“A Devil of a Witness to the Truth”
The Death of a Witness to the Truth
“Now he is dead. It would have very desirable if, at the end of his life, he could have been prevailed upon to make the confession to Christianity that what he has represented was not really Christianity but a toned-down version, for he carried the entire age…. Now that he is dead without having made that confession, everything is changed; now all that remains is that his preaching has mired Christianity in an illusion.”
This was Kierkegaard’s first reaction to Mynster’s death. It had come quite suddenly. During the previous summer he had been able to make his usual visitation journeys. At times his family had noted that he was “a bit indisposed,” but his sermon on December 26, 1853, had been marked by exceptional strength and fervor. That, at any rate, was how Mynster’s eldest son remembered it. Others had experienced something different. Martensen, for example, had written the following to his friend Gude on January 4, 1854: “Incidentally, between the two of us, Mynster is quite poorly…. More and more, you notice that he is world-weary, which is no surprise.” Not long thereafter, Mynster caught cold, then appeared to recover, but around noon on Saturday, January 28, he felt as though he had had a blow to his chest and had to lie down. The pain diminished but was replaced by a drowsiness that was so overpowering that Mynster could regain full consciousness only in the presence of members of his immediate family. His powers failed, and at seven o’clock on the morning of January 30, 1854, the seventy-eight-year-old bishop breathed his last.
That same day the front page of Berlingske Tidende was emblazoned with a black cross, under which was published the first of the many obituaries that would run in the nation’s newspapers: “It is with sadness that the news will be heard all across the land that Jacob Peter Mynster, Bishop of Zealand, the ornament of the Danish Church, the great witness to the Christian faith, has completed his life’s course.” Two days later, the same newspaper carried an elegy by “O. B.”—Oluf Bang, the tireless versifier and Kierkegaard’s physician—who hailed Mynster as a unique figure of his times. Many other well-intentioned elegies, including one by B. S. Ingemann, were published in the ensuing days. And on behalf of the Copenhagen Clerical Conference, Archdeacon Tryde announced in Berlingske Tidende that “members of the clergy, both from the city and from the rest of the country, who wish to participate in the funeral procession at Bishop Mynster’s burial on Tuesday, February 7, are requested to gather at the university in such rooms as will be indicated there, at 9:30 A.M. sharp.” And when the great day dawned, the length and scope of the ceremonies were indeed impressive. According to the account that appeared in Berlingske Tidende, the ceremonies began at eight o’clock in the morning, when the graduates and students of the theology faculty bore Mynster’s casket from the episcopal residence, across the square, and into the Church of Our Lady, where it was positioned in front of the chancel. As Tryde had prescribed, the procession assembled at the university “at 9:30 A.M. sharp,” and members of every order of society were represented: “The Lord High Steward, representing the King, the Lord Chamberlain of the Queen Dowager, the Crown Prince and the other royal princes, members of the Ministry, and the ministers of several foreign governments participated in the procession. More than two hundred members of the clergy turned out, both from the city and from the country at large, including the bishops of Funen, Aarhus, Aalborg, and Lolland-Falster, plus the clergy from the city’s Reformed Church.” When the procession had crossed the square from the university and was standing at the main entrance to the church, “trumpets were blown from the church tower,” after which the clergy and the other notables entered the church, which was “decorated in black and illuminated with wall sconces and candelabra.” After the university student chorus had sung the first portion of a cantata written by Frederik Paludan-Müller to music by J.P.E. Hartmann, Archdeacon Tryde spoke, pointing out the significance that the late bishop had had for the nation and for the church. Then Just Paulli’s brother, the musician S.H. Paulli, served as concertmaster and conducted the singing of a poem that Mynster himself had written. Next came appearances by Bishop C. T. Engelstoft and Dr. A. G. Rudelbach, who were in turn succeeded by the second half of Paludan-Müller’s cantata, “sung to a choral melody in which the entire gathering participated, singing in lively fashion.” The session at the church had now been completed, and the theology students bore the casket out into the street, where it was put onto a hearse near Nørreport. The procession—“for the most part traveling by carriage”—continued on to Assistens Cemetery, where Court Pastor Paulli, the son-in-law of the deceased, spoke some “words of farewell” on behalf of the family and performed the ceremony of casting earth on the casket.
It goes without saying that Kierkegaard was not present at all this; but as a neighbor of the Church of Our Lady, he could not have avoided hearing all the trumpet blasts from his rented rooms. Likewise, he would have had the opportunity to read about the event in Berlingske Tidende, where he could also have studied the texts of the cantatas and songs, which were published in the paper. On February 13, in this same newspaper, he could read the following under the rubric “Literature”: “Dr. H. Martensen has published in printed form the sermon he delivered in Christiansborg Castle Church on the fifth Sunday after Epiphany; basing his sermon on the text of Hebrews 13:7–8, he erected a beautiful and fitting monument to the departed bishop.”
The aforementioned sermon could be acquired for the sum of sixteen shillings, but for Kierkegaard it was virtually priceless. The sermon itself was in fact merely a rather turgid and overblown commemoration of the deceased, but Martensen had gone to considerable lengths, and his remarks included the following: “From this man, whose precious memory fills our hearts, our thoughts are led back to the whole series of witnesses to the truth, stretching across the ages, from the days of the Apostles up to our own times…. Our departed teacher also served as a link in this holy chain of witnesses to the truth, to the honor of God Our Father.”
Kierkegaard had scarcely finished reading Martensen’s sermon before he began composing the statement of protest that would form the beginning of the most remarkable one-man revolution ever. Kierkegaard, however, did not wish to get involved in the controversy surrounding the appointment of Mynster’s ecclesiastical successor, so he delayed his protest. The conservatives wanted Martensen appointed, the liberals favored H. N. Clausen, while King Frederick VII himself had plans of appointing J. N. Madvig, a professor of classics. Foreign Minister C. A. Bluhme tried to dissuade the king from taking such a step, pointing out that Madvig was not a trained theologian, to which the king, displaying equal amounts of amazement and pique, replied, “What difference does that make?”--a remark that was a source of some amusement in the more intellectual circles. The king’s wife, Countess Danner, was pressing for yet another candidate, which did not make the decision any easier. In the end, the conservative ministry prevailed upon the king to appoint Martensen, and shortly after the church service on Easter Sunday, Prime Minister A. S. Ørsted went to the Castle Church to give Martensen the happy news in person. The evening of that same day Martensen shared his jubilation in a letter to Gude: “So now, by the guidance of God—for I myself have done nothing in this connection—I have been called to this extraordinarily important and holy office.” In the period from then until his ordination on June 5, Martensen was stricken with what he called “bishop fever.” The political and ecclesiastical situations were chaotic, and he had no doubts about what lay ahead: “There are still more crises in store, because the corruption and the spread of amorality that is now under way cannot come to a halt. I expect it will get worse!” And in this, Martensen’s expectations would be more than fulfilled.
Martensen’s consecration took place at Pentecost, the feast of the Holy Spirit. A while earlier, Kierkegaard had reflected on the matter of deriving temporal advantage from Christianity, and found it disgusting, just as vile as eating “oily fish with syrup on it.” And now he was on the verge of vomiting: “Oh, how genuinely disgusting this is, these millions of people playing at Christianity, celebrating Pentecost—and now we are going to have a bishop consecrated on the day after Pentecost. And believe me, there will be orations about ‘the Spirit’; how disgusting it is, how abominable.” Kierkegaard could certainly have published his protest after Martensen’s appointment had been announced, but he still hesitated, among other reasons because there had been debate about the appointment in the press, and Kierkegaard did not want his protest connected with that. Neither did he want to stand in the way of a public campaign—initiated by a group of doughty clerics the very day after Mynster’s burial—to raise funds for the erection of a statue of the late bishop. But Kierkegaard also had other quite unrelated reasons for postponing his own campaign. A. S. Ørsted was not only prime minister; in the period from April 1853 until December 1854 he also served as cultus minister, in charge of the church and of cultural affairs, and if Kierkegaard had initiated his protest under those circumstances, he could have counted on being named in a libel case. It was therefore best to wait a little longer, all the more so because a strong opposition faction was attempting to put together a liberal ministry. This became a reality on December 12, 1854, with P. G. Bang as Prime Minister and C. C. Hall as Cultus Minister. The changed situation was absolutely not to the conservative Martensen’s liking, and three days after the formation of the new government he wrote as much to Gude: “Yes, we have a new ministry, and they are even talking about having a torchlight parade to the king to mark the occasion. This is the most frightful thing we have experienced thus far, and royal dignity has now attained the pinnacle of prostitution.”
In addition to these strategic and political considerations, there was also a personal circumstance that has often been overlooked. Mynster’s Communications concerning My Life had been published in mid-April 1854. Mynster’s eldest son, Frederik Joachim, had arranged for its publication, and in a gesture of friendship he sent a copy to Kierkegaard. In an undated note Kierkegaard expressed his thanks for the letter that had accompanied the package containing the book; he wished to retain the letter from Mynster’s son, but he felt compelled to return the book itself. “My relation to your late father was of a very special kind,” he explained in his reply, pointing out that, despite the considerable sympathy they had felt for one another, there had been differences between them. “Whether or not I make use of it, I must have, and I want, the liberty of being able to speak out without having to take a matter of this sort [the gift of the book] into consideration,” he continued. Thus Kierkegaard did not wish to be in any debt of thankfulness to the family—so the book was sent back.
A remark that appears in Kierkegaard’s journals sometime after this makes it clear that he was nonetheless familiar with the contents of at least portions of Mynster’s Communications. For Kierkegaard noted—almost in passing, but full of sarcasm—that toward the conclusion of his “memoirs” Mynster had expressed the wish that he might go to his grave an honest man. That sentiment in fact constituted the final sentence of the book, and Kierkegaard thus must either have purchased Communications, which seems unlikely because the title was not included in the library he left at his death, or borrowed it from the Athenæum. If we bear in mind how intensely Kierkegaard concerned himself with Mynster throughout almost all his life, it would indeed be remarkable if the man’s memoirs had not piqued Kierkegaard’s interest. Regardless of how the book came into his hands, it must have been terrible for him to ascertain that Mynster did not set aside so much as a single page to describe their relationship—not even a sentence, in fact, not a single word! The Kierkegaard family did not appear at all in Mynster’s memoirs, neither the father—the hosier who had been so devoted to the bishop—nor either of his two sons, despite the fact that the paths of both of them had crisscrossed Mynster’s for more than a generation, and the younger of the two had seen him frequently during the very period he wrote his Communications, which as noted, covered Mynster’s life all the way up to September 13, 1852. Martensen, on the other hand, was discussed, and he was spoken of with a warmth that must have made Kierkegaard’s blood run cold. Mynster wrote quite openly about the “love” he had felt for Martensen, which “had grown with each year” since the beginning of their friendship.
There is no way of knowing whether the painful asymmetry between Kierkegaard’s love for Mynster and Mynster’s total neglect of Kierkegaard had a role in precipitating the public attack, but the fact is that his journals from the period immediately following the publication of the perfidious Communications are awash with entries about Mynster and display an aggressiveness not previously seen.
Thus it was Martensen and not Kierkegaard whom Mynster had taken along with him in his Communications, thereby also taking him along as his successor in the ecclesiastical profession. On October 23, 1854, this same Martensen wrote to Gude: “So we have finally moved into the episcopal residence, and now I am sitting at my work table, the place where Mynster spent his many blessed years. The other evening I sat up long into the night in this extraordinary solitude and quiet.” Two months earlier, on August 21, Martensen’s wife had given birth to their “fine and healthy little daughter,” whom they named Virginie. After giving birth, Mrs. Martensen had been overwhelmed by a “marked case of spasms”; later she had “severe neurasthenia” as well as “inflammation in one breast.” But now Martensen could breathe easier: “Praise God, the real danger is past. Of course, we must learn to be patient.” On November 12, the bishop put pen to paper once again: He was busy, beset by the duties of his office—but to Gude he did have to admit, “Yes, you are right. I am now living at one of the most beautiful points in existence.”
Five weeks later, all hell would break loose.
“—That Is How a Witness to the Truth Is Buried!”
On December 18, 1854, Kierkegaard published his protest. It appeared in Fædrelandet under the heading “Was Bishop Mynster a ‘Witness to the Truth,’ One of ‘The Authentic Witnesses to the Truth?’ Is This the Truth?” This might be termed a rhetorical question. After a brief account of Martensen’s sermon, Kierkegaard presented the authentic version of an authentic witness to the truth: “A witness to the truth is a man whose life, from beginning to end, is unacquainted with everything that goes by the name of enjoyment…. A witness to the truth is a man who, in poverty, witnesses to the truth, in poverty, in lowliness and degradation, so unappreciated, hated, abominated, so ridiculed, mocked, scorned—…. A witness to the truth, one of the authentic witnesses to the truth, is a man who is flogged, mistreated, dragged from one prison to another, and then finally (the final promotion whereby he is awarded first-class membership in the Christian order of precedence and is placed among the authentic witnesses to the truth)—then finally (for after all, Prof. Martensen is speaking of one of the authentic witnesses to the truth)—then finally he is crucified or beheaded or burned or broiled on a grill, his lifeless body thrown in some out-of-the-way place by the executioner’s assistant, unburied—that is how a witness to the truth is buried!” And that, of course, was not how Mynster had been buried. On the contrary, his burial had taken place quite literally with “all pomp and music”; this, however, did have a certain logic to it, inasmuch as in reality Mynster had merely been “weak, pleasure-mad, and great only as an orator.” The conclusion was thus that “Bishop Mynster’s preaching of Christianity tones down, covers up, suppresses, and omits some of the most decisively Christian tenets.”
So much for Mynster. As for Martensen, Kierkegaard maintained that one of the more important motives behind his memorial sermon had been to make sure that Martensen himself was remembered in connection with the vacant episcopal chair; that is, Martensen’s actions had simply been a tactic dictated by a crass worldly concern for his own ecclesiastical career. Kierkegaard’s remarks contained a libelous pun which Kierkegaard himself presumably cherished and which in any case was a source of amusement in certain circles in the city. Martensen’s sermon had also said quite a bit about the importance of “following”—implicitly, of course, following Christ—and he had repeatedly accentuated the importance of continuity: “Christ’s spirit remains, even though it acts through various instrumentalities and gifts,” and therefore the Lord “will always arm himself with the instrumentalities necessary for the edification of his congregation.” Kierkegaard was not slow to exploit a malicious association, linking being a follower of Christ with being Mynster’s follower in the office of bishop; furthermore, Kierkegaard wrote, what Martensen was doing was nothing more than “playing at Christianity,” just as “a child plays at being a soldier.”
“To Bring About a Catastrophe”
Kierkegaard had been in doubt, right up to the last minute, about what form the attack ought to take. Ought he begin by criticizing Martensen for his dubious use of the term “witness to the truth?” Or would it be better to begin with the “Outcry,” a little piece that warned against participating in official religious services? The upshot of Kierkegaard’s reflections was that the “Outcry” would have to wait its turn. And in any event, Kierkegaard was not yet finished with the two broadsheets that were supposed to accompany that piece, so it did not appear until May 24, 1855, under the title “This Must Be Said.” In Kierkegaard’s view, the catastrophic effect he had intended would probably have been achieved more fully if that piece had appeared first, but there was a very special problem in this connection. He wrote in a December 1854 journal entry that “if I dared to accompany my actions with commentary explaining the clever purposefulness behind the entire project, I would enjoy great success—but fail completely in my task.” The campaign itself “must appear to be a sort of madness (because without this we do not get the passions set in motion, the fires lit).” A couple of days later, under the heading “Catastrophe,” the journals contain the following dramatic manifesto: “How can a catastrophe be produced in the realm of the spirit? Quite simply by omitting several intermediate steps, by setting forth a conclusion without providing the premises, by showing the consequence without first indicating what it is a consequence of, and so forth—then the collision between the person who acts in this manner and his contemporaries can become a catastrophe.”
Here we are presumably confronted with the major, strategic point of Kierkegaard’s campaign: It must come as a surprise to everyone. It must seem to be genuine madness. It must call forth the most complete overturning of all values. In short, it must be a catastrophe, destructive both of the banal, everyday optimism of the bourgeoisie and of the Protestant cultural self-understanding of the clergy. “Catastrophe” is, so to speak, the formula under which all of Kierkegaard’s maneuvers can be summed up. It is clear that Martensen merely served as an occasion for all this and that he was not the cause of the attack. And indeed, several years earlier Kierkegaard had told C. T. Engelstoft that as soon as Mynster was dead he would “blow the trumpet loudly.”
An undated journal entry that was written after the publication of Kierkegaard’s article on December 18, titled “To Bring About a Catastrophe,” sketches out his strategy: “However afraid people would be of me if they found out, however strange it would seem to them, it is certain that what has occupied me in recent times has been whether God in fact wants me to stake everything on bringing about a catastrophe, on getting arrested, convicted—executed if possible. And in my soul I am concerned that if I refrained from doing so I would regret it eternally…. So I have great misgivings concerning myself, about whether I am in fact capable (if it comes to that) of going to prison, of possibly being executed, whether all this sort of fighting would have a disturbing effect on me.” Here, with a peculiarly academic sort of daring, Kierkegaard imagined the worst conceivable catastrophe, and even though we might smile a little at his fear concerning the disturbing consequences of such “fighting,” we must not overlook the realism with which he thought through his campaign.
The journals come to an end a couple of days later with an entry about “the death of the person of spirit.” The remainder of this final journal—journal NB 36—consists of blank pages. From here on Kierkegaard can only be followed fragmentarily on loose sheets of paper—and of course in his public actions.
Once again, after four years of silence.
“A Devil of a Witness to the Truth”
The article against Martensen caused an enormous outcry and immediately set spirits stirring, both the great and the less great. The less great were the first on the scene. The very next day, Dagbladet carried a piece by “A,” who expressed amazement at how “piety could command silence about the living and allow speech about the dead.” On December 23, Kjøbenhavnsposten carried an anonymous poem, and the next day—Christmas Eve—the same paper carried an article in which a certain “æsculap” [Danish for Asclepius, the ancient Greek god of medicine and healing] asserted that Kierkegaard, who had started out as an “original,” was now lacking “all but three of the letters” in that word—that is, that Kierkegaard had now become gal [Danish: “insane”; “original” is the same in Danish and English]. It is quite understandable that in his journals the target of this attack suggested that Kjøbenhavnsposten change its name to “stuff and nonsense.”
Madness became a theme on which variations were to be played for the next half-year. Thus, at one point Kierkegaard was counseled to take “a restorative journey twenty-eight miles outside the city”; this was the distance to Sankt Hans, a well-known insane asylum. On December 27, someone named “J. L. from Nørrebro” published a piece in Flyve-Posten in which he cited lengthy passages from Kierkegaard’s Fædrelandet article, supposedly in order to reveal what he called the “Kierkegaardian comedy-pathos.” In his “offensive article” against Martensen, Kierkegaard had unconsciously revealed his “innermost, basic character.” It was indisputable that Kierkegaard possessed both “great gifts” and “a wealth of cultivation,” but he was totally lacking in one thing: “seriousness.” J. L. continued: “And this is why everything he has went into his virtuosity as a writer. Mr. Kierkegaard is a peerlessly stimulating, brilliant author, with a sparkling artistic style that is capable of aesthetic, philosophical, and theological work such as has never been known before,” but despite all this, the frightful result is and remains that “Mr. Kierkegaard is the man lacking in seriousness.” It is not known with certainty who was concealed behind the initials “J. L.,” but since he seemed to know Kierkegaard personally and based his criticism in part on philological observations, there is much that indicates that it was Israel Levin, Kierkegaard’s former secretary [in nineteenth-century Danish, the letters “J” and “I” were often used interchangeably], who now had a chance to avenge himself on the employer he had come to hate. Naturally, Kierkegaard could not take notice of such cutups and their caprices: “So people will understand that I cannot pay attention to what every anonymous person, every ‘æsculap,’ … publishes in a newspaper, or to what a serious man from Nørrebro, invoking the seriousness of Flyve-Posten, informs people about my lack of seriousness.”
One of the somewhat greater spirits to get involved was Rasmus Nielsen, who paid Martensen a nocturnal visit, counseling him to offer Kierkegaard the requisite admission, or “concession,” as Nielsen called it. At the end of a letter he had begun on December 15 (though it was apparently concluded several days later, just after Kierkegaard launched his attack) Martensen appended the following postscript: “At 10:30 P.M. last night I had a totally unexpected Nicodemus-visit from Rasmus Nielsen. He remained until 12:30 A.M. All I learned, packed under a frightful lot of nonsense, was simply that he regretted the scandal with Kierkegaard—and wouldn’t it be possible for me to give this fellow a concession in order to render him harmless in the future? (What nonsense.) He expressed regret that the forces fighting on the side of Christianity had been divided. The day of judgment was near…. During all this I remained the very soul of gentleness. In my view, he has been moved by some inner conviction to the effect that Kierkegaard is in a bad way…. As mentioned, I remained as calm as possible, so as not to provoke him. Oh, all the things one has to experience!”
Rasmus Nielsen’s attempt to mediate was in vain: On December 28, Martensen published a rejoinder in Berlingske Tidende in which he pointed out that Kierkegaard had used a restrictive definition of the term “witness to the truth,” which was of course not simply identical to the term “martyr” in its goriest sense. Kierkegaard—“whose Christianity is without a Church and without a history”—seemed to have willfully misunderstood a number of simple things, including the fact that there undeniably “exist other sorts of suffering than physical persecution.” Martensen went on to ask, “Cannot a witness to the truth be stoned in a manner other than by the throwing of actual stones?” (In all honesty, Kierkegaard, who had once called himself “the martyr of ridicule,” would have to grant Martensen this.)
As far as the indignant bishop was concerned, Kierkegaard’s protest could only be explained in one of two ways: “Dr. S. Kierkegaard must therefore either be so much in the grip of an obsession that he has lost the simplest sort of presence of mind, or he must have defined the concept of a witness to the truth (despite the fact that he himself knows better) in this distorted fashion because he wants to make a stir yet again about ‘playing at Christianity.’ But in that case this daring game ought to have been planned more carefully. Because, in the absence of any further material, the simple assertion of this presupposition—which is so crudely and tangibly arbitrary and lacking in foundation that it is almost trivial to rebut it—is, after all, rather meager for so practiced a sophist as Dr. S. Kierkegaard, and it must be feared that his thought, so excessively labile at the outset, has begun to become all too rigid—or that his ideas are now really beginning to become obsessive.” Furthermore, when Kierkegaard accused Mynster of having suppressed some of “the most decisively Christian tenets,” he ought to have considered that a “servant of the Lord must not only guard against suppressing anything he was sent to say to people, but he must likewise guard against saying more than he has been sent to say. This also means that he must guard against saying more than precisely what he has been sent to say, in accordance with the specific spiritual gifts that have been laid down in his soul. Bishop Mynster always observed this golden mean, and if it were followed by everyone, a great many untrue and distorted words about the heights and depths of the Christian life—about dying away from the world, for example, something this speaker is acquainted with only by way of the imagination—would be avoided, and indeed, many edifying discourses and books would remain unwritten.” If one wishes to pass judgment on a man like Mynster, “what is required is not only something different from and greater than Dr. S. Kierkegaard’s slovenly article in Fædrelandet, but also something different from and greater than the whole of that long-winded body of Kierkegaardian literature.” Here Martensen is quoting himself; in fact, he is even quoting himself quoting himself. For as early as his Dogmatic Information from 1850, Martensen had rather arrogantly summed up his familiarity with Kierkegaard’s work: “[My] acquaintance with that long-winded body of literature is, as I have mentioned, quite scanty and fragmentary.”
Martensen then turned to the attack on Mynster’s “life and character” and quite understandably expressed amazement that Kierkegaard could have accused Mynster—“one of the hardest-working men in Denmark”—of having been “pleasure-mad.” At this point, Martensen came close to losing the sober-mindedness that Peter Christian Kierkegaard had attributed to him in such great measure: “Truly, this mask, which he removed in Fædrelandet, will surely be long remembered in the history of our public morals and will add to S. Kierkegaard’s renown. But the following observation seems obvious: Might not things reach the point that Dr. S. Kierkegaard himself will finally become a mask, wandering among us…. Or does Dr. S. Kierkegaard really think that we should continue to assume that he is serious in what he continually lectures us about, that the truth must be expressed in ‘existence?’” Despite his merely fragmentary acquaintance with Kierkegaard’s writings, Martensen had nonetheless grasped several points—and problems—of decisive significance. “I do not know,” Martensen continued, “how he can justify this masquerade to himself. For, after all, in his relations with people, both with the living and the dead, a knight of faith (and Dr. S. Kierkegaard has often given the appearance of being one) ought to endeavor to comport himself in a chivalrous manner. I have, however, no doubt whatever that he will be able to justify his actions to his conscience by appealing to the morality of some sort of higher genius, perhaps even by appealing to some sort of religious requirement that demands that every other consideration give way, thus providing him with a criterion—elevated far above the ordinary—by which his actions are to be judged.” This is followed by an unctuously unkind cut: “This much is certain, that with his most recent discourse about someone who is dead Dr. Søren Kierkegaard (who once wrote a discourse ‘On the Work of Love in Remembering Someone Who Is Dead’), will make himself remembered in a manner that will long protect him against a danger he seems willing to make any sacrifice to avoid—the danger of being forgotten.” It is certainly true that the dispute was about the meaning of the term “witness to the truth,” but it was also about who would occupy which place in history, about who would stand where in the firmament of the future.
There was a great deal more of this same sort of nastiness, but the worst of it was a little subordinate clause in which Martensen compared Kierkegaard to Thersites, one of the vilest figures in all of Homer, whom the poet described as follows: “Crooked were his legs; on one of them he limped badly. His back was hunched, … and thin was the hair on the top of his head.” There can be no doubt that Kierkegaard understood this compliment; he was very familiar with the second song of the Iliad. And indeed, the day after the publication of Martensen’s article, the shoemaker’s widow who kept house for Kierkegaard found the Berlingske Tidende torn to bits and scattered all over the floor. That same evening there was a dinner party at the home of the choreographer August Bournonville, who had invited friends and colleagues from the Royal Theater; the group included Frederik Ludvig Høedt, who was a successful actor and director but also an enthusiastic reader of Kierkegaard, and this proved problematic. “We had a pleasant time,” Bournonville wrote in his diary, “but Høedt displeases me by defending Søren Kjerkegaard’s vile attack on Münster.”
But Martensen’s instructive remarks and episcopal rhetoric were wasted on Magister Kierkegaard, who merely repeated his protest in the December 30 issue of Fædrelandet: “To represent a man who even in his preaching of Christianity has attained and enjoyed, on the grandest scale, all possible material goods and advantages—to represent him as a witness to the truth, as part of the holy chain, is just as ludicrous as to speak of a virgin with a large flock of children.” There are many things one can be “in addition,” Kierkegaard explained pedagogically. One can be “both this and that and in addition an amateur violinist.” It is different with being a “witness to the truth,” which is in fact a very “imperious, a most unsocial category” that does not permit itself to be linked with any other, and if, in spite of this, the attempt is made to do so, then “one must say with Christian exactitude, that this was a Devil of a witness to the truth.”
On January 2, 1855, Martensen wrote to Gude, expressing his delight that his friend had viewed his article against Kierkegaard as a “well-deserved slap.” Martensen explained that he had been compelled by his piety toward Mynster to rebut “that outrageous attack,” even though he had no desire whatever to engage in a public dispute. And then he cited yet another justification for having written his rejoinder: An article such as Kierkegaard’s “must not only be judged by the immediate and perhaps somewhat extraordinary impression it produces, but also by its aftereffects. In his second article, which is even more fanatical than the first, bordering on megalomania, he has already provided an example of what I have said about him. In any event, naturally I will not be writing anything further in this connection. I think it is not impossible that at some point he will produce an entire book on this topic.”