, in order to keep it from disturbing the gluttony of the lust for life…. And how often we preach and speak of the poor as being so much happier than the rich—and this is done in the guise of sympathy. It is presented so movingly: How happy the poor are able to live, free of all the burdens of wealth. Now is this a speech to provide consolation to the poor? No, it is a turn of phrase that is exceedingly welcome to the rich, because then they do not need to give anything to the poor.”
These twin frauds in the social and religious spheres presuppose each other; they create the conditions for each other’s existence in an obscure but quite tangible dialectic that compelled Kierkegaard to revise a number of his previous positions. Reflecting on the idea of Providence, he wrote the following in 1854: “Among people who own something or who have amounted to anything in the world, one frequently—or even most of the time—encounters a tendency to be a bit religious. They like to speak of believing in Providence, about Governance…. Charming! But if you analyzed this piety a little more closely, you would perhaps instead shudder at this sort of cruelty and egotism. / For if one owns something or has amounted to anything in the world, one wants to enjoy these earthly goods in a refined manner by attributing them to God, making oneself important by being the object, perhaps the very special object, of Governance’s solicitude. Aha! / Next, one might perhaps have a tendency to imagine that in order to continue possessing these earthly goods, it would be desirable that there be a Providence, a Governance—as a guarantor, one might think. Aha! / Furthermore, it is flattering for a person to imagine that what one has achieved in the world is, in fact, a reward from Governance because one has used one’s life wisely and piously. Aha! … Finally, in the existence of this Governance one even has a defense for not doing more than one does for those who suffer, because one is afraid of interfering in a manner that might disturb the plans Governance has for every individual.”
It is in journal entries like these that we find a portion of the theory and some of the impetus behind the materialistic critique of the clergy and of Christendom that Kierkegaard developed more fully a couple of years later in his rabid criticisms of the clergy’s “livings.” When he wrote that it is precisely the “main thrust of the Gospel, that the Gospel is for the poor,” he was of course not thinking in narrowly economic categories, but neither was he thinking only in symbolic or abstract categories: “Here we are to understand by ‘the poor,’ not only poverty, but all those who suffer, the unfortunate, the wretched, the aggrieved, the lame, the halt, the lepers, those possessed by demons. The Gospel is preached for them—that is, the Gospel is for them.”
S. A. versus A. S.
As individualism increased throughout the mid-nineteenth century, a number of pessimistic thinkers emerged who had minimal confidence in the power of reason as the organ governing human life, emphasizing instead the significance of irrational forces, the “night side” of the self, its passion, the grasp of desire. One of these thinkers was Arthur Schopenhauer, whom Kierkegaard first began reading in May 1854 and continued reading during the entire summer of that year. It might seem surprising that he had not become acquainted with the like-minded German thinker much earlier, since Poul Martin Møller had discussed Schopenhauer in his essay on immortality in 1837. Kierkegaard had studied Møller’s essay carefully, but perhaps he felt frightened by Schopenhauer at that time, for Møller had spoken of Schopenhauer’s efforts as an example of the “nihilistic side of modern pantheism,” turning up his nose at the German thinker, who had characterized “his philosophy, in the frankest terms, as anti-Christian and nihilistic.”
Whether it was precisely for this very reason that Kierkegaard felt drawn to Schopenhauer in 1854 must remain an open question, but there is the indisputable fact that in a very short period of time, Kierkegaard—who had almost entirely stopped purchasing books—acquired more or less all the available literature by and about Schopenhauer: Letters on the Philosophy of Schopenhauer, which had just been published; Parerga and Paralipomena, published two years earlier; The Two Fundamental Problems of Ethics, published in 1841, the year Kierkegaard had defended his magister dissertation; and finally, On the Will in Nature, published in 1836, when the young Kierkegaard was himself embattled with the will in his own combative nature.
Detailed expositions and critical remarks at various points throughout the journals indicate that the work Kierkegaard read most (though, as always, in his typically nonlinear, zigzag fashion) was Schopenhauer’s principal achievement, The World as Will and as Representation, from 1844; this was the work that really held Kierkegaard’s interest. Here Schopenhauer attempted to prove that the innermost essence of existence is a blind, ungovernable will-to-life, or instinct, which governs a human being to a much greater extent than he or she is conscious of. The individual’s will springs from an all-encompassing will-to-life that wants to continue life at all costs and is prodigal with individuals in order to preserve the species. The intellect is the slave of the will; of course, it can provide the will with themes to use at its own convenience, when things must be rationalized after the fact, but the intellect itself has no influence on the decisions of the will. Thus, in its relation to the intellect, the will is like the strong blind man who bears the sighted cripple on his shoulders. The more developed an individual’s intellect, the more filled with suffering existence becomes; and geniuses therefore are disharmonious creatures. Because the impression of the wretchedness of the world emanates from the will and is not caused by any remediable defect in the external world, the important thing is to pacify the will-to-life, and according to Schopenhauer this can only be done by devoting oneself—totally unselfishly and without any desire whatever—to aesthetic enjoyment, to asceticism, and to moral self-sacrifice. Schopenhauer embraced that portion of Buddhism that has as its specific goal liberation from all desires, and the Oupnekhat, the Persian version of the Upanishads, became his Bible. “The fact that we will at all is our misfortune: It has nothing to do with what we will…. We continually believe that the things we will can put an end to our willing, while we can only do that ourselves, by ceasing to will.” If the knowing self can liberate itself from the willing self and devote itself to viewing the object without desiring it, then the self looks upon pure objectifications of the will, the ideas, and will find peace.
“Curiously enough, I am called S. A. So we have a inverse relation to each other,” wrote Kierkegaard, who had to limit himself to the initials of “Søren Aabye” in order to demonstrate his inverse relation to Arthur Schopenhauer. He went on to explain that Schopenhauer is a “significant author, … and despite total disagreement, I have been surprised to find an author who affects me so much.” He must also have found it curious and almost disturbing to discover a philosopher who was just as anti-Hegelian, anti-historical, anti-academic, and misogynistic as himself. And they even resembled one another in biographical details: Like Kierkegaard, Schopenhauer was the son of a well-to-do merchant who had married a woman almost twenty years his junior, and who upon his death had left a fortune that enabled the son to carry on a long career in philosophy, leaving him—in almost Kierkegaardian fashion—in a debt of thankfulness to his late father. There was no Regine in Schopenhauer’s love life, which was limited to a liaison in Venice and an affair in Dresden that resulted in a daughter who, however, had died when only a couple of months old. Schopenhauer remained unmarried, though not alone, for his life was lived in the company of a long series of poodles, all named Atman, the Indian name for the “self.” Schopenhauer also resembled Kierkegaard in his difficult relations with the university, but unlike Kierkegaard he was not satisfied merely with using his writings to combat the academic philosophy of the professors. When he was appointed to the University of Berlin, where Hegel was spreading his erroneous doctrines to great acclaim, Schopenhauer scheduled his lectures at precisely the same hour as Hegel’s, semester after semester, though with little success. His view of the world was not required reading for the examinations and therefore did not attract student interest. Schopenhauer instead tested his talents as a translator of Kant into English and Hume into German, and he also offered to revise a French translation of Goethe and to publish an Italian edition of Bruno, accompanied by a Latin translation; but here again, there was not much interest. This did not make much of an impression on Schopenhauer’s self-esteem, however, which was always enormous and which had the Kierkegaardian peculiarity of seeming merely to increase, the more opposition it encountered from the external world. Schopenhauer’s works sold very badly, mostly ending up as scrap paper, as was the case with The World as Will and as Representation, which did not appear in a second edition until two years before the author’s death. But Schopenhauer never doubted for a second that his work was of decisive significance for philosophy. He wrote with a pronounced sense for the artistry with which he presented his argument; indeed, he flatly insisted that unlike all previous philosophy, with the single exception of Plato, his philosophy was quite simply art. And in Schopenhauer, Kierkegaard in fact discovered what he had loved in Lessing: style. There was a rhythm in Schopenhauer’s rhetoric because, like Kierkegaard, Schopenhauer was musical; he loved Mozart, whose operas he often played for himself on the flute, a talent Kierkegaard would probably have envied him.
There were thus quite a few similarities between A. S. and S. A., though sometimes this could become too much of a good thing. For example, when Kierkegaard learned that Schopenhauer had called journalists “those who rent out opinions,” he was delighted, finding the expression “really valuable”; but then he immediately added a note in the margin: “In one respect I find having begun to read Schopenhauer almost unpleasant. I have such an indescribably scrupulous anxiety about making use of someone else’s turns of phrase and so forth without acknowledgement. But sometimes his expressions are so akin to my own that in my exaggerated anxiety I perhaps end up attributing to him things that are actually my own.” One such pleasant unpleasantness was occasioned by the word windbag of which “Schopenhauer makes excellent use,” especially when he has to speak of “the Hegelian philosophy and of the whole of professorial philosophy.” So much did Kierkegaard fall head over heels in love with the word—which was perfectly suited to the “age of the philosophy of lies”—that for a moment he became envious of the German language. But then he reflected on the matter and, in an argument that is as dubious as it is charming, Kierkegaard explained why the word did not occur in the Danish language: “We Danes do not have the word, nor is the thing the word designates characteristic of us Danes. The character of the Danish nation does not really contain the possibility of being a windbag.” Danes can breathe a bit easier, but not for long, because Kierkegaard continues: “On the other hand, we Danes have another shortcoming—alas, a corresponding shortcoming—for which the Danish language indeed has a word, a word that is perhaps absent from the German language: windsucker. It is commonly used in connection with horses, but it can be applied more generally. And this is more or less the situation: a German to make wind—and a Dane to suck it in. Germans and Danes have long had this sort of relationship to one another.” And with this, A. S. and S. A. were reunited in their inverted symmetry: A. S. fought against the “windbags,” S. A. against the “windsuckers.”
In other respects, Kierkegaard primarily noted their differences. To simplify the situation slightly, Kierkegaard spoke ethically about psychological matters, while Schopenhauer spoke psychologically about ethical matters. For Schopenhauer, blessedness consisted in becoming objective, pure, disinterested, and contemplative, while for Kierkegaard, on the other hand, what was important was to become subjective and to relate oneself passionately to one’s eternal blessedness. Kierkegaard, however, was less concerned with Schopenhauer’s wholly abstract positions than with his existential praxis, which he criticized harshly in quite a number of journal entries. One particular episode in Schopenhauer’s life made the problem acutely visible. In 1837, the Norwegian Scientific Society proposed the following question for a gold-medal essay: “Can the Freedom of the Human Will Be Demonstrated on the Basis of Self-Consciousness?” Schopenhauer submitted an answer and won the gold medal. Scarcely was this accomplished before the Danish Scientific Society proposed a related question, formulated in such byzantine language as could probably only have occurred to Professor Sibbern: “Is the Source and the Foundation of Morality to Be Sought in the Development of the Idea of Morality as It Is Immediately Available to Consciousness and in the Fundamental Moral Notions that Emanate from It, or in Another Source of Knowledge?” Schopenhauer also submitted an answer to this question, but he did not win the prize. Rather, he was the object of a great deal of criticism because, in the view of the judging committee, he had not only misunderstood the question and committed a number of formal errors, but had also written of some of the most important contemporary philosophers in a manner that the committee found “extremely improper and offensive.” Schopenhauer published his two responses to these essay competitions under the collective title The Two Fundamental Problems of Ethics, accompanying them with a lengthy introduction in which he ironized about the narrow-minded verdict of the Danish Scientific Society. He was certainly within his rights in doing so, if—and here was Kierkegaard’s objection—if in so doing he had not placed himself in a ludicrous conflict with his own ethics: “Yes, but it is not inexplicable, however. Representing as he does—and with such talent—a view of life that is so misanthropic, he is so extremely delighted … that the Scientific Society in Trondheim (Good Lord, in Trondheim!) has crowned his prize essay…. And when Copenhagen failed to crown another prize essay by Schopenhauer, he rages over it, quite seriously, in the introduction that accompanies its publication.”
Kierkegaard’s objection highlighted the central point in his criticism of Schopenhauer, the absence of reduplication, the distance between theory and practice. This was given a uniquely dramatic twist in connection with Kierkegaard’s reflections on Schopenhauer’s “fate in Germany”: “Schopenhauer has truly learned to appreciate the fact that … within philosophy there is a class of people who live off philosophy under the guise of teaching it…. Schopenhauer is incomparably coarse in this connection.” So far, so good, but now things begin to go wrong: “Schopenhauer is no character, no ethical character, does not even have the character of a Greek philosopher, much less that of a Christian police officer…. How does Schopenhauer live? He lives a withdrawn existence, occasionally emitting a thunderstorm of coarse epithets—which are ignored. Yes, see, there we have it.” Kierkegaard viewed making oneself a spokesman for pessimism—while occupying such a privileged position—as the very incarnation of sophistry, since “sophistry is to be found in the distance between what one understands and what one is. The person who does not enter into the character of what he understands is a sophist.”
Kierkegaard was far from the first person to raise this objection to Schopenhauer. And to this accusation Schopenhauer replied quite appropriately that it would be quite peculiar to require that a moral philosopher not recommend that others adhere to a higher standard of virtue than what he himself has attained. We could add that this was more or less what Kierkegaard himself had been doing when he repeatedly called himself a poet, and that his criticism of Schopenhauer’s lack of reduplication really only makes sense when it is understood as displaced or indirect self-criticism. Furthermore, Schopenhauer did in fact follow his own ascetic instructions to a considerable extent: Regardless of the weather, he took long walks in the countryside surrounding Frankfurt, where he had lived since 1833; he took cold baths; and he led a life as regular and punctual as though he were some sort of Immanuel Kant—or Søren Kierkegaard.
The Schopenhauer whom Kierkegaard studied in the last year of his life still had six years left to live, and unlike his Danish colleague, in his final years, Schopenhauer’s view of life grew brighter than it had ever been (though this may not be immediately obvious when we look at the grim and dogged-looking man who sulkily peers out at us from the daguerreotypes taken toward the end of his life). But after the revolutions of 1848 and the disillusionment that followed, the times were ripe for the reception of his bitter message, and Schopenhauer the pessimist experienced the strange sensation of success to such an extent as almost to turn him into an optimist. Thus the longest part of his final work consisted of a series of aphorisms concerning life wisdom, presenting themselves to the reader as little exercises in the “art of getting through life as pleasantly and happily as possible.” This was something that appealed directly to the taste of the easygoing bourgeoisie, and it so infuriated Kierkegaard that his journal entry practically flew to pieces: “There cannot be any doubt that as matters now stand in Germany—this can be easily seen from the literary ruffians and roustabouts and journalists and small-time writers who have been so preoccupied with Schopenhauer—he will now be dragged onto the stage and proclaimed. And I wager one hundred to one that he—that he will be pleased as punch, that it would absolutely not occur to him to cut that garbage down; no, he’ll be happy.” So Schopenhauer had only been a pessimist for as long as external circumstances made it necessary, but the moment the times were on his side, his pessimism became a style, his philosophy was made presentable, and his hostility to systems became systematized: “So he takes it upon himself to assign asceticism a place in the system…. He says, not without great self-satisfaction, that he is the first person to have assigned asceticism a place in the system. Alas, this is nothing but professor-speak: ‘I am the first to have assigned it a place in the system.’”
It is symptomatic of the late Kierkegaard that he interprets Schopenhauer’s philosophy biographically—he had done something similar with Martensen and Mynster, for example—and he had no doubts about how Schopenhauer could free himself from the falsity in which he was mired: “No. Approach the matter differently. Go to Berlin. Move these scoundrels out into the theater of the streets. Endure being the most notorious person of all, recognized by everyone…. That is what I have practiced—of course, on a smaller scale—here in Copenhagen…. And then I have even dared to do one more thing—precisely because I have been placed under religious command—I have voluntarily dared to expose myself to being caricatured and ridiculed by the whole mob, from the simple people to the aristocrats; all in order to explode illusions…. But A. S. is not like this at all; in this respect he does not resemble S. A. at all.”
This personal perspective leads to a deeper problem of principle which, after a bit of dialectical rotation (as we will see), will come back to Kierkegaard in a quite personal form: “Schopenhauer makes light of Christianity, jeers at it in comparison to the wisdom of India. Now that is his business. I have nothing against Schopenhauer’s mighty rage against this ‘villainous optimism’ which is the special province of Protestantism in particular. I am very happy that he shows that this is not Christianity at all.” Here, as elsewhere, Kierkegaard was extremely tolerant of those who openly renounce Christianity, but he nonetheless had to protest against one quite specific circumstance, namely that Schopenhauer had identified living with suffering, “because then Christianity is abolished.” Because if life was already suffering from the very beginning, Christianity would be deprived of “something that helps make it negatively identifiable” and become a “pleonasm, a redundant observation, gibberish. Because if to be a human being is to suffer, then it is of course ludicrous that there be a doctrine that proposes the following definition: To be a Christian is to suffer.”
Kierkegaard was very anxious to emphasize Schopenhauer’s error in having identified life with suffering. His carefree and superficial epoch had surely benefited from being “raked over the coals by melancholia,” but life is happiness, life is not suffering. Life only becomes suffering when Christianity intervenes. In this connection Kierkegaard invokes Johannes Climacus, whose Postscript had already formulated “the principle, that to be a Christian is to suffer,” and thus every notion of wanting to “kill or mortify the lust for life” can only make sense if the individual exists in relation to a transcendent authority external to the individual, a God, who commands the individual to mortify the flesh.
Despite the differences and disagreements that characterized the two men, Schopenhauer’s pessimism had a productive effect on Kierkegaard and intensified his own criticisms. And after his encounter with Schopenhauer, Kierkegaard, who otherwise rarely gave a thought to future students of theology, made an exception: “Just as during epidemics one puts something in one’s mouth to avoid, if possible, becoming infected by breathing the disease-laden air, so one could recommend to students of theology who must live here in Denmark amid this nonsensical (Christian) optimism, that they ingest a little dose of Schopenhauer’s Ethics every day to protect themselves against infection from this nonsense. With me it is a different matter. I am protected in another way.”
“Christianity Is the Invention of Satan”
Kierkegaard was certainly not at risk of being infected by the optimism of his times. On the contrary, his journals from these years resound with the monotonous hammerings of misanthropy. He became preoccupied with inhumanity in the name of Christianity, citing, almost like a mantra, the epigrammatic description of early Christianity given by a number of writers, including Tacitus: odium generis humani, a hatred of everything human. Kierkegaard then put forth a view of his own: “A View of Christianity which, so far as I know, has never been proposed before, is that Christianity is the invention of Satan, calculated to make human beings unhappy with the assistance of the imagination. Just as the worm and the bird seek out the finest fruit, Satan has taken aim at superior people, those with a great deal of imagination and feeling, in order to lure them astray by means of the imagination, getting them to make themselves unhappy, and if possible, the others as well. This view at least deserves a hearing.”
That view most definitely received a hearing—specifically when Kierkegaard described his understanding of Christianity, in which the natural life has been made the object of so much hatred that it can be difficult to distinguish God from Satan. “It is also certain,” he wrote, “that once we attain that high plateau that is the true point of departure for any discussion about becoming a Christian, then every step is so difficult, so mortally dangerous, that it is continually like a ‘red or black’ situation [in roulette]: Either it is God or it is Satan.” Kierkegaard did not assemble these rudiments of satanism into a coherent theme, but continued his journal entry with one of his familar diatribes against this “mess called Christendom, these millions of Christians,” typically represented by an “inoffensive, grunting, well-off bourgeois philistine,” which from a Christian point of view is “just as ridiculous as if the Round Tower wanted to pass itself off as a young dancing girl, eighteen years of age.”
The metaphor is a good one, but it is also grotesque because it gains its full comic effect by having two incommensurable elements collide with each other. As such, it is typical of a series of Kierkegaard’s metaphors from this period, all of which emphasize the distance between Christianity and the world, between ethical requirement and nature. In every case, the heterogeneity is the point of the metaphor, becoming more and more intimately connected to Kierkegaard himself. Thus on February 13, 1854, he wrote the following under the title, “My Task. And about Myself”: “What is absolutely the decisive factor is that Christianity is a heterogeneity, an incommensurability with the world, that it is irrational with respect to the world and with respect to being a human being in a straightforward sense.” This had been heard previously, which is clear from the metaphors, but then Kierkegaard continued: “From my early years, I have winced at a thorn in the flesh, and to this was also connected a consciousness of guilt and sin. I have felt myself to be heterogeneous. This pain, my heterogeneity, I have understood as my relation to God.”
Thus, first came the pain, the life of suffering, the feeling of being heterogeneous; thereafter—or, more correctly, therefore—came the relation to God. In other words, here it was not the relation to God that gave rise to the suffering—which was what Kierkegaard had insisted on in arguing against Schopenhauer—but precisely the reverse: It was the suffering that gave rise to the relation to God! It is therefore more than reasonable to suspect that Kierkegaard has transferred to Christianity his own heterogeneity, his radical incommensurability. The problem is not that the lust for life must be killed or mortified. No, the problem is the unsuccessful mortification, where the nature that was to be killed has refused to die and has turned outward in aggression against everyone, with an intensified requirement to oppose nature and to die away from the world. With this maneuver all forms of universally valid authority disappear, and this is why there is nothing remaining that is capable of correcting the denatured subject, who is referred only to himself: “Doesn’t Christianity make me into an enormous egotist, or doesn’t it develop my egoity quite abnormally, because by frightening a person with the greatest of terrors, it causes him to concern himself only and exclusively with his own salvation, absolutely oblivious to the possible imperfections and weaknesses of all other people?” The question stands there for a second, crying out to heaven, and the reader feels an increasing desire to reject it as absurd. But it is too late, for Kierkegaard has already written: “To this the answer must be: ‘The Truth’ cannot behave otherwise.”
To this must be said: Kierkegaard, the later Kierkegaard, could not behave otherwise. This position, this abnormally developed “egoity,” has emerged out of an extreme intensification of the thesis that subjectivity is truth. What has been lost is the dialectical dynamic that had issued from the antithesis—in which subjectivity is untruth. It is not Kierkegaard who is mad, it is his theology, and this is attributable precisely to the loss of this dialectical dimension.
And thanks to this loss, Kierkegaard finally gained clarity about his extraordinary task.
25. The Church of Our Lady. In the distance, at the end of Nørregade is the first building on Dyrkøb. This is where Kierkegaard rented rooms from Mrs. Borries during his final years—very close to the nation’s principal church.
26. Jakob Peter Mynster. “You have no idea what sort of a poisonous plant Mynster was,” the dying Kierkegaard said to his friend Emil Boesen. And he does not look entirely harmless as he sits here in the powerful ecclesiastical uniform; paradoxically, his missing teeth lend him a greedy, sharklike air. As a man of the State Church, he was a careful and efficient administrator, conservative but not really high-church. Kierkegaard’s relation with Mynster—”my father’s pastor”—was marked by extraordinary ambivalence. Naturally, opinions about Mynster’s personality were divided, but Kierkegaard was not alone in his misgivings. H. N. Clausen, for example, wrote in his memoirs that “In Roman cardinals, I have occasionally encountered a similar combination of a fine, polished, social tone and an unctuous priestliness.”
27. Hans Lassen Martensen. “I recognized immediately that his was not an ordinary intellect but that he also had an irresistible urge to sophistry, to hairsplitting games, which showed itself at every opportunity and was often tiresome.” This was how Martensen remembered the young Søren Aabye, who, at his father’s expense, had hired as his private tutor this remarkably competent man who would have a meteoric career. In the battle about what constituted a genuine witness to the truth, Martensen spoke publicly only once, after which he entrenched himself in a silence that Kierkegaard called “indefensible from a Christian point of view,” “ludicrous,” “stupid-shrewd,” and “contemptible.” The attack made a profound impression on Martensen, which is clear from his autobiography, where he labels Kierkegaard an “accusing angel” and calls his campaign an “experience of the most unpleasant sort.”
28. Nikolai Frederik Severin Grundtvig. Although Kierkegaard admired Grundtvig’s legendary erudition, the weight of his personality, and his elemental, unsleeping energy, no one else was subjected to such disrespectful treatment in Kierkegaard’s journals, where the Nordic giant was described in epithets that included “world-historical rowdy,” “bellowing blacksmith,” “hearty, yodeling fellow,” and “Ale-Norse warrior.” Grundtvig read the various issues of The Moment and called Kierkegaard one of “the ice-cold scoffers that always hang under the church roof like icicles.”
29. Peter Christian Kierkegaard. Irresolution almost seems to shine forth from the eyes of Peter Christian Kierkegaard, whose fate was to some extent determined by the circumstance that he was the elder brother of a little brother who was a genius. He defended his thesis On Lying at Göttingen, where his eloquence and dialectical acumen earned him the nickname “The Devilish Debater from Scandinavia.” Despite his qualifications, he was passed over for professorial posts both in philosophy and theology, presumably because he had theologically incorrect sympathies for Grundtvig. In 1875, after almost twenty years as bishop of Aalborg, the darkened and spiritually broken man tendered his resignation because he felt himself unworthy to hold the position.
30. Berlingske politiske og Avertissements-Tidende, Thursday, May 24, 1855. Even in a greatly magnified selective enlargement, the advertisement for Dette skal siges; saa være det da sagt [Danish: “This Must Be Said, So Let it Be Said”] does not exactly jump right out at the reader and thus serves as a slightly depressing reminder of the distance between the powers of the intellect and those of the market. Farthest down on the page there is an advertisement for an effective miracle fluid called “Lilionese,” which not only can give one’s skin a “beautiful whiteness and a delicate, youthful freshness,” but is also able to remove “freckles, ringworm, pimples, liver spots, wrinkles, and redness of the nose.” The seller, Geo. Dralle, guarantees effectiveness of the fluid within fourteen days. And that’s that.
31. H. P. Hansen’s drawing from 1854. That same year Kierkegaard wrote that “There is no one so shrewd that he can hit upon a form of cleverness that my policeman’s gaze does not see immediately and that my cleverness cannot reveal to be a trick.” But that was not entirely correct. H. P. Hansen’s drawing was a “trick” in two senses of the word. For when Kierkegaard marched past, Hansen sat in his apartment with his pencil and pad at the ready and thus captured “the police spy” for posterity. The shadow cast by the hat and our view of the upper side of the brim make it clear that Hansen probably caught the figure from a window on the ground floor or one flight up. Kierkegaard aged early, and it is clear that he shed his aesthetic refinement as the years passed, but he still retained the little smile on his muzzle-like mouth, a smile that was sad and satirical in equal measure.
32. Berlingske politiske og Avertissements-Tidende, Friday morning, November 16, 1855. Peter Christian Kierkegaard’s obituary for his little brother who died young appears in a chaos of entirely prosaic announcements, ranging from Havana cigars to reasonably priced cloaks to French “cement steel pens.” The right-hand column contains an offer for a French preparation for ladies “whose appearance is disfigured with hair that grows low upon the forehead.” Just under the obituary for the country’s most important thinker is a “Missing” advertisement for a “little red and white male dog of the English race with a white chest and white legs.” The runaway dog answers to the name Pion, and someone in Sølvgade “promises a good reward for its recovery.”