The Woman among the Graves

The Woman among the Graves

1855

“My Opponent Is a Glob of Snot”

Kierkegaard did not, in fact, write a book on the topic, but if all the various individual documents connected to the case are gathered together, they quickly come to constitute an entire archive of pamphlets, in which the tone varies from shrill indignation to sober condescension. Thus on January 9, 1855, Berlingske Tidende carried a lengthy, anonymous review of Jens Paludan-Müller’s essay Dr. Søren Kierkegaard’s Attack on Bishop Mynster’s Posthumous Reputation. The reviewer pointed out that Paludan-Müller, resident curate at the cathedral in Aalborg, had convincingly proved that both the “standard of measure” Kierkegaard had employed, as well as the “judgment” he had passed, were in error, and that accordingly Kierkegaard’s protest amounted to nothing but the “ungrateful blackening of the posthumous reputation of an august personage.” Paludan-Müller had challenged Kierkegaard to support his claims with documentation from the New Testament, and he doubted Kierkegaard would succeed in doing so because “at some points the Doctor wishes to be more Christian than our Lord Christ and his apostles themselves.” In conclusion, the reviewer awarded the victory to Kierkegaard’s opponents: “They have demonstrated with certainty and clarity that in Dr. S. Kierkegaard’s own writings, what he emphasizes as the most decisively Christian tenets is mixed with human doctrines and human inventions. The self-made Christianity he recommends thus leads away from the Church and its means of grace and must end either in self-righteousness or in despair.” And, invoking a sort of retroactive logic, the reviewer added his own view: “His two articles in Fædrelandet have obliterated him as an edifying author.”

Several days later Kierkegaard dismissed Paludan-Müller’s challenge as a distraction. The issue was whether or not Mynster had been a witness to the truth. Period. A wide-ranging, scholarly debate would merely transform this inherently simple question into a “prolix, learned, theological investigation with quotation after quotation…. No, thank you!” The day before Kierkegaard wrote this, Martensen had written to Gude that he found Paludan-Müller’s work “quite excellent,” but that it could perhaps have benefited from a “more intense focus upon the personality.” This was Martensen’s way of more than implying that, for agitational purposes, a more thorough exploitation of the eccentricities in Kierkegaard’s mental makeup would have been desirable. Martensen further reported that Kierkegaard was said to have a “big book in press,” and that if this turned out to be true, “then not only will there be more scandal, but confusion, because lies and deceptions are always mixed with a goodly portion of truth, and many illdisposed people will find something to support them in their opinions.” Martensen himself felt that he had received a “dispensation” from involving himself any further with the matter, but if the situation worsened, he was of course prepared: “Then the task would be precisely that of combating him from the point of view of doctrine. And the utterly jesuitical—indeed, diabolical—logic he employs will not withstand any serious analysis. The worst thing is that he has become so sordid that it is very awkward to get involved with him.” Thus spoke the Bishop of Zealand. And thus he washed his hands, which were already extraordinarily clean. We really get a sense of why Kierkegaard simply could not stand this self-righteous ecclesiastic—and of why, infuriated by what he viewed as the spinelessness of the “established order,” Kierkegaard was at one point moved to remark, “My opponent is a glob of snot.”

Rasmus Nielsen, on the other hand, was not afraid to get involved. In the January 10 issue of Fædrelandet he published “A Good Deed,” a lengthy article in which he maintained that Kierkegaard had been justified in protesting against the portrayal of Mynster as a witness to the truth. Nielsen’s piece was courageous and was thus itself a good deed, but as had so often been the case with Nielsen in the past, his courage was accompanied by a sort of touching naïveté. This self-appointed mediator had, alas, taken it on himself to rebut a number of the common prejudices against Kierkegaard. For example, Kierkegaard was not nearly as coldly rational as one might think, Nielsen assured his readers, and then went on to support this view with a couple of sentences, including a splendid parenthetical remark that spoke volumes about his relationship with Kierkegaard: “In fact, I have the impression that for all his reflections, Kierkegaard is a man of feelings. When I have read him, when he has spoken with me (even when he teased me), I have had the sense that this slender man, with his pointed words, nevertheless surely had a tender and childlike temperament.”

Nielsen then turned to the more substantive issue, the accusation that Kierkegaard was “unchurchly” and that his campaign was a “narrowly private matter.” The church’s cause was not furthered merely by invoking external authorities, but by something much more radical, by “putting Christ’s words into effect”: “The Church cannot endure if the impression of what it means to be a witness to the truth is weakened…. Directing his many-faceted and untiring intellectual polemics against every sort of spiritual cunning, Søren Kierkegaard, a master of reflection in a reflective age, has striven to remedy this consumptive weakening.” Invoking a retrospective and historical perspective, Nielsen attempted to show how Kierkegaard had waited in vain for Mynster to make an admission: “Bishop Mynster died. The Communications was published, but there was no final explanation, not a word from the Church’s side that could have cleared up the misunderstanding…. So the limit had been reached.” Thus Nielsen, too, had studied Mynster’s Communications and had apparently been amazed that they did not mention Kierkegaard and his work with a single line. Nielsen therefore found Kierkegaard’s attack entirely understandable. Nielsen believed that Kierkegaard knew what he was doing, but he also believed that Kierkegaard had done so “with unspeakable pain” and had put the matter in God’s hands. And, finally, Nielsen let slip this brilliant little remark: “I believe this because I cannot do otherwise; in this matter I am compelled to value this man so highly in order not to value him—very little.”

After these well-intentioned efforts at the thankless task of bringing about a reconciliation, Nielsen presented his actual “petition,” which made it clear what an incredibly poor understanding of the entire matter he actually had: Presupposing that Kierkegaard had been motivated neither by “self love” nor by “vain imperiousness or intellectual arrogance,” he requested that Bishop Martensen permit him, Nielsen, to offer Kierkegaard the admission he demanded. “I do not require that Bishop Martensen alter his individual views; I ask only that the Bishop—not for Kierkegaard’s sake, or for my sake, but for the sake of the Church—will permit the admission, as I understand it, to stand and to apply to himself as well.” This was a surprising suggestion, and J. F. Giødwad, the gray eminence of Fædrelandet, discreetly took Kierkegaard aside to hear if he thought the newspaper should publish more of this sort of thing, which in Kierkegaard’s decided opinion was not strictly necessary. He would in fact prefer that Fædrelandet publish articles that attacked him, since this would help preserve his “separateness as an individual.”

The day following Nielsen’s good deed, Martensen wrote to his clerical friend Gude, informing him that he had recently paid Nielsen a “return visit” to make it clear that he did not “harbor any hatred, nor was he opposed to reconciliation.” The visit had been reasonably successful, inasmuch as Nielsen apparently not only shared, but supported, Martensen’s views. Nielsen would of course continue to defend Kierkegaard’s “works,” but Martensen noted that he had spoken “with much greater disapproval concerning Kierkegaard’s most recent scandalous episode. He would not quite grant that it was diabolical, but granted that it could be. He said that Kierkegaard was now standing at a perilous crossroads: Either he would have to prove that he was the greatest man of the era or he would be less than zero!” According to Martensen, Nielsen then mentioned that he would write a piece explaining his views in more detail. “Naturally, I did not discuss it any further, since these were delicate matters, and I prefer to let everyone write what he wants to write, reserving for myself the right to do the same. It will become unpleasant if he visits me more frequently.”

B. S. Ingemann, who was usually able to maintain friendly relations with just about everyone, could no longer contain his indignation, and on January 15 he wrote to Jens Paludan-Müller that his piece had been a muchneeded “defense of Mynster’s reputation against the master sophist of our Athens.” Ingemann continued: “As far as Søren Sophist is concerned, I have never believed that the truth was in him; with his brilliant dialectics, he has always seemed to me to be a sleight-of-hand artist who plays hocus-pocus with the truth and with Christianity, letting it appear and disappear under his shells. Meanwhile, he plays first Simeon Stylites, then Mephistopheles, and is himself fundamentally a hollow character, who has in a way sold both his heart and his reason for a double portion of brilliant wit—without, however, having had the sense to conceal the hollowness from which a boundless vanity, pride, an unloving spirit, and great many other sorts of wretchedness constantly peer forth.” That same day, January 15, Fædrelandet carried an article by Archdeacon Tryde—“Has Dr. Søren Kierkegaard Performed a Good Deed in Protesting against Calling Bishop Mynster a Witness to the Truth?”—which investigated the conflict in thoughtful theological fashion, though it ended by taking Mynster’s side.

A little less than a week after his first contribution to the debate, Nielsen published a second, quite brief article that he titled “To the Honorable Right Reverend bishop Martensen: A Question.” Summoning up all his diplomatic ingenuity, Nielsen asked that the bishop affirm that Kierkegaard’s protest had been a good deed: “On behalf of the Church, do you find it appropriate that my view will remain standing, unopposed, as a counterpart to your own, until further notice, or is it your judgment that my view must immediately be rejected as unfounded, so that, for the sake of the peace of the Church, your verdict can be confirmed as infallible and irrevocable?” Nielsen never received a reply. But a couple of days later Berlingske Tidende ran an announcement from an unknown “X,” who noted with curt astringency that “Since, under the present circumstances, any sort of reply to such an untimely and unwarranted question would merely seem to pour oil on the flames, one probably ought to assume that for the sake of peace and for the sake of the future, no reply will be forthcoming.”

It is not known whether Martensen was the person who concealed himself behind X, but in any case he was certainly far from happy about the turn the matter had taken. “As for R. Nielsen,” he wrote to Gude on January 19, “by now, you have certainly read his atrocious second article. Oh, how utterly without character that fellow is.” Ten days later the situation would become, if possible, even more atrocious. For on January 29, Kierkegaard announced in Fædrelandet that “by canonizing Bishop Mynster in this fashion, the new bishop makes the entire clerical Establishment, from a Christian point of view, into a piece of shameless impropriety. For if Bishop Mynster is a witness to the truth, then—as even the blindest person can see—every pastor in the country is a witness to the truth.” And then Kierkegaard ran amok in the genre of the atrocious: “I hereby repeat my protest, not in toned-down fashion but intensified: I would rather gamble, booze, whore, steal, and murder than participate in making a fool of God. I would rather spend my time at bowling alleys, in billiard parlors, my nights in casinos or at masked balls, than participate in the sort of seriousness that Bishop Martensen calls Christian seriousness. Indeed, I would rather make a fool of God quite directly, climb to some elevated spot or go out of doors where I am alone with him, and there say outright, ‘You are a poor God, good for nothing better than for people to make a fool of you.’ I would rather do that than make a fool of him by pompously pretending to be holy, presenting my life as sheer zeal and ardor for Christianity—though, please note, in such fashion that this always (damned equivocation!) ‘in addition’ brings me profit in temporal and earthly respects.”

That same day, in a “newspaper supplement,” Kierkegaard published an article titled “Two New Witnesses to the Truth.” The article had been occasioned by the publication of a sermon Martensen had delivered on December 26, 1854, in which he had provocatively called two new bishops “witnesses to the truth.” “The late Bishop had a quite unusual talent for concealing the weak sides and infirmities of the established order,” Kierkegaard explained. “The new Bishop, Martensen, also a talented man, has a rare talent for exposing, even in the least things he does, one or another of the weak sides of the established order.” The consecration of the two new bishops had taken place the day after Christmas, the day of Saint Stephen the Martyr, something Kierkegaard found “satirical,” just as he was indignant that in alluding to Saint Stephen, Martensen had taken “the occasion to note, among other things, that the term witness to the truth ‘reverberates with a special resonance on this day.’ And this cannot be denied—except that this special resonance is a dissonance.”

Once again, Ingemann had to come to the rescue, bringing words of comfort to those who were attacked; in a letter dated January 28 he wrote the following to Martensen: “I have been greatly angered and offended by Søren Sophist’s unseemly antics on Mynster’s grave. Your rebuke was harsh, but just and fitting.” Were Ingemann to offer a single objection, it would be that Martensen ought not to have attacked Kierkegaard’s physical appearance, because by having done so he had risked letting Kierkegaard’s “well-deserved punishment make him into a martyr in his own imagination and eo ipso into a ‘witness to the truth’ in that same imagination.” It was thus not sympathy but tactical considerations that induced Ingemann to counsel Martensen to tread more softly. As for Kierkegaard, Ingemann continued as follows: “He is a hollow, dialectical sleight-of-hand artist, who permits the truth to show itself and then disappear under a rigid monk’s cowl, which is really a clown’s hat. In my view, unbounded pride and vanity and a great deal of other baseness peep out through the aesthetic rags and holes with which he adorns himself—and meanwhile he deepens and deepens the gulf between himself (as well as his admirers) and the Christianity he preaches.”

Ingemann was capable of other and greater accomplishments than writing the saccharine hymns for which he is so well-known. Putting the truth in the mouth of a clown directs us forward in time, toward der tolle Mensch, the mad person, whom Nietzsche, less than a generation later, would send staggering around, bearing a lantern in broad daylight, proclaiming the death of God.

Virginie and Regine—to Lose What Is Most Precious

In the midst of all these goings-on, far away in a tiny corner of history, Gude became the father of a little daughter, Emma Dorothea. On February 2, Martensen sent his congratulations and added a couple of remarks concerning Kierkegaard’s article about the two newest witnesses to the truth: “You may perhaps not have had occasion to read Kierkegaard’s latest fanatical article, written with vulgar vehemence. It is the sort of thing that makes one concerned for his mental state. What is certain is that the Kingdom of God does not approach us by such means…. I would hope that people might now leave him entirely to himself and not get involved with him.”

When Martensen wrote again two weeks later, it was—in marked contrast to the many matters of principle that flew back and forth between these intransigent men—about a profoundly personal matter: “I hereby share with you the sad news that our little Virginie, who was now half-a-year old, died yesterday from convulsions and pneumonia. This event has especially caused much mental grief for my wife. God grant us the strength to bear this and every cross that God wills us to bear!”

While the Bishop was getting ready for the burial and the grave digger hacked away at the frozen earth so that the child’s coffin could be lowered the prescribed six feet, polemics spouted unhindered from Kierkegaard’s pen, and the clergy, shaken, was universally scandalized. “We have really had an unpleasant time with Søren Kierkegaard’s attack on Mynster,” Just Paulli wrote an acquaintance in mid-February. “It is truly disgraceful to exploit Christianity as Kierkegaard does, using it to stir up a fuss. There is something demonic about his vanity. Everything about him is calculated. From his conversations—in earlier times we used to take walks together—I had certainly long been aware that he believed that he himself was the man to promote Christianity among us, and I gave him my honest opinion about what was awry and dangerous in his writings.”

This Kierkegaard could not calculate everything, however. In the course of March, the Schlegels were busy packing up their home, for Schlegel had been appointed governor of the Danish West Indies, where he and his wife would spend the next five years. On March 17, the very day of their departure, Regine left the ghostly apartment on Bredgade for a walk around town in the hope of meeting her Søren. Whether or not it was one last, generous gesture of Governance toward these two, whose lives had been bound together so impossibly, before long, she caught sight of the well-known figure in the broad-brimmed hat. As she passed by, she said with a voice so soft, it could just barely be heard, “God bless you—may all go well with you!” Kierkegaard was quite stunned, but then he managed to tip his hat and greet his old love—for the last time ever.

Then Regine hurried back to the apartment on Bredgade, acting as though nothing had happened.

“Quite Simply: I Want Honesty”

In the course of the next five months Kierkegaard wrote almost a score of articles for Fædrelandet, more than half of which were published in the course of just twelve days. It was a veritable carpet bombing with polemics. Martensen was short of both allies and ammunition, and he asked Gude several times for appropriate material with which to combat the “Kierkegaardian fuss,” as he put it in letter dated March 21. In this same letter, the bishop, who had now made his first official visitations to Mynster’s old precincts, confided the following: “I have had many insights into the very miserable conditions and circumstances that characterize the ecclesiastical situation. There are certainly things in the State Church that neither can be nor ought to be retained. And the clergy includes a good many members for whose sake it would not be worth supporting any ecclesiastical Establishment whatever. Today I expect to have dinner with Count Knuth and a little circle of friends.”

Kierkegaard would not only have been amused by Martensen’s easy transition from his ecclesiastical complaints to the aristocratic society he expected that evening, but he would also have taken delight in the fact that here, indeed, was the admission he had been seeking. Martensen had confirmed with his own eyes what Kierkegaard had criticized so volubly: The situation in the church was miserable, the State Church was open to criticism, and the major part of the clergy was not worth defending. It was to Martensen’s credit that he acknowledged that this was how things were; that he did not say so publicly made hypocrisy of his silence.

While Gude sat in idyllic surroundings on the island of Lolland, reading the bishop’s letters, the March 22 issue of Fædrelandet appeared, containing Kierkegaard’s concrete advice about what Martensen ought to do: “First and foremost, and on the grandest possible scale, there must be a stop to all the official—well-intentioned—untruth which (with the best of intentions) conjures up and sustains the illusion that what is being preached is Christianity, the Christianity of the New Testament…. The matter must be turned this way: Away, away from all hallucinations, out with the truth, out with it—We are not capable of being Christians in the New Testament sense.” Four days later, on March 26, Kierkegaard picked up where he had left off: “The religious situation of the country is: Christianity … does not exist at all, which certainly just about everyone can see as well as I can. We have, if you will, a full complement of bishops, deans, pastors. Learned, exceptionally learned, talented, gifted, well-meaning in the human sense, they all declaim—well, very well, exceptionally well, or fairly well, indifferently, poorly—but not one of them is in the character of the Christianity of the New Testament, and is not even in the character of striving in the direction of the Christianity of the New Testament.” Martensen would hardly have agreed with Kierkegaard’s conclusions, but the two men could most likely have agreed on the premises.

The conversation could not be continued, however, and two days later, on March 28, yet another fragmentation bomb fell very close to the episcopal residence. “A Thesis—Just One Single Thesis. O, Luther, you had ninety-five theses. How frightful! And yet in a more profound sense, the more theses, the less frightful. This matter is far more frightful: There is only one thesis. The Christianity of the New Testament does not exist at all. There is nothing here to reform. What matters here is to shed some light on a Christian criminal offense that has persisted for centuries, practiced (somewhat innocently or guiltily) by millions, whereby, while saying they were perfecting Christianity, people have shrewdly attempted, little by little, to trick God out of Christianity, turning Christianity into exactly the opposite of what it is in the New Testament.” On this same occasion Kierkegaard insisted that he was not a “reformer,” a “seer,” or a “prophet,” but rather “an unusually talented police detective.” Two days later, March 30, Kierkegaard was so pointed in his critique of religion that it must have sent the men in black into a swoon: “If the human race had risen in rebellion against God and had rejected or rebuffed Christianity, it would not have been nearly as dangerous as this underhanded behavior that has abolished Christianity by propagating it in a false and untrue manner.” Kierkegaard developed this idea the next day, March 31, in an article with the interrogatory title “What Do I Want?” to which he himself provided the answer: “Quite simply, I want honesty…. I am willing to dare for this honesty. But on the other hand, I am not saying that it is for Christianity that I dare. Assume this, assume that I became quite literally a sacrifice: I would not, however, have become a sacrifice for Christianity, but because I wanted honesty.”

Martensen was at his wits’ end. He reacted with defensiveness and outrage, reporting the following to Gude in a letter of April 2: “So Kierkegaard has begun a new scandal with his ceaseless newspaper articles. I have not read them but have heard oral summaries of them. Oh, this fellow reveals himself in an increasingly frightful manner. It furthermore seems to me that even in intellectual terms, quite apart from the moral side of the issue, he prostitutes himself with these narrow-minded attacks, exposing himself as a person who simply has not paid attention to the limitations of his own talents. Here we see clearly what he is capable of in the realm of direct communication. It would be interesting to know what Rasmus Nielsen now thinks about the either/or he proposed in his first article. But I have seen absolutely nothing of him, nor do I wish to.”

A week earlier, Carsten Hauch had written a letter to Ingemann, declaring himself in complete agreement with the latter’s “judgment of Kierkegaard’s behavior.” Ingemann had expressed his indignation at “the support the impudence and shamelessness of this sophistry has found among young people, to whom this cruel clowning with the truth seems brilliant.” Six years earlier, when Hauch had thanked Kierkegaard for sending him a copy of Either/Or, he had assured Kierkegaard that this was certainly the book he would take along if he ever had to serve time in prison.

Magdalene Hansen, a sister of the painter Christen Købke and the wife of his colleague, the painter Constantin Hansen, expressed herself much more charitably in a letter to Baroness Elise Stampe: “It has also been a continuing source of sorrow to me to hear people tear Kierkegaard apart and, so to speak, diligently deafen themselves to the truth in his conduct so that they can discern his own human weaknesses all the more distinctly—as if the question were, What sort of a person is Kierkegaard? and not, Am I a Christian?”

“Therefore, Take the Pseudonymity Away”

What had begun as a conflict about the proper definition of the term “witness to the truth” soon developed into a wide-ranging critique of the inept stewardship the clergy had displayed in discharging its responsibilities to Christianity, which by now had become indistinguishable from the spiritlessly polite worldview of the bourgeoisie. On April 3, someone taking the name “N-n” published a “Suggestion to Dr. S. Kierkegaard” in Fædrelandet, hoping to put an end to the debate that was now approaching the half-year mark and that, in N-n’s view, ought to be “kept somewhat freer of paradoxical exaggerations and convulsive overexertions.” N-n was furthermore indignant at the malicious virtuosity with which Kierkegaard hurled his maledictions at the church and its clergy: “Everything taught and preached by the appointed servants of Christianity is lumped together and stamped as anti-Christian.” Now it was time to speak constructively, so if Kierkegaard wanted to do something more than merely “stir things up and tear things down, disturbing and confusing, promoting anxiety and terror,” he ought to “provide his fellow countrymen some guidance, an account, in clear, definite outlines, of the doctrines of the New Testament in such fashion as, in his view, would entitle them to bear the name ‘doctrines of the New Testament.’” If this were provided, N-n believed, readers might perhaps be able to emerge from the “foggy realm in which they are at present situated, with no other lights than Roman candles and rockets,” for “nothing has been accomplished by ringing the alarm and by shouting, by storm and rage, by thunder and lightning. This is not in the spirit of the prophets, much less in that of Jesus and the apostles.”

On April 7, Kierkegaard replied, referring N-n to the Postscript, The Sickness unto Death, and in particular to Practice, which was of course sold out, but was just then “being printed in a new edition.” A couple of weeks later, Dean Victor Bloch, a Grundtvigian, published his views in Fædrelandet. He had read N-n’s contribution with interest, and agreed with N-n’s presentation of the matter, though not with his conclusion, because in Bloch’s view what the matter required was not theological negotiations, but an ecclesiastical decision. If Kierkegaard was to be taken seriously and the entire matter was not merely to be regarded as a “coarse joke carrying a police truncheon,” he would have to be confronted with the self-contradictions he is guilty of when he, “who is no Christian, wants to decide what Christianity is and what it is not.” But Kierkegaard had not merely contradicted himself, he had also “contradicted the Lord, who promised his congregation eternal life and victory over the powers of darkness…. But when he becomes altogether too impudent and shrill, he will have to put up with the fact that the Lord’s congregation will leave his shrill voice outside and unheeded, closing their doors to him while consoling themselves with singing their hymns, praying their Lord’s Prayer, reading their Bible, listening to preaching of the Word of God, and living through the sacraments of the Lord.” This was the Grundtvigian method, and it has rarely awakened offense.

Kierkegaard, who of course had long since ceased attending church, replied three days later: “If I do not mend my ways, the Dean wants me to be subjected to punishment by the Church. And how? Indeed, the punishment is cruelly calculated, so cruel, that I advise ladies to have their smelling salts at the ready so they do not swoon when they hear it: If I do not mend my ways, the doors of the Church will be shut against me. Terrifying! Thus, if I do not mend my ways, I will be excluded, excluded during the quiet hours on Sundays from hearing the eloquence of witnesses to the truth—an eloquence which, if not priceless, is at any rate beyond value. I—poor, wretched sheep that I am—can neither read nor write, and therefore, thus excluded, I must languish spiritually, die of hunger from having been excluded from what surely deserves to be called nourishing, since it nourishes the pastor and his family! … Frightful, frightful punishment! Frightful Dean!” After this, Bloch remained very quiet.

A couple of days earlier, Dagbladet had carried a article by an anonymous man who supported Kierkegaard’s critique of the halfheartedness of the times. But, the anonymous fellow believed, the fault lay not in the church, but in the fact that “Christ is a stranger in our homes,” and he therefore wanted to strike a blow for “home devotions—Yes, that is what we lack!” Kierkegaard, who until now had reacted to even the least little peep, did not comment on this profound simplicity, yet a while earlier he himself had in fact considered something not so different from this suggestion. Since religious services were merely a “grandiose attempt to make a fool of God,” he had decided to remain at home and read “one of the more stringent edifying works on Sunday morning and sing a couple of hymns.” This plan to hold such one-man religious services was probably never put into effect. Instead, Kierkegaard came to give his protest a provocative twist by turning up regularly at the reading room of the Athenæum every Sunday just as the church bells intoned their call to attend services. On Friday, May 28, 1852, Kierkegaard took communion for the last time in his life from Pastor A.N.C. Smith, his father’s old confessor. And he was consistent. On May 2, 1855, after his elderly cousin Michael Andersen Kierkegaard had lost his wife, Kierkegaard received a message from the undertaker, who informed him that he would be picked up by carriage on the day of the funeral. Kierkegaard sent his regrets, however, and in a letter (which, incidentally, is the last dated letter we have from his hand) he explained that for a number of years he had not “attended a funeral for anyone, not even members of my closest family, which you yourself will know, Uncle, for I attended neither the funeral for our aunt in Gothersgade nor that of cousin Andreas, so I would surely give offense to others, who of course will be present, if I were to make an exception in this case. So, dear Uncle, let me be excused. And perhaps would you also inform the undertaker of this, so that he does not send a carriage to pick me up because of a misunderstanding.”

Kierkegaard had other business to attend to and had to let the dead bury their dead. And on May 10 he published two articles in Fædrelandet, “A Result” and “A Monologue,” both of which focused harshly on the paucity of reaction from the clergy. In this connection he set forth a clarification: “It was against the fantasies of Bishop Martensen that I protested. I did not pose the matter in such a way that the clergy must be obligated to be witnesses to the truth. No, I posed the matter like this: They must take down that sign.” Six days later Kierkegaard himself hung out his own sign. The occasion was the newly published second edition of Practice in Christianity; he explained that if the work were being published for the first time now, on May 16, 1855, it would not “have been by a pseudonym, but by myself, and the thrice-repeated preface would have been dropped…. Earlier, my idea had been that if the established order could be defended, this was the only way of doing so: by poetically (therefore, by a pseudonym) passing judgment upon it…. Now, on the other hand, I am completely convinced of two things: both that, from a Christian point of view, the established order is untenable and that every day it exists is, from the Christian point of view, a crime; and that one may not call upon grace in this manner. Therefore, take the pseudonymity away; take away the thrice-repeated preface and the ‘Moral’ to the first section—then, from a Christian point of view, Practice in Christianity is an attack on the established order.”

The pamphlet “This Must Be Said, So Let It Be Said,” which appeared the following week along with its two so-called “accompanying sheets,” made it abundantly clear that an “admission” was no longer a possibility. The two accompanying sheets bore the dates April 9 and 11, 1855. The first of them had originally been addressed to Cultus Minister C. C. Hall and had been written in the form of direct discourse; Kierkegaard deleted those features and published the piece as an official declaration of hostility to official Christianity. On May 26, before anyone had managed to reply, there appeared yet another article in which Kierkegaard, after a sort of summary of events thus far, passed the following, unflattering verdict: “Bishop Martensen’s silence is: (1) indefensible from a Christian point of view, (2) ludicrous, (3) stupid-shrewd, (4) contemptible in more than one sense.”

With this, the first phase of Kierkegaard’s attack was concluded. The second could begin, but time was running out.

The Moment

“Apropos of witnesses to the truth, now Søren is bringing out the big guns and has opened up his batteries in an article in Fædrelandet and in a sort of journal, The Moment,” wrote Hans Brøchner in a letter dated May 29, 1855, to his old friend Christian K. F. Molbech, then a professor of Danish language and literature down in Kiel. As usual, Brøchner was well-informed. Five days earlier, the first issue of the newsletter had been published and suddenly begun circulating in Copenhagen, then sweltering under an almost subtropical heat wave, and it had caused an unusual stir. Brøchner had scant hope that the newsletter would make an impact on the clergy, however. “Our witnesses to the truth are like the people in Sebastopol,” he wrote, comparing the ecclesiastical situation to the famous naval port in the Crimea, which at the time was surrounded by English forces, who had fruitlessly laid siege to the city for months. “As long as they are not starved out, they don’t care at all about anything else; they are quiet and continue their studies of ombre and parish tax rates—the Old and New Testaments of our clergy.”

It had long been clear to Kierkegaard that he could not continue his campaign in Fædrelandet. While he had good relations with J. F. Giødwad, he was reluctant to overplay his hand. By now, Fædrelandet had lent its name and great quantities of printer’s ink to no fewer than twenty-two articles from Kierkegaard’s hand, and he did not want the newspaper to become his official journal. “So,” as Kierkegaard subsequently wrote in retrospect, “after considering many different factors, I decided to begin publishing some newsletters myself and thus have an organ solely for myself as an individual.”

But it took time to get the newsletters off the ground. For one thing, there were certain difficulties with respect to finances, since Kierkegaard himself had to assume responsibility for the production costs. For this purpose he had to draw on the last of the five thousand rixdollars remaining from his sale, on August 25, 1854, of the mortgage on 2 Nytorv to his brother-in-law, the banker Henrik Ferdinand Lund. For another thing, Kierkegaard was fearful of ending in a nasty journalistic paradox. From an unpublished article dated April 8, 1855, it is clear how important it had been for Kierkegaard “to use the daily press without coming into contradiction with my views about the daily press.” Still, for the good of the cause, Kierkegaard brushed aside these various difficulties, and on May 24 the first issue of The Moment was published; it had a press run of one thousand copies and included an invitation to subscribe through the publisher, C. A. Reitzel. As early as July 19, Kierkegaard was able to request that Reitzel print an additional “five hundred copies of The Moment, No. 2,” and ten days later he noted in quiet triumph that The Moment now had a circulation about equal to that of Fædrelandet.

Despite Kierkegaard’s insistence that he wanted to carry out his campaign as “an individual,” his newsletter was nonetheless a break with his previous principles, and Sibbern could scarcely believe his own aged eyes when he saw the first issue of The Moment. Not only did he have some doubts about whether Kierkegaard really had a “Christian disposition and temperament, … although he certainly must have had something of that sort,” he was also surprised that Kierkegaard, “who hated agitation the whole time I knew him, himself became a zealous agitator.” Martensen also noted this reversal: “Here he addressed himself to the masses—he, who had previously disdained the masses and had only sought a quiet encounter with the individual.” Nor was it long before Kierkegaard himself began to sense the discrepancy between the message and the medium, between personal protest and public broadcast. On August 30, when he considered the effect he was having, he found no fault with the interest people had taken in his cause. There was absolutely no doubt that people were reading him, but the next step people took was quite literally in the wrong direction: “The next Sunday, people go to church as usual. What K. says is basically true, and it is very interesting to read what he has to say—that the whole of the official worship of God consists of making a fool of God, that it is blasphemy. But we are used to it, after all, and we cannot free ourselves from it; we don’t have the strength to do so. Still, it is certain that we will take great pleasure in reading what he writes; one can really become very impatient to get hold of the latest issue and learn more concerning this criminal matter, which is undeniably of enormous interest.” Naturally, Kierkegaard found this sort of interest deplorable, and it served only to confirm him in his belief that Christianity had been abolished and that “in our times, people are not even in what I would call a state of religion, but are alien to and unacquainted with the sort of passion every religion must require, and without which one cannot have any religion, least of all Christianity.”

“Then That Poet Suddenly Transformed Himself”

To counteract the inertia of stupidity that is built into the media themselves, Kierkegaard repeatedly insisted from quite early on that he would prefer not to have to operate via The Moment. In the very first article of the very first issue, he embraced the old adage “that willing hands make light work,” but he modified it, saying that “true seriousness only emerges when a competent person is compelled by a higher power to take on a task against his will—that is, a competent person in opposition to his own desire.” Kierkegaard argued that if this reversal of appetite and duty were genuine, which it was, then he would be able to relate himself quite “properly to the task of ‘taking action in the moment.’ For God knows, nothing is more alien to my soul. Being an author—well, yes, that appeals to me. If I am to be honest, I must say that I have loved being productive…. I am the sort of person who truly does not take the slightest pleasure in taking action in the moment—presumably it is for this very reason that I have been chosen to do so.”

The situation was extraordinary, and so is the role Kierkegaard assumed. In the draft of the tenth issue of The Moment, dated September 1855, Kierkegaard displayed all due modesty in describing his situation: “The point of view I have to exhibit, and do exhibit, is so singular that in eighteen hundred years of Christendom, I literally have nothing analogous, no corresponding situation, to which I can refer. And thus—face to face with eighteen hundred years—I stand quite literally alone. The only analogy I have before me is Socrates; my task is a Socratic one, to scrutinize the definition of what it is to be a Christian.” In the same piece, Kierkegaard informed his readers that there “is only one person alive who has what is required to produce a genuine criticism of my work, and that is myself…. The only person who has occasionally spoken with some truth about my significance is Prof. R. Nielsen, but this truth he heard in private conversations with me.” Nor was Kierkegaard in doubt about the importance of his cause to the history of his country, though his opinions remained in his journals: “The cause I have the honor to serve is the greatest Denmark has ever had; it is the future of Christianity, and it must begin here. As is proper, for my part, this cause has been served with such zeal, effort, diligence, and selflessness that Denmark has had no cause that resembles it in this respect.”

The matter was without parallel, beyond all analogy, but nonetheless, when Kierkegaard indicated the theater that would be the scene of his actions, everyone could see that he had found his stage props in the Colosseum of ancient Rome. “So in the end it becomes a sort of pleasure (corresponding to the pleasure experienced by spectators when gladiators fought with animals) for a member of the public to witness this combat: an individual possessing nothing but the power of the spirit and who absolutely refuses to accept any other power, fighting for the religion, the religion of sacrifice, against this gigantic corps of one thousand professional pastors, who say ‘No, thank you’ to spirit but who heartily thank the government for pay, for titles, and for crosses of knighthood.” And when Kierkegaard came up with an example of such a “life” lived in relation to New Testament Christianity, a person would have to be more than a little obtuse not to associate that life with something tending in the direction of Kierkegaard himself: “Let me give an example. To live in such a way that one works more strenuously than any compulsory laborer, and in the process puts money into the project; to amount to nothing; to be ridiculed, and so forth. For the great mass of people, living like this must seem to be a kind of madness; in any case, most people will feel that this is alien and will look upon such a way of living as alien. The truth, however, is that this sort of life is a life lived in relation to the Christianity of the New Testament.”

Kierkegaard’s campaign was a corrective to “the established order”; he had pointed this out frequently and vociferously. But it was also something else, something he expended almost equal energy on not mentioning: It was a corrective to extensive portions of his own works; his pseudonymous ventroquilism had now reversed itself, finally turning into personal statements. “When the castle gate of inwardness has long been closed and is finally opened, it does not move soundlessly like an interior door on springmounted hinges,” he explained with a medieval metaphor. In the work What Christ Judges with Respect to Official Christianity, dated June 16, he expressed himself more directly: “I began by passing myself off as a poet, cunningly taking aim at what I surely believed was the central point of official Christianity.” The crux of the situation was that people had transformed “Christianity into poetry” and had thus abolished “the imitation of Christ, so that one can relate to the exemplar merely by means of the imagination, living oneself in totally different categories—which means that one relates oneself to Christianity poetically.” Kierkegaard noted with respect to his tactics that “the procedure was the same as that used by the police to make the persons involved feel secure; this is something the police do precisely in order to gain the opportunity to investigate a case more thoroughly.” And as time passed, this investigation revealed so much that the poet had to undergo a transfiguration: “Then that poet suddenly transformed himself. He cast off his guitar—if I may be permitted to put it thus—and took out a book called ‘The New Testament of Our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ.’”

Kierkegaard’s words border on the utterly platitudinous, but they were meant in deadly earnest, which is clear from various bits of evidence, including a piece in the seventh issue of The Moment that lays out in some detail the danger the poet poses to religion. Here, once again, the exposé is undertaken by a “talented police officer,” who precisely by dissembling and by disguising himself as “a poet,” has been able to see through the many masks and various getups of the day. With several deft, dialectical moves, the piece—titled “Why Does ‘The Human Race’ Love ‘The Poet’ Most of All?”—presents “the poet” as a deceiver and illusionist par excellence. Everyone loves him because he appeals so evocatively to “the imagination” that people simply forget that his writing is fictional and confuse it with reality. Here again, the “talented police officer” could be arrested for a number of aesthetic crimes, including his past as a “poet,” but since the forces of law and order have been temporarily suspended, we will settle for making the point, which is that Kierkegaard’s criticisms are, among other things, more or less obvious self-criticisms.

Something similar applies with respect to the remarks about nonsense (subsequently cited so often) which appeared in the ninth issue of The Moment: “The human race is shrewd. It has compelled existence to reveal its secret. It has got wind of the fact that if one wants to have life made easy (and that is exactly what we want), it can be easily done. All one needs to do is to make oneself and make being a human being more and more insignificant—then life becomes easier and easier. Be nonsense, and you will see, all difficulties will disappear! … Be nonsense. Have one opinion today, another tomorrow, and then once again have the one you had the day before yesterday, and a new one on Friday. Be nonsense. Make yourself into many people. Or parcel yourself out, have one opinion anonymously, another under your own name, one orally, another in writing, one as a public official, another as a private citizen, … and you will see, all difficulties will disappear.” “Nonsense” is the category of lightness, of noncommittal and experimental hovering, of the mutability of the subject. But precisely in being all this, nonsense is also an insidious or involuntary metaphor for Kierkegaard’s own works, which merely by virtue of the rapidly changing characters, the exploding population of the portrait gallery found in the pseudonymous works, and the edifying discourses in very varying spirits provide an almost classic demonstration of the behavior of a person who makes himself into “many,” who parcels out his “self,” who has one “one opinion anonymously, another under [his] own name.”

Out with Inwardness!

Kierkegaard had taken on his character, had put aside all forms of indirect communication, and would no longer tolerate inwardness, neither his own, nor that of his culture, as a pretext for refraining from action. The very images and metaphors Kierkegaard employed gave his campaign the stamp of something like an exorcism of inwardness. Kierkegaard often depicted a situation in which a festering or sick “internality” erupted into the outer world, as, for example, in the article “Take an Emetic!” In this piece, Christendom is diagnosed as a disease with numerous internal symptoms such as “a bad taste in the mouth, a coated tongue, chills and shivering,” for which the physician usually prescribes an “emetic.” Kierkegaard prescribed the same medicine: “Take an emetic. Come out of this halfway condition.” Stronger and stronger doses help bring about a cure, placing the patient in a sort of trance in which the terrors that had originally been a part of Christianity dramatically reassert themselves: “First, think for a moment about what Christianity is, what it requires of a person, what sacrifices it demands…. And then make it clear—absolutely, vividly clear—to yourself how disgusting it really is that this is supposed to be the Christian worship of God: to spend a quiet hour during which a dramatically costumed man steps forth and, striking a posture of terror, proclaims in stifled sobs that there is an accounting in Eternity, that we are advancing toward giving an accounting to Eternity; and that we live in such a fashion that, outside of this quiet hour, to disregard even so much as one or another conventional consideration—much less to disregard considerations touching upon one’s advancement in worldly matters, or one’s earthy advantages, or the views of the elite—is of course something that would never occur to anyone, nor of course, to the sermonic orator. And if anyone did do so he would be punished by being declared some sort of madman. Think of living in such a manner that this is supposed to be the Christian worship of God. Now, doesn’t an emetic work?” If, contrary to expectations, the medicine does not have the desired effect, the cure can be continued ad nauseam: “Well, then, take an additional dose!” The point of this little tidbit—and the very idea of healing—is to cast out the internality that has spread throughout Christendom. “So let it do its work. And, next after God, give thanks to Bishop Martensen for this extremely beneficial emetic.”

In the century since Sartre, nausea has become the great symbol of cultural illness, and in The Moment it was associated with an entire series of illnesses: “Now it is obvious that it only takes one single person to infect an entire city with cholera, and one thousand perjurers are more than enough to infect an entire society with scabies.” The cholera epidemic of 1853 was used as a catastrophic counterpoint to the natural and medical sciences that had otherwise been the source of so much optimism. In the second issue of The Moment, Kierkegaard compared his understanding of his times with the treatment of a psychiatric patient. At length we are led into a gigantic hospital (a metaphor for the Danish People’s Church, which in 1849 became the new name of the State Church) where everyone is dying like flies, with the exception of Kierkegaard, who is untouched by the disease and is able to make his expert diagnosis, namely, that the “entire building is infested with poison” and that therefore the “close air” must be immediately replaced with “fresh air.” The article bears the clinical title “Physician’s Diagnosis,” and Kierkegaard’s cure is not exactly the most edifying prescription: “Let this mess collapse, get rid of it, close all these boutiques and shops, the only exceptions to the strict Sunday closing laws. Make this official ambiguity impossible, put them out of business, pension off all the quacks, … and let us once again worship God in simplicity, instead of making a fool of him in splendid buildings; let things once again become serious and be done with playing.”

“The Pastor—That Epitome of Nonsense Cloaked in Long Robes!”

Kierkegaard’s appeals to governmental and official institutions were for the most part confined to the early issues of The Moment. Thereafter he bypassed governmental authorities and the clergy and addressed himself directly to the common man in a personal tone and with a sense of solidarity: “You common man! I have not cut off my life from yours. You know it; I have lived in the streets and am known by everyone. Moreover, I have never amounted to anything and am possessed of no class egotism. So, if I belong to anyone, I must belong to you, you common man.” Kierkegaard did not call upon the common man to resign from the church, but to shun it and in general to remain appropriately aloof from the pastors: “But for the sake of God in Heaven and by everything that is holy, there is one thing I implore you to do: Avoid the pastors, avoid them, these abominable people whose way of making a living is to prevent you from even becoming aware of what true Christianity is.” This plea characterized the entire campaign, as here, for example, in the seventh issue of The Moment: “If you believe—and of course you do—that God is opposed to theft, robbery, pillage, fornication, slander, gluttony, et cetera: Official Christianity and its worship of God is infinitely more loathsome to him.”

Kierkegaard consistently demanded that church and state be separated, with the state providing economic compensation to pastors who resign their positions. At the same time, however, he emphasized that it was important that everyone continue to pay his or her church taxes. Indeed, it would be even better if people paid double the amount due, thereby demonstrating their contempt, because “at all costs” one ought to avoid having “differences concerning money” with those one holds in contempt. Kierkegaard’s alternative to a state church was as inconvenient as it was radical: “The state must make all preaching of Christianity into private practice.” And as time went on, Kierkegaard’s methods took on the appearance of a full-blown slander campaign: “And therefore, from a Christian point of view, ‘the pastor’ must be stopped…. And just as people used to shout ‘Hep!’ [abbreviation of Latin, Hierosaluma est perdita: ‘Jerusalem is lost’] at a Jew, so, until there are no more pastors to be seen, people should shout at a pastor, ‘Stop, thief! Stop him, he is stealing what belongs to the glorious ones!’”

Neither before nor since has the Danish clergy been subjected to such systematic persecution. Accusations veritably rained down on this “guild of clerical swindlers,” also called “the company of pastors,” this band of little, mediocre men, who had been so fortunate as to get their parasitical snouts way down into the country’s treasury, and who would do anything simply to hang on to their positions, even if, “for example, the state came up with the idea of instituting the religion that the moon is made of green cheese.” Kierkegaard employed countless allusions, little stories, anecdotes, gossip, tasteless innuendos, and whatever else worked, in order to make the pecuniary position of the pastors into a central theme of The Moment, where he put the matter quite directly: “The question of the continued existence of the established ecclesiastical order is—a question of money.” Kierkegaard emphasized the commercialization of Christianity, giving his articles titles such as “The Clergy as a Merchant Class” or “The Enormous Guild of Professional Pastors.” Not infrequently the clergy was simply called the “One Thousand Public Officials Who Must Live Off Christianity” (that is, they live off “the cloying, syrupy sweetness that is the stock-in-trade of witnesses to the lie”). The pastor’s role, Kierkegaard insisted, is thus to protect society against Christianity, and just as a statistician, when he is presented with “the size of the population of a large city,” is able to state “the corresponding number of prostitutes consumed by such a city,” it is also possible to calculate how many “perjurers (pastors)” the state needs in order to “protect itself against Christianity.” This is a secret pact, and it produces benefits for both partners, the state and the pastors. And indeed, as a sort of business partnership, the pastors are especially keen on two things: “(a) that people call themselves Christians—the bigger the flock of sheep, the better—that they take the name ‘Christians,’ and (b) that the matter rest there, that they do not find out what Christianity actually is.”

From his collision with The Corsair, Kierkegaard knew better than anyone about the satirical effect achieved by directing people’s attention to a someone’s external appearance, especially to a more or less random item of clothing, a pair of trousers of uneven length or—as in the present case—a clerical robe: “Long robes inevitably lead one to think that a person has something to hide. When a person has something to hide, long robes are very practical. And official Christianity has a very great deal to hide, because from beginning to end it is untruth, which is thus best concealed—by long robes. And long robes—of course, this is women’s clothing. And this calls to mind yet another thing typical of official Christianity: the unmanliness, the use of stealth, untruth, lies, as its power. And this is again entirely typical of official Christianity, which, being itself an untruth, makes use of an enormous mass of untruth both to conceal what the truth is and to conceal that it is itself untruth.” Or, with especially merciless precision: “the pastor—that epitome of nonsense cloaked in long robes!”

Kierkegaard simplified his criticisms in order to amplify their impact; he exaggerated, at times wildly; he agitated more than argued; and he could be genuinely vulgar, as was the case in the ninth issue of The Moment, where he pumped a lot of sophistical air into his argument, making the bestial behavior of the pastor outdo that of the cannibal: “(1) The cannibal is a wild man. ‘The pastor’ is a learned, cultivated man, which makes his abominable behavior all the more revolting. (2) The cannibal eats his enemies. It is otherwise with ‘the pastor.’ He gives the impression of being extraordinarily devoted to those whom he eats. The pastor, precisely the pastor, is the most devoted friend of those glorious ones. ‘Just listen to him, hear how he is able to depict their sufferings and present their teachings; doesn’t he deserve a silver centerpiece for his table, a cross of knighthood, a complete set of embroidered armchairs, a couple of thousand more per year—he, this glorious man who, himself moved to tears, can depict the sufferings of the glorious ones in this manner?’” In the middle of this bizarre scene Kierkegaard has positioned a set of embroidered armchairs, which of course were among the gifts Mynster had received on moving into the episcopal residence—a gift that had apparently occasioned some raised eyebrows and had quickly become a topic of gossip in the city. Kierkegaard continued: “The pastor is cozily ensconced in his rural dwelling, with the prospects of a promotion beckoning from beyond. His wife is buxomness itself, and his children no less flourishing. And all this is owing to the sufferings of the glorious ones, of the Savior, the apostle, the witness to the truth; this is what the pastor lives on; this is what he eats, feeding them to his wife and children in happy enjoyment of life. He keeps these glorious ones in his brine barrel. Their cries of ‘Follow me, follow me!’ are futile.”

The worst treatment is reserved for a certain “Ludvig From, Cand. Theol.” [literally: “Louis Pious, theological graduate”], who was trotted out in the little short story entitled “First the Kingdom of God.” Ludvig From, he is a seeker. “And when one hears that a ‘theological’ graduate is seeking, one does not need a lively imagination to understand what it is he is seeking: The Kingdom of God, that is of course what one must seek first. But no, it is not that; what he is seeking is a royal appointment to a livelihood as a pastor.” And before he arrived at this point, he had first attended a preparatory school; thereafter he had first taken the obligatory first and second examinations; and then, after four years of study at the university, he had first taken his examinations for the theology degree. So now he was a theological graduate, but that did not mean he could begin to work on behalf of Christianity. No, no, first he of course had to spend half a year at the pastoral seminary, and when that was completed, in accordance with the rules of the times, he had to wait an additional eight years before he could begin in earnest to dedicate himself to his real work: “And now we are at the beginning of the story. The eight years are up, and he is seeking. / His life, which up to now cannot be said to have had any sort of relation to the absolute, suddenly enters into such a relation: He seeks absolutely everything. He fills out sheet after sheet of official paperwork; he runs from pillar to post; he ingratiates himself both with the cabinet minister and with the doorman; in brief, he is entirely in the service of the absolute. Indeed, one of his acquaintances who has not seen him during the past several years discovers to his surprise that he has become smaller, which perhaps was because the fellow had suffered the fate of Münchhausen’s dog, which had started out as a greyhound but which, after so much running, had become a dachshund. / Three years pass in this way. Our theological graduate is really in need of a rest; after such enormously strenuous activity he needs to be taken out of action or find repose in a pastoral position and be looked after a little by his future wife—for in the meantime he had first become engaged.” Finally he receives an appointment, but just as the appointment becomes a reality he learns that “the income of the call” is about 150 rixdollars less than he had counted on. Ludvig almost despairs. He quickly purchases some more paper with official stamps on it, so that he can request that the minister free him from the appointment, but one of his acquaintances dissuades him from doing so, and From reconciles himself to his sorry financial circumstances. “He is ordained—and the Sunday arrives when he is to be presented to the congregation. The Dean whose job it is to do this is more than an ordinary person; he not only has … an unprejudiced eye for worldly profit, he also has a speculative eye on world history, something he cannot keep to himself, but also shares with his congregation.” Ironically enough, the text the dean has chosen was taken from the words of the apostle Peter about abandoning everything and following Christ. Then it is From’s turn to preach, and strange to say, the text of the day is the one about seeking first the Kingdom of God. “‘A very good sermon,’ says the bishop, who was present in person, ‘a very good sermon, and it produced a proper effect, that whole part about “first” the Kingdom of God, the way in which he emphasized that first.’”

This satirical short story was full of grotesque exaggeration, and it thus might seem puzzling that Kierkegaard stressed, almost as the moral of the story, that it was “so true, so true, so true.” The explanation might be that not only had he seen the beam in his brother’s eye, he also enjoyed putting it on display. For in 1850, Peter Christian had been permitted to resign the call to the parish of Thorslunde-Ishøj when, at the absolute last moment, he had realized that the income attached to that appointment had been incorrectly stated, for it was possible that “the tithe income was smaller by yet another twenty barrels of barley.” This sort of shortfall had been enough to give Peter Christian cold feet. Neither can it be ruled out that Kierkegaard was here alluding to H. P. Kofoed-Hansen, who after serving as a schoolteacher in Odense had sought a position at the Church of Our Savior in Christianshavn. He, too, had had the frightful experience of discovering that the income attached to the position was less than what he had expected, which prompted him to seek an immediate discharge from the call. Nevertheless, not unlike Ludvig From, Kofoed-Hansen ended up reconciling himself to his fate, and on September 9, 1849, the slightly perplexed theological graduate was installed in his office by Archdeacon Tryde. Kierkegaard was familiar with this muddled affair, and he recounted it in a journal entry that was less critical of Kofoed-Hansen than of Tryde, because Tryde, despite his familiarity with the details of Kofoed-Hansen’s decision, had chosen to orate “movingly about how, in these times, the servants of the Lord must reflect quite specifically on the fact that this is a matter in which one’s life is at stake. Sure. No thanks.” It is not particularly important whether it was Peter Christian or Kofoed-Nielsen who served as the model in Kierkegaard’s satirical workshop, for both of them surely felt stung by the piece—and Kierkegaard had thus managed to hit two greedy little ecclesiastical flies at one blow.

Similar marksmanship was on display when Kierkegaard punctured such ecclesiastical balloons as baptism, confirmation, and marriage. In a bizarre sketch of a quite worldly young man who—God only knows why—had decided to have his child baptized, Kierkegaard recommended that instead of clothing the baby in a baptismal bonnet, someone ought to hold “a nightcap over the supposed father.” Having dealt with baptism (this “sheer bestial nonsense—becoming a Christian by receiving a shot of water on one’s head from a royal official”), Kierkegaard proceeded to confirmation, which was, if possible, “much deeper nonsense than baptism,” inasmuch as it of course “lays claim to something that was lacking in infant baptism, an actual personality.” Part of what makes confirmation nonsensical is to be found in the disproportion between the age of the person involved and eternity: “A boy of fifteen years! If it were a matter of 10 rixdollars, the father would say, ‘No, my boy, you cannot be allowed to have it at your disposal, you are too wet behind the ears.’ But when it is a matter of his eternal salvation … the age of fifteen is most appropriate.” The whole business is “comedy,” concluded Kierkegaard, who nevertheless wanted to contribute to the merriment by imagining a rule requiring that “while in church, male confirmands would have to wear a beard, which naturally could be removed during the family festivities in the evening.” Kierkegaard’s description of the wedding service was not quite as festive. Instead of the normal ceremony he proposed a New Testament alternative that hardly had much of a future. The wedding service would be canceled because, at the last moment, “hating himself and the beloved,” the young man had chosen to “let go of her in order to love God.” It does not take much speculation to discover whom Kierkegaard might have had in mind in this connection.

From here it is no great distance before we arrive at general criticisms of the whole of natural life. The pastors, an extraordinarily mediocre lot if ever there was one, appear to constitute a special threat to the spiritual advancement of the human race, for they continually reproduce themselves, spawning lesser and lesser individuals who immediately congregate in small, self-congratulatory enclaves: “From a Christian point of view, the muchlauded Christian family life is a lie. From a Christian point of view, there is no family life, and least of all should it be regarded as the truest form of Christianity. At best, it can be indulgently tolerated.” And indeed, the “Christian child-rearing that is so very much praised consists in filling the child full of—sheer lies.” So Kierkegaard compelled these pastors—“the whole of the merry, child-begetting, career-making pastoral guild”—to listen to quite a few words about the concupiscence, the rutting energy, the sexual stimulus they had such a hard time keeping under control: “And indeed, the older I get, the more clearly I realize that the nonsense into which Christianity has sunk—especially in Protestantism and especially in Denmark—is to a great extent connected with the circumstance that those tender arms have come to encircle a bit too much. So on behalf of Christianity, one must ask that the females to whom these tender arms belong back off a little.” The getting of children and associated activities have nothing to do with Christianity, since “from a Christian point of view, it is the highest degree of egotism that because a man and a woman cannot control their lust, another being is to sigh in this vale of tears and prison for perhaps seventy years and perhaps be eternally lost.”

The sum total of all these “holy monkeyshines” is thus “Abracadabra; amen, amen, amen forevermore: Praised be the pastors!”

The Death of God

Kierkegaard compared history to a “process of filtration,” though he inverted the metaphor, so that instead of removing impurities, the filter of history contributed to their virulent growth: “The idea is stated—and then it goes into the process of history. But this does not consist of purifying the idea (what a ridiculous assumption!) which is never purer than at its beginning. No, it consists in the continually increasing process of botching the idea, making rubbish of it, turning it into nonsense.” With this, Kierkegaard pointedly emphasized his understanding of history as the history of decline: History takes its energy from nonsense and it ends in nothing. There could scarcely be a greater contrast to Hegel’s notion of the indwelling rationality of history!

Kierkegaard’s radicality was rooted in his radical rejection of history, which in his view never clarifies ideas, but always muddles them. This explains why Christianity was abolished at the same tempo at which it spread. His motto, in other words, was: The more, the fewer; and if all, then none. Kierkegaard was able to compress history into a very simple schema by juxtaposing two irreconcilable opposites: “Christianity has really never come into the world. It remained confined to the Exemplar and, at most, to the apostles. But even the apostles emphasized its spread so much in their preaching that the fraud had already begun…. [Christ] was much more restrained. Thus, in three and one-half years he won only eleven disciples, while in one day, probably in one hour, one apostle wins three thousand disciples of Christ.”

This radical distrust of history was the source of the distaste Kierkegaard felt for culture. He described culture’s “way of thinking” as follows: “Among the many different things that human beings need in the cultured condition, things that the state tries to guarantee its citizens in the most inexpensive and comfortable manner possible—such as public safety, water, lighting, roads, pavement, et cetera, et cetera—there is also eternal blessedness in the hereafter, a need that the state also ought to satisfy (how generous!) and in the most inexpensive and comfortable manner possible.” It goes without saying that catering to the religious needs of the citizenry in this way will unavoidably have a major influence on people’s view of the New Testament, which started out as an existential “guide for Christians” and has now become an “historical curiosity, somewhat like a tourist guide for travelers in a particular country after everything in that country has been totally changed. Such a guidebook is no longer of any real value for the travelers in that country, but is very valuable as light reading. As one travels along comfortably in the train, one reads in the guidebook that ‘here is the frightful Wolf Pit, where one plunges 70,000 fathoms under the earth.’ While one sits smoking one’s cigar in the cozy dining car, one reads in the guidebook, ‘here is the den of a gang of bandits who attack and abuse the traveler.’ Here there is—that is, here there was, because now it is amusing to imagine how things used to be—no Wolf Pit, but a railroad, and no gang of bandits, but a cozy dining car.”

What other people would have called the progress of culture, or even of civilization, Kierkegaard presented as the deterioration of the race and as the death of the person of spirit. Kierkegaard presented his genealogy of pessimism in the fifth issue of The Moment: “The race has degenerated to the point that it no longer gives birth to human beings who can bear the divinity that is the Christianity of the New Testament.” And in this same Moment the reader is given a serious look at the modern, spiritless human being: “The person of spirit is different from people like us because he is able to endure isolation, and his rank as a person of spirit is proportionate to the fortitude with which he can endure isolation, while people such as us always need ‘the others,’ the herd; we despair and die unless we are reassured by being in the herd, by having the same opinions as the herd, etc. But the Christianity of the New Testament is precisely designed for relating itself to this isolation of a person of spirit. In the New Testament, Christianity means to love God in hatred of humankind, in hatred of oneself and thus of all other people, hating father, mother, one’s own child, spouse, et cetera—the most powerful expression of the most painful isolation.”

Thus modern man and Christianity appear to be totally incompatible. One is either modern or Christian. The modern Christian does not exist or exists only if history can be suspended and the eighteen hundred years between Christ and Christendom can be erased: “Persecution, ill-treatment, and bloodshed have inflicted no such injury. No, in comparison with the fundamental damage—official Christianity—they have been helpful, they have been incalculably helpful…. Abolish official Christianity, let persecution come: At that very instant, Christianity will once again come into existence.” Kierkegaard’s antihistoricism was also bound up with a theological radicalism that at some points caused his requirements to fluctuate between being totally impossible to fulfill, on the one hand, and being involuntarily comical, on the other: “To become a Christian in the New Testament sense is such a radical transformation that, from a purely human perspective, one would have to say that it is the greatest tragedy for a family if one of its members becomes a Christian.”

As early as the second issue of The Moment, Kierkegaard posed the question: “If we are really Christians—then what is God?” And Kierkegaard himself provided the answer: “The most ludicrous being that has ever lived.” With this question and answer Kierkegaard was not only pointing backward to the one single thesis he had proposed in Fædrelandet on March 28; when he asserted that Christianity did not exist, he was also pointing forward in time, to Nietzsche’s proclamation of the death of God. Of course, this was not an ontological statement, but a social-psychological assertion that linked the existence of God to the significance—or lack of significance—that Christianity has for society’s values and for individual self-understanding. Thus if Christianity does not exist, then God is dead. But this does not mean that human beings have been freed from some outmoded form of servitude. On the contrary, it means the death of the human being, the death of the person of spirit, whereupon Homo sapiens is reborn as an animal: “Being a Christian in the New Testament sense is just as different, in the upward direction, from being human, as being an animal is different from being human in the downward direction.”

Grundtvig’s Rejoinder

Kierkegaard’s attack added to the confusion among the clergy, who were already confused and who generally tended to be as irate at the attack as anticlerical people were delighted by it. Martensen continued to follow the course of events closely and had long feared that Kierkegaard might make common cause with Grundtvig and his allies. In the first article in Fædrelandet, Kierkegaard—as a way of demonstrating how many years earlier he had made the decision to launch his attack—had noted that “old Grundtvig” had witnessed his statement that he would attack, but that “Bishop Mynster must first live out his life [and] be buried with all pomp and music.” Perhaps this remark was a sign of a rather close relationship to Grundtvig, maybe even a conspiracy—Grundtvig, after all, had also been demonstrative in his absence from Mynster’s funeral!—and Martensen was fully convinced that Kierkegaard would not shrink from “making use of any means whatever in order to injure his opponents.”

On Palm Sunday 1855, Mrs. Martensen and Paulli, who was Pastor at the Castle Church, went to Vartov Church to hear Grundtvig preach. When they returned they reported that they had heard an “entire sermon against S. Kierkegaard,” whom Grundtvig had repeatedly called a “scoffer.” Like Kierkegaard, Grundtvig had of course repudiated “the world’s so-called Christianity,” that is, all the talk about “millions of Christians, so-called Christian states, and everything connected with that.” But then Grundtvig had gone on to say that when “the scoffers cry that therefore, if we wish to be permitted to call ourselves Christ’s disciples, we must take leave of the world, or at least whip ourselves through the world and whip the world into declaring open hostility to the name, to the faith, and to the congregation of our Lord Jesus Christ, then we abandon it to the scoffers themselves.”

Martensen was not displeased with this intelligence. “Both my wife and Paulli, who chanced to hear this sermon, were most satisfied,” he wrote enthusiastically to Gude, who, it may be hoped, had sufficient tact to overlook the obvious lie in the word “chanced.”

It is not clear whether Kierkegaard had heard rumors about this sermon, or whether it was merely a remarkable coincidence, but in the sixth issue of The Moment, which appeared on August 23, Grundtvig was given a broadside: “Take Pastor Grundtvig, then…. The most he has fought for is permission, for himself and for those who want to follow him, to express what he understands by Christianity. Thus, he wants to remove the yoke that the State Church has placed upon him. It has made him indignant that police power would be used to deny him his freedom in religious matters.” All this was fine enough, as far as it went, Kierkegaard continued, but the problem was simply that Grundtvig had never thought of declaring war on the real “illusions” of Christendom: “No. Freedom for himself and for those who agree with him; freedom to express what he and his supporters understand by Christianity; that is the most he has wanted—and then he will remain quiet, tranquilized in this life, belonging to his family, and in other respects live like those who are essentially at home in this world…. No, in comparison with the original passion of Christianity, Grundtvig’s enthusiasm is halfheartedness, indifferentism.”

This was quite a serious accusation, and only three days later, on Sunday, August 26, Grundtvig’s sermon contained a powerful rejoinder: “Yes, it is shouted into our ear that our Christianity is vanity, just like the Christianity of the world, which consists only of empty words and ecclesiastical customs. Yes, it is said of us—who hear Our Lord Jesus Christ’s own voice, and thank our heavenly Father for life, for eternal life in the name of his only begotten Son—that we know no more of true Christianity than does an unbelieving Jew. But, far from frightening us, it should rather make us happy to be mocked for the sake of Christ.” The next issue of The Moment did not make direct mention of Grundtvig, but there was a passage about those who are false in their honesty, those who merely pay lip service, which might have been a little greeting to the Vartov congregation. Whatever Kierkegaard had intended, Grundtvig felt stung by it, and in his Elementary Christian Teachings he made it clear how wounded he had been at Kierkegaard’s accusation of being “the worst of all of them in the den of thieves.” In a sermon delivered on September 16, Grundtvig resumed his criticisms of Kierkegaard’s campaign: “And as they become increasingly clever and skillful in their arts, these slanderers of Our Lord Jesus Christ will impart the appearance of truth to their slander by misusing and distorting the Christians’ own Holy Scripture, the so-called ‘New Testament,’ by lumping together even the most earnest and upright Christians with all the thousands and millions who are lured or threatened into getting themselves baptized and who call themselves Christians, who of course possess only the empty name.” By now, Kierkegaard was no longer merely one of “the slanderers of Jesus Christ,” he was an accomplice of “the Father of Lies and the Prince of Darkness, the Standard-Bearer of Death, who of course pretends to be the Angel of Light, who confuses his adherents with the appearance of clarity and with all sorts of brilliant delusions, but nevertheless kills everything human in them, leading them to the outer darkness, where there is weeping and gnashing of teeth.”

Grundtvig’s rejection here reached its zenith—it was certainly difficult to get any more extreme than this! His subsequent sermons contained occasional allusions to articles that had appeared in The Moment, but no more than that. Nonetheless, Kierkegaard’s campaign made a powerful impression on Grundtvig, as can be seen in his Elementary Christian Teachings, the first portions of which were written while Kierkegaard’s rage was at its wildest. This is clear, for example, in the section titled “The Christianity of the New Testament,” where Grundtvig wrote about a “remarkable hairsplitter,” who presupposes “the possible truth of Christianity.” But, as Grundtvig argued, “if one does not want to be compelled to grant that the hair splitter is right, one will have to begin by oneself abandoning the backwards way of thinking, according to which the book, ‘the New Testament,’ is supposedly the true source of Christianity, its foundation, or its rule of faith. Because this is the decisive point for the hairsplitter as the judge of Christianity and the tormentor of pastors, who must either prove his own arguments wrong or stand as the manifest enemy and denier of Christianity.”

“Pastor P. Chr. Kierkegaard, Lic. Theol., My Brother”

The confrontation between Kierkegaard and Grundtvig was particularly unpleasant for Peter Christian Kierkegaard, who was the brother of the former but who had fraternized with the latter. On June 7, Peter Christian attended a wedding in Gentofte, just north of Copenhagen, and shortly thereafter he called on his younger brother, who seemed quite exhausted. He therefore suggested that his brother take a little trip, but the reaction was merely “Is this the time to travel?!” Apparently it was not. Peter Christian had also wanted to discuss some of the “main points concerning which his efforts seemed to me to be misleading,” but the anticlerical warrior was not prepared to do that either. Thus parted these two remarkable brothers who were the bearers of so many secrets, both jointly and separately. Neither of them could have known that they would never see each other again. In August, Peter Christian in fact spent ten days in Copenhagen, from which he regularly traveled out to visit his nephew Vilhelm Nicolai Lund at his estate Annissegaard, but he was unsuccessful in his attempts to contact Søren Aabye.

Something that happened between Peter Christian’s June and August visits to Copenhagen turned out to have fateful consequences, though Peter Christian noted it very undramatically in his diary: “Spoke against the pseudonymous (Sørenish) literature and theory at the Roskilde Convention on July 5th.” Prior to the Roskilde Pastoral Convention, the general feeling had been that this was precisely the topic that would not be discussed at the meeting, but the Grundtvigian cleric Gunni Busck nonetheless managed to persuade Peter Christian to give a talk on some of the “principal features of the trend that runs through the entirety of Søren’s work as an author.” Peter Christian improvised his way through the talk. Afterwards, he made an attempt to reconstruct his talk on paper, and true to form, the reconstruction was as bone-dry and boring as the talk had been lively and elegant. His talk had been a critical investigation of the “theology—or, as it probably prefers to be called, the nontheology—that an academy of pseudonyms has in recent years developed as a part of the literature of our fatherland.” On examining these pseudonymous figures, Peter Christian noted the absence of what is absolutely fundamental to Christianity, namely the “renewal of the genuinely human life, both in individuals and in the race.” Since the truth of the Christian life makes itself visible in growth, development, and expansion—all the way from “the germ of conception to the maturity of man”—there are only two possibilities: “Either the pseudonymous thinkers, who have been carrying on a public conversation about the existential for some time now, have not taken any notice of this truth, or, to use their own expression, they have intentionally glossed over and de-emphasized it.” Thus, Søren Kierkegaard’s writings had overlooked the truth of the Christian life, and they had done so either because of inattention or because of conscious deception—no other interpretation seemed to be possible. Thus, Søren Aabye’s “mystical-ascetic literature,” as Peter Christian labeled his brother’s works, contained an invitation addressed to everyone who “wishes to have a living experience of faith,” but what they were actually given was a “swimming exercise without safety belts over seventy thousand fathoms of water”; indeed, people were advised to “begin by leaping in headfirst.” This remark about a beginner leaping headfirst was undoubtedly a source of general mirth among the Grundtvigian delegates attending the convention, who had the pleasure of listening to a polemicist who was more pointed than he had been in his previous lecture at the Roskilde Convention, back in October 1849. Peter Christian was really in high spirits. He saw no reason to mince his words, and toward the end of his talk, he in fact came out with an open declaration of hostility to his younger brother: “Yes, to be sure, Christianity is not what the sniveling pastors say it is. But from this it of course does not follow that it [Christianity] is more likely to be what jesting or damning prophets seek to make it into.”

No one wrote down the talk at the time, but Søren Aabye must have heard verbal accounts of what had transpired, and he did not ignore them. On July 23 he finished work on a manuscript entitled “Pastor P. Chr. Kierkegaard, Lic. Theol., My Brother,” a comprehensive assault on Grundtvig and all his facile disciples. Søren Aabye made the pretentious pastoral conventions the object of his sarcasm, thus adopting the position of Mynster, who had referred to them as “small beer.” This was perhaps what put him in mind of a heady metaphor: “For, just as they say one should not get too close to a heavy drinker because he is surrounded by a stench of alcohol, I have always found it rather unpleasant [changed from ‘disgusting’] to get too close to what the Grundtvigians write because it tends to be enveloped in a stench of heartiness. And indeed, among the Grundtvigians, Pastor Lic. Kierkegaard is one of those who exudes this stench most.” And once again, the notion that Peter Christian, qua brother, might possess special knowledge about Søren Aabye was labeled an obviously erroneous conclusion: “This is extremely far from being the case. With respect to the entirety of my inner religious life, my intentions, et cetera, Pastor Lic. Kierkegaard knows only what anyone else can know on the basis of my writings. For that matter, he knows neither more nor less than everyone else who knows nothing.”

And then, almost compulsively, the whole story is retold yet again: that he, Søren Aabye, had selflessly given Denmark an author; that for the good of the cause he had voluntarily exposed himself to the assaults of The Corsair; that Peter Christian had not lifted a finger in connection with those assaults; that on the contrary, Peter Christian had exploited the situation when he had given his talk at the Roskilde Convention, where he made his younger brother into the representative of ecstasy. “Then came the moment when I attacked Martensen. From then on, on almost the greatest possible scale, people raged against me in this little land; everything was set in motion to have me stamped as a villain, as someone who disturbs the peace of the grave, or to make me out to be quite simply a kind of madman—which was repeated in the press again and again. The hearty brother had not a word to say in this connection.” Therefore the only thing that could be said with respect to this brother, stench and all, was that he was fundamentally a “spineless person,” and that “the truth was” that by having associated himself with this “wretched but enterprising company of Grundtvigians, and with the help of some minor accomplishments and of party solidarity, [he has] underhandedly obtained for himself [changed from ‘lied his way into’] an importance that is simply not his at all—while if he had shunned all that rubbish, remaining alone with God in the true Kierkegaardian way, he could have been of great importance for Denmark.”

We may take some solace in the fact that this article was allowed to lie undisturbed for twenty-six years and was not published until it appeared in the final volume of Kierkegaard’s Posthumous Papers. There is, however, rather less solace to be found in the fact that, for considerable periods of time, the publication of those papers was followed quite closely by an increasingly tormented Peter Christian, in whose episcopal residence the editing of the manuscripts took place.

“In a Theater, It Happened That”

One of the side effects of Kierkegaard’s newspaper articles and pamphlets was that he had managed to position himself more firmly in the public consciousness than at any time since the publication of Either/Or. Even though it undeniably sounds a little awkward to use the word in this context, it is hardly an error to see his campaign as a wildly successful “comeback.” Many of his contemporaries remembered him as having been lively, almost giddy, when they met him on the street during this period. “Yes, you see,” Kierkegaard was said to have confided in Tycho E. Spang, “well, Denmark has had its greatest sculptor in Thorvaldsen, its greatest poet in Oehlenschläger, and now its greatest prose stylist in me. Denmark won’t last long now!” Of course, this was intended as a joke, but not only as a joke. Vilhelm Birkedal experienced a similar sort of cheekiness. He could recall a little episode that instantly convinced him that the “dying away from the world” that Kierkegaard “continually preached for us others, making it into the hallmark of the genuine Christian witness,” did not apply to the preacher himself. One day, Birkedal, who was a Grundtvigian and as such also saw himself as involved in a “fierce battle for the church,” espied Kierkegaard sitting at a well-provided table in one of the best restaurants in the city, “with an ample portion of food fit for a king and a very large goblet of sparkling wine before him.” Kierkegaard recognized him and immediately called out “Hello, Birkedal, you look good. Yes, you who are persecuted are getting fat.” To which Birkedal replied: “Yes, and you who persecute are getting thinner.” For despite his “high living,” Kierkegaard was only “skin and bones.”

Kierkegaard’s campaign made a profound impression on Birkedal, costing him “no small amount of struggle in my soul,” but Birkedal nonetheless succeeded in battling his way through to “light and cheerfulness,” when, “as if in a vision, I saw our Lord Jesus standing on the mountain crying over Jerusalem and the sinners in the city, and next to him I saw Søren Kierkegaard standing and laughing at all of us, condemning us to the abyss of Hell…. Then I was struck with the irrefutable certainty that these two could not be in agreement, that there must be a huge distance between them. And I at once emerged from my melancholy thoughts.” This same Grundtvigian firmness in rejecting Kierkegaard can also be seen in Hans Rørdam, who, in a letter dated May 4, 1855, wrote the following to his brother Peter: “Søren Kierkegaard, who shouts that the Church of Christ has perished, is for me like a bogey who screeches to terrify the unbelieving and superstitious children of this world. But a Christian laughs at him. If he went to the ends of the earth like the Shoemaker of Jerusalem [Ahasuerus, the ‘Wandering Jew’of legend], shouting that the Church of Christ has perished, I would ask that I might be permitted to walk behind him and say: ‘You are lying, Søren! According to the testimony of Christ and the Spirit of God, you are a great liar!’” Peter Rørdam probably would have declared himself in agreement with his brother, for a while earlier he had taken a stroll with Kierkegaard, who had indeed spoken of Grundtvig “in mocking tones.” This caused Rørdam to break off all further contact with Kierkegaard, whose comment had touched Rørdam, a Grundtvigian, “in his most sensitive spot.”

The campaign taxed Kierkegaard both financially and physically, but it also made his adrenalin flow just as happily as it had when he had written Either/Or twelve years earlier. Kierkegaard’s lapidary style, his satire, his paradoxical provocations and well-turned points, his jollity, even the tone in “those piquant and nervous articles,” as Goldschmidt called them, bring to mind some of the best of the “Diapsalmata” with which Aesthete A had introduced himself in the first part of Either/Or. A little cluster of aphorisms in the sixth issue of The Moment is entitled “Brief and Pointed,” and the fourth one in this group takes the form of an absurd, mechanical dialogue: “‘Did the Apostle Paul have an official position?’ No, Paul did not have an official position. ‘Did he, then, earn a lot of money in some other way?’ No, he did not earn money at all. ‘Was he at least married, then?’ No, he was not married. ‘So then Paul was not a serious man!’ No, Paul was not a serious man.” Goldschmidt, on the other hand, was a serious man, for he took the aphorism a bit too seriously, pointing out to Kierkegaard in his journal North and South that Paul had in fact earned money, inasmuch as he had been “a tentmaker by profession.” The second of these aphorisms is unusually direct in its form: “In the splendid cathedral, the high, well-born, highly honored, and worthy Geheime-General-Ober-Hof-Preacher, the chosen darling of the important people, steps before a select circle of the select, and movingly sermonizes on a text chosen by himself, namely, ‘God has chosen the lowly and despised of the earth’—and no one laughs!” And then of course, everybody laughed. Maybe even Goldschmidt.

At the eleventh hour, the master of irony had managed to have laughter once again on his side, which, in addition to everything else, was one of the more or less conscious motives behind the campaign. In the draft of an issue of The Moment, in a piece titled “Who I Am and What I Want,” Kierkegaard declared that the “power that I shall use (this is how I understand it in accordance with Governance) is—yes, people will be taken aback, but this is how it is—it is laughter! … But of course, it is dedicated to a religious cause when I serve that cause. And see, this was why it pleased Governance that I, having been doted on by profane ridicule, should voluntarily make myself vulnerable so that I could become—if you will—the martyr of ridicule, so that, thus consecrated, and with the very highest approval of divine Governance, I could become a bothersome ‘gadfly,’ an awakening scourge upon all this spiritlessness.”

Helped along by obviously ex poste rationalizations, Kierkegaard here attempted to rearrange the sequence of the factors involved, so that the martyr of ridicule could once again be doted on. In this connection it is thus quite symptomatic that he appended to this journal entry a reference to the “last diapsalm” in Either/Or. For this was the passage about the vain aesthete who was in seventh heaven, where he was asked by the gods to make a choice from a selection that included youth, and beauty, the loveliest woman, and many other delights. After hesitating for a moment—he explained—“I addressed the gods like this: ‘Esteemed contemporaries! I choose one thing, that I might always have laughter on my side.’ Not one of the gods replied with so much as a single word; instead, they all began to laugh. From this I concluded that my wish had been granted.”

It is impossible to know whether Aesthete A was correct in his conclusion, but what seems beyond doubt is that Kierkegaard, during his own campaign, did all he could to make a similar wish come true. People simply could not keep from laughing—even Bishop Martensen may have felt a bit of a smile on his episcopal countenance. But this very circumstance begins to engender a bit of doubt as to whether the campaign lived up to the requirements that had been set for it. Was it possible that Kierkegaard and his laugh-inducing remedies not only helped expose the discrepancy between Christianity and Christendom, but that he and his laughter also helped make that discrepancy more tolerable, precisely because we can reconcile ourselves to it in laughter? That, in any case, is how history has reconciled itself with Kierkegaard’s denunciation. Or do we perhaps laugh at the wrong thing and at the wrong time? Is ours a misunderstood and misplaced jollity? In that case Kierkegaard would suffer the same fate as the clown he himself once had Aesthete A tell about: “In a theater, it happened that a fire broke out backstage. A clown came out to inform the audience about it. People thought it was a joke, and they applauded. He repeated it; they cheered even more. This, I think, is how the world will come to an end, amid the universal jubilation of clever people who think it is a joke.”

We are amused by the episode, because we tacitly assume it is fiction. But it is not. For Aesthete A in fact based his diapsalm on an actual event that had taken place in Saint Petersburg on February 14, 1836. The accident had cost a good many human lives, because no one had taken the clown seriously when he had rushed forward shouting “Fire! Fire!” We suddenly feel sorry for the panic-stricken clown. He had made an appalling discovery at which the public had merely laughed. But then, what if the clown himself had lit the fire, what if it had been his fault—then our sympathy would instantly be transformed into contempt; we would abominate him.

On April 4, 1855, prompted by an anonymous suggestion that he “stop ringing the alarm bell,” Kierkegaard replied that it would be indefensible to stop ringing the alarm as long as the fire was burning, because under such circumstances a person is required to raise an outcry. Kierkegaard’s reply continued as follows: “But strictly speaking, I am not the one who is ringing the alarm. I am the one who has set the fire in order to smoke out illusions and trickery.” Thus Kierkegaard was a pyromaniac—a Christian one, of course—and was therefore justified in what he did, “for according to the New Testament, Christianity is the setting of fires. Christ himself says, ‘I have come to cast fire upon the earth.’” And Kierkegaard the pyromaniac pointed out that “indeed, it is already on fire, and it will certainly become a growing conflagration, comparable to a forest fire. For it is ‘Christendom’ that has been set afire.” So this was serious business. Christendom was in flames, and only a spiritless public would confuse Kierkegaard’s arson with ordinary clowning.

From here it is no great distance to the sixth issue of The Moment and its upside-down “fire chief,” who bellows and curses and orders the throngs of people who have rushed to the scene to get out of the way, not so that the fire can be extinguished, but so that the fire can really take hold and thus consume “this jungle, the stronghold of all nonsense, all delusions, all trickery.” Employing his special ear-deafening rhetoric, the “fire chief ” addresses all these “nice, hearty, sympathetic, helpful people, who would so much like to help put out the fire”: “The fire chief, he says—and yes, in other respects the fire chief is a very pleasant and cultivated man, but at a fire he uses what is called coarse language—he says, or rather he bellows, ‘Oh, go to hell with all your little pails and squirts.’”

The fire chief brutally rebuffs the whole of that “cheerful, hearty nonsense company who certainly believe that somehow, something is wrong and that something must be done.” This rejection was a critique of religion that so resembled active nihilism that it might be difficult to distinguish one from the other. But the fire chief’s tactics also serve as a reminder that Kierkegaard’s campaign has a unique historical status, for his tactics constitute a forceful rebuff to all future disciples and all their sophistical attempts to endow his campaign—that final rejection of Christendom—with a certain tractability by interpreting it as indirect communication. It was also for these people—for the academic assistants, the university plagiarists, the members of Kierkegaard societies and other clubs full of thoughtful people, who a century and a half later stand around holding “wet tapers and matchsticks without sulfur”—it was for these people as well that the brusque “fire chief ” issued his ungentlemanly orders: “Get this nonsense company out of here.”

“Come Listen, Brilliant Bastard Son”

One of those who had been offended and who attempted to do battle with Kierkegaard by sending the laughter back in his direction was a twenty-five-year-old theology student by the name of Christian Henrik de Thurah, the son of a pastor from a parish near Ribe in Jutland. Thurah had acquired something of a name for himself as the author of a couple of collections of religious poetry in which his choice of rhythms, rhymes, and runes had made it clear that he was a disciple of Grundtvig. In 1852, Thurah had demonstrated a firm grasp of the complex art of versifying when he published a new poetic rendering of the Song of Solomon under the title The Rose of Sharon.

On September 27, 1855, he published a little pamphlet of just under twenty pages, which could be purchased for twelve shillings. The pamphlet bore the title Rhymed Epistle to Johannes the Seducer, Alias Dr. Søren Kierkegaard. The piece is painful testimony to the fact that Kierkegaard was taken so seriously that people were compelled to turn to the most dreadful of all weapons, ad hominem attacks, allusions to his physical person. The first stanza runs as follows:

Come listen, brilliant bastard son,*

You with talent in your tongue,

As slick as any slimy eel,

As sharp as any blade of steel:

Instead of running all about

To shuffle and, alas, to putter

In every filthy, stinking gutter—

Let’s you and I play “Tag, you’re out!”

* Who have degraded your father into a stud animal.

The final volume of Kierkegaard’s journals contains no entries from the latter part of September 1855, so we do not know whether he read Thurah’s scurrilous poem. But it was in the collection of books Kierkegaard left at his death, and he did mention Thurah while he was in the hospital, shortly before he died. It is not difficult to understand why he would have mentioned him.

You dare so much, you dare as well

To put yourself where God does dwell,

All because you cannot stand

That God’s call comes from God’s own hand.

Sweet Satan’s monkey, tell me, whence

Cometh this intelligence?

A shame that you escaped God’s gaze

Until these very recent days.

For God would really find it sweet

To gather wisdom at your feet!

Thurah’s epistle continued on, alluding along the way to articles from several issues of The Moment, to which Thurah referred in little footnotes. The result was a poetic pastiche that presented Kierkegaard’s Christianity, hostile as it was to the life of the flesh, as sheer spiritual masochism.

Spiritual suffering, there’s the beauty—

’Tis every Christian’s bounden duty.

Christian pain is so divine,

In (or out of) your right mind,

And folks with little oddities

Will find themselves at their hearts’ ease.

Thurah was also fascinated with the pyromaniacal “fire chief,” whom he identified both with Kierkegaard and with Nero, who had set fire to Rome. Next Thurah turned his attention to Kierkegaard’s personal wealth, which made it so easy (though hypocritical) for him to demand asceticism of others:

Everything to you was given.

You’ve never had to earn a living.

The Christian feels your painful lash,

But you have never lacked for cash.

You are the rich inheritor

Of dry-goods merchant Kierkegaard,

And all here in the city know

He left you gold, in drifts, like snow.

Your face can smile, your humor dances,

For you yourself take no real chances.

And, oh! what rogues, these foolish pastors

Who, unlike me, cannot be masters,

But “fish for people—my, how greedy!”

Because they’re needy!

“Just follow me. The Lord has said

That I must live, but not earn bread….”

It’s splendid when you think of how

You ran from that engagement vow

That once you to a woman gave

Who said she’d follow to your grave.

But you continued, on and on,

To test the patience of someone

Who, after all, could only bear so much.

And you were out to make her learn that such

Is life, that she must yield to you

As though to God. But this she could not do.

Oh, what a lovely stroke it

Was—you simply broke it!

So now, a bachelor, with all indelicacy

You pride yourself on preaching—celibacy!

… You must be angel-pure.

Glance at your legs, you’ll know for sure.

You pastor-hater, rash and wild,

You’ll not be father to a child.

Though—maybe you’ve had lots of tykes.

Each person may think what he likes.

Having come this far, Thurah wanted to assist Kierkegaard in producing those scandalized feelings he apparently valued so highly. So Kierkegaard was directed to take a stroll through the city streets one Sunday morning, gathering a crowd of people as he walked along. And then the cycle would be completed:

Take them to the cemetery

Where your father’s dead and buried.

Stand there, and stick out your tongue,

And shout: “Here, then, is your bastard son,

And go to Hell, you old whoremaster!

You can’t reply a word, you bastard!”

And now I’m finished with my song,

Unless more Moments come along.

Another student of theology mounted a counteroffensive, publishing an anonymous piece entitled Thurah and Søren Kierkegaard. Thurah had plagiarized Grundtvig, the author claimed, but “in his hands, the powerful expressions he took from Grundtvig’s writings became merely crude and tasteless.” Thurah’s work, the author asserted, had now culminated in his Rhymed Epistle, which can only have had the purpose of abusing Kierkegaard, “overwhelming him with the crudest language and the most vulgar sorts of attacks on his morals.” Thurah’s assault had been conducted with the sort of “baseness that should least of all be found in a student of theology.” And the result was thus that the general mood, which previously had been against Kierkegaard, had now turned in his favor: “Such abominable accusations directed at a man whose reputation was so unsullied in this respect could not do otherwise than call forth the serious disapprobation of every Christian.”

Yet another of Thurah’s fellow students issued a rejoinder with his Rhymed Epistle to “Defensor fidei,” Alias Theology Student Thurah, from Theology Student Th. L. The initials “Th. L.” concealed a twenty-six-year-old student of theology named Thomas Lange, who spent his time in busy idleness, producing ephemeral verse and amateurish comedies for the stage while also functioning as part-owner of the Heaven Café, an establishment in the middle of the university quarter, at the corner of Købmagergade and Store Kanikkestræde. (This latter position allowed Lange to style himself an innkeeper.) Lange’s poem was not nearly as well-turned as Thurah’s, but the seventh of its fourteen stanzas did manage to make the point that it must have been Kierkegaard’s criticisms of Grundtvig that had caused Thurah to rush into print:

You’re an official Grundtvig poet,

And therefore you can understand

Your duty, and you surely know it:

That Søren Kierkegaard be banned.

Why ever did that foolish man

Say, “Grundtvig? Ideal? He fell below it!”

If Søren had but clenched his jaws,

We’d all be free of poems like yours!

Strange as it may seem, Thurah was bold enough to reply to these rejoinders with a little pamphlet titled Why Do It This Way? The Premises Underlying the Matter. C. H. Thurah vs. Dr. S. Kierkegaard. Here Thurah made an attempt to defend his perfidious poem in pathetic prose: “Dr. Kierkegaard mocked Our Lord…. He took God’s name in vain and spoke of him in foolish, frivolous tones. He distorted the Word of God and called it gibberish…. He passed himself off as God’s instrument. In the name of God, he jeered at humanity. He misused the name of God, making it serve as a cloak for wickedness, so that he might ensnare the weak and vulnerable. He must first of all be forced to remove this cloak and come out into the open, where he can be branded as a mocker of God.” Thurah’s pamphlet, dated October 6, 1855, once again put him in the public eye, and Goldschmidt—who, as time passed, had become so solidly bourgeois that he was now able to pass moral judgment on the follies of misguided youth—wrote the following in his journal North and South: “Theology student Thurah has used swinish language to attack S. Kierkegaard.”

Thurah had a number of sympathizers at Regensen College, and they did their best to demonstrate their contempt for Thomas Lange, who lived directly across the street in Eler’s College. Whenever Lange would show himself at his window or appear in the street, he was met with shouts and ugly facial expressions. Finally the merriment got to be a little too much for Lange: “One morning, when I had been challenged in this way, I went and loaded one of the large pistols, opened the balcony door, and fired at the enemy—at Regensen, that is. The heavens and even the Round Tower were shaken to their foundations.” The chief of police meted out a fine of five rixdollars and issued a paternal admonition that put an end to this sophomoric “church battle.”

“You Dine with the Swine”

At about the same time that Thurah had published his Rhymed Epistle, F. W. Trojel, one of Kierkegaard’s old fellow students from his university years, was reading the proofs of his Eternity: Nine Letters from Heaven to Dr. Søren Kierkegaard. The purpose of the work was to rehabilitate Mynster and the established church, which according to Trojel, no one had the right to judge, because this was reserved to God—and of course to Trojel! A mystery-filled introductory section sketched out the humiliations in store for Kierkegaard when he arrived in the lofty chambers of heaven. This was followed by a charming mixture of trembling outrage and undeniable stupidity typical of Trojel, in which it was asserted that Kierkegaard’s works consisted of “fantasies on linguistic themes and intellectual projects, presented with the unbelievable dexterity of a modern-day virtuoso.” “Is this,” Trojel asked, “supposed to be Christianity?” He then approached the matter more directly, advising Kierkegaard to release his “artful grasp upon the strings of language,” abandoning both his “balancing act on the ladder of thought” and his “haughty isolation.” Trojel further labeled Kierkegaard a “glutton” and a “voluptuary,” and he even managed to force Kierkegaard into the embraces of several lovely denizens of a harem: “You set fire to the whole world, and yet you are the only one burning in that harem, closeted as you are with Logica, Ironica, and Dialectica.”

After a dialogue—as lengthy as it was insufferable—between “an accusing angel and an angel of God” who address one another in wretched verse, Trojel reached the ninth and last of his letters from Heaven, where he triumphantly emphasized Kierkegaard’s “bodily flaws.” Trojel had obviously read Martensen’s article against Kierkegaard, and could thus exclaim: “Oh, but you are a Thersites! You have that proud, conceited, malevolent spirit, that sickly mutability and demonic acuity…. I have pointed out your spiritual lust and cruelty. And by the same token, your pride is obvious to everyone. What a torment for such a nature … to possess as well—in a physical, bodily sense—something that the rude masses find ridiculous and disgusting, and that everyone finds rather repulsive and comical. And if, in addition to all this, you were a street philosopher, gossiping with everyone, seemingly good-natured; if you made strange faces, walked crablike, arching your back on Østergade, it was to no purpose: You merely interrogated people in order to make fun of them, went there only in order to satisfy your need for contempt. You dine with the swine, not simply because you have produced filthy literature, but because—with the mob cheering you on—you have grasped the desire of the times: to tear down everything high and holy.”

Patient No. 2067

It was September 25, 1855. Kierkegaard took his pen, dipped it in the ink, and wrote across the top of the page “This Life’s Destiny, Understood from a Christian Point of View.” It was to be his last journal entry: “This life’s destiny is: to be brought to the highest degree of weariness with life. The person who, brought to this point, is able to maintain (or is helped by God to be able to maintain) that it is God who, out of love, has brought him to this point—that person, understood from a Christian point of view, has passed life’s examination, is ripe for eternity. I came into existence through a crime. I came into existence against God’s will. The crime—which in a sense is not my crime, even though it makes me guilty in God’s eyes—is to give life. The punishment fits the crime: to be deprived of all lust for life, to be led to the most intense degree of weariness with life…. What does God really want? He wants to have souls that can praise, adore, worship, and thank him—the business of angels. That is why God is surrounded by angels. Because the sort of beings of which there are legions in ‘Christendom,’ the sort who for 10 rixdollars will roar and trumpet to God’s honor and praise—that sort of being does not please him. No, the angels please him. And what pleases him even more than the praises of angels is this: When, during the last lap of this life—when it seems as if God transforms himself into sheer cruelty and with the most cruelly devised cruelty does everything to deprive a person of all lust for life—when a human being nonetheless continues to believe that God is love and that it is from love that God does this—such a human being then becomes an angel. And he can certainly praise God in heaven, but of course the time of instruction, schooltime, is always the strictest time. It is as if a person had the idea of traveling the whole world over to hear a singer with a perfect voice: That is how God sits in heaven and listens. And every time he hears praise from a human being whom he has brought to the most extreme point of weariness with life, God says to himself, ‘Here is the voice.’”

There is a special, unbearable irony in the fact that Kierkegaard wrote these painfully autobiographical lines about being brought to the “most extreme degree of weariness with life” precisely two days before Thurah published his Rhymed Epistle. Thurah’s poem had certainly not helped dampen Kierkegaard’s weariness with life during the last couple of weeks of September, which had been more wretched than usual. In the middle of the month, when Kierkegaard was sitting on a sofa and tried to lean a little to the side, he slid down onto the floor and was scarcely able to get up. The next day he fell again while trying to put his trousers on. He did not suffer from dizziness, convulsions, or headaches, but when he walked, his feet did not go where he wanted them to; it was as though his stride had become a bit too short. At the same time he felt a creeping, tingling sensation in his legs, which buzzed or fell asleep; sometimes he felt shooting pains from the small of his back all the way down. The old difficulties with urination had returned; either he could not urinate at all or he did so involuntarily. His stomach was in knots, but curiously enough there was nothing wrong with his appetite. He had also had a cough for some time. When it had been particularly bad, especially in the beginning, he had had a pain in the front of his chest, and a creamlike substance would come up. Now the secretion was serous, with yellow blobs. It did not hurt so much any more, it was just very tiring. When he was out for a walk on one of the last days of September, his legs failed him and he fell. A carriage was called and he was taken to his rooms in Klædeboderne, but his condition did not improve. Four days later, on Tuesday, October 2, he went to Royal Frederik’s Hospital and asked to be examined.

The examination was undertaken by the medical graduate on duty, one Harald Krabbe, who in accordance with the applicable procedures was also responsible for Kierkegaard’s hospital journal. Krabbe had finished his medical education that year and was without much experience, which is clear from the case history (the anamnesis) which—in a stroke of good fortune for posterity—allowed the patient a greater than usual say in the evaluation of his own illness. Thus Krabbe noted, with respect to Kierkegaard: “He cannot cite any particular cause of his present illness. He does, however, connect it with imbibing some cold seltzer water in the summer, with a dark dwelling, as well as with strenuous intellectual work that he believes [has been] too much for his frail physique. He considers his illness to be fatal. His death is necessary for the cause upon the furtherance of which he has expended all his intellectual energies, for which alone he has labored, and for which alone he believes he has been intended. Hence the strenuous thinking in conjunction with the frail physique. Were he to go on living, he would have to continue his religious battle, but then people would tire of it. Through his death, on the other hand, his struggle will retain its strength, and, as he believes, its victory.”

After the examination Kierkegaard was sent to the hospital’s administrative offices to sign himself in as a paying patient. From there he went to medical department A, where head physician Seligmann Meyer Trier, who had reigned for thirteen years, was still in charge. The patient was shown to a private room in one of the small pavilions located in the front building. The hospital had fourteen such private rooms, which unlike the common wards were relatively nicely appointed, with good, soft blankets, a bed, wardrobe, mirror, chairs, and tables, as well as a corner cabinet containing fine china tea and dining service. On the side facing Bredgade there were storm windows that dampened the worst of the wind and noise. Kierkegaard was on “one-half best meal service,” which was not a qualitative but a quantitative halving of “best meal service,” and one could only have this by “special order” and by paying for it. Every day of the week, lunch consisted of thirty-two grams of wheat bread, eight grams of butter, and one half deciliter of milk. Like all other patients, Kierkegaard had a little food scale in his room, so that he could check to make sure that the hospital personnel had not pilfered a bit of his food in the corridor.

Kierkegaard’s private room was situated on the second floor—his perennially preferred belle étage—thank God for that. But he might certainly have wished that the corridor on which the room was located had had another name, because it was called—of all things—Mynster’s Corridor! At the eleventh hour, the irony of the world thus seemed to want to play a trick on Kierkegaard, and a nasty one at that, because the room into which they trundled the broken-down man was number 5; in its day, about three-quarters of a century earlier, it had served as the children’s room for the chief physician’s two stepsons, Ole Hieronymous and Jakob Peter Mynster. Here it was that the two brothers had planned their fabulous futures.

And here it was that Kierkegaard would pass the final forty-one days of his life.

THURSDAY, OCTOBER 4. The weakness of the legs increased. When the patient was supported, he could certainly move his legs fairly well, but he could not place his feet on the floor properly; they would flop down, heel first. When he sat up in bed, he swayed somewhat, finally settling on his left side, where it hurt. When he lay down, he could pull his legs up under himself a little, but he could not lift them. His chest was examined, but nothing unusual was found. His spinal column was also examined, and here again there was nothing abnormal. Kierkegaard slept terribly during the night of Thursday, October 4 to Friday, October 5, frequently coughing up some secretion. He also had diarrhea, and was therefore prescribed infusio saleprod, a mild astringent extracted from the rhizome of an orchid. Kierkegaard had gone through most of the night without urinating, and the hospital journal noted: “He had to urinate frequently today, perhaps because of his previously mentioned aversion for urinating in the presence of others (the night nurse), and he thinks about it almost all the time. He even believes that this problem has had a pervasive effect on his life, making him into an eccentric.” It was also noted that Kierkegaard had used valeriane officinalis, an extract of valerian root with sedative qualities. It was not stated when or how often he had used it, but in his Handbook for Therapy, Oluf Lundt Bang had listed valeriane officinalis as a drug against epilepsy.

Not many people knew that Kierkegaard had been admitted to the hospital. People continued to write about him as if he might come storming through the door at any moment, but on October 6, Carsten Hauch wrote to Ingemann about their common bane: “Just recently Søren Kierkegaard is said to have been stricken with an attack of apoplexy, of which death is the likely consequence. Most likely illness, nervous stress, and a sort of convulsive irritability have played a large role in his bitter and negative activities, during which he displayed to the entire world his face, marked as it was by hatred of humanity.” On this same occasion Hauch called Kierkegaard an “acute but ice-cold spirit, whose words are as sharp as icicles.” Indeed, Kierkegaard was a “false prophet,” who certainly “presents us with great gifts but with a heart so hollow that he plainly says that it really makes no difference to him whether the world is Christian or not,” and all the while he himself “loudly proclaims that he is more or less the only person who can see what true Christianity is, bluntly declaring that God hates humanity.”

During the following week Kierkegaard’s condition deteriorated. His ability to support himself on his legs diminished further, and his left leg became increasingly paralyzed. In addition, there were now back pains, which were treated by rubbing the patient’s back with oil of turpentine. Essensia valeriane officinalis, which had even stronger sedative qualities than the valerian extract used previously, was now prescribed. Twenty-five drops, four times a day. The “# bottle Bavarian-style beer” that was also prescribed had a somewhat less clinical ring, but the very next day Kierkegaard refused to take it because of “religious convictions,” as the hospital journal put it. Instead, he was given a special tea made from a blend of dried clover, chamomile flowers, and arnica flowers. He was supposed to drink a cup of this every morning and evening, but because of involuntary urination when he coughed, the tea was soon stopped. “He continues to assert that he is near death,” the physician noted on Friday, October 12. A couple of days earlier, Hans Christian Andersen had informed Henriette Wulff of the situation: “Kierkegaard is very sick. They say the entire lower part of his body is paralyzed, and he has to be in the hospital. A theologian named Thurah has written a coarse poem against him.”

Emil Boesen had also heard that Kierkegaard had been admitted to the hospital, and he made the journey from Horsens to Copenhagen. On Sunday, October 14, he paid his first visit to Kierkegaard. Ten years later, at the request of H. P. Barfod, the first editor of Kierkegaard’s Posthumous Papers, Boesen would produce a written account of these visits. To his wife Louise, back in Horsens, Boesen recounted the powerful impression made on him by seeing Kierkegaard once again, and he also touched on the odd fact “that I, who was his confidant for many years and was then separated from him, have now come here almost to be his father confessor.”

“How is it going?”

“Badly. It’s death. Pray for me that it comes quickly and easily. I am depressed. I have my thorn in the flesh, as did Saint Paul, so I was unable to enter into ordinary relationships. I therefore concluded that it was my task to be extraordinary, which I then sought to carry out as best I could. I was a plaything of Governance, which cast me into play, and I was to be used…. And that was also what was wrong with my relationship to Regine. I had thought that it could be changed, but it couldn’t, so I dissolved the relationship…. It was the right thing that she got Schlegel; that had been the earlier understanding, and then I came in and disturbed things. She suffered a great deal because of me.” (And he spoke about her lovingly and sadly.) “I was afraid that she would have to become a governess. She didn’t, however, but now she is Governess in the West Indies.”

“Have you been angry and bitter?”

“No, but sad, and worried, and extremely indignant, with my brother Peter, for example. I did not receive him when he last came to me after his speech in Roskilde. He thinks that as the elder brother, he must have priority. He was playing schoolmaster when I was still being caned on my a____. I wrote a piece against him, very harsh, which is lying in the desk at home.”

“Have you made any decisions about your papers?”

“No. That will have to be as it may. It depends upon Providence, to which I submit. But in addition to this, I am financially ruined, and now I have nothing, only enough to pay my funeral expenses.”

That same Sunday, Kierkegaard was visited by his brother-in-law Johan Christian Lund, who brought along his daughter Sophie as well as his fifteen-year-old nephew, Troels Frederik Lund. Troels could remember how the sick man, pale and thin, had sat, all bent over, in a tall armchair, and had greeted him with a tired but friendly smile. The visitors had been slightly ill at ease because the cool, clinical air of the hospital had stimulated Johan Christian Lund’s pronounced hypochondria. When he asked Kierkegaard how he felt and what was really wrong with him, he received a laconic reply: “Things are as you see them. I myself know no more.” Johan Christian Lund found these words, in all their simplicity, both unsatisfactory and threatening, and he almost lost his head: “No! Listen. Do you know what, Søren? So help me God, there is nothing wrong with you except your old and unreasonable habit of letting your back slouch over. The position you are sitting in would of course make anybody sick. Just straighten your back and stand up and the sickness will disappear! I can tell you that!” Johan Christian Lund could himself sense that his almost explosive reaction had merely added insult to injury, and he fell silent. Sophie looked down at the floor while Troels stole a glance at Kierkegaard and their eyes met for a split second: “Through the sadness there gleamed a look of gentle tolerance, combined with the playful, provocative glint of a subversive proclivity to laughter, and a sense of fun—this was instantly captivating, and we looked at each other in happy conspiracy…. This tone ran, as it were, through the entire gamut of feelings, from a schoolboy’s sparkling laughter to a penetrating and all-forgiving glance…. It was as if all expression had been drained from his bodily movements, indeed, even from his facial features, and had been concentrated all the more strongly in his eyes alone. They shone with a soulfulness that made an indelible impression…. As the youngest, I extended him my hand last, looked into his incredible eyes one more time, and said, shyly and with emotion, ‘Good-bye and a good recovery!’”

TUESDAY, OCTOBER 16. Urination was still involuntary and very frequent. Kierkegaard had now been constipated for three days. Castor oil had been tried a number of times, but now a clysma sebum was prescribed, a laxative rectal injection of a soapy solution. It worked. At night, one of the night nurses sat in his room. The head night nurse was named Ilia Fibiger, who spoke with him regularly, expressing her enthusiasm for his work For Self-Examination. Fibiger had put flowers in his room, but Kierkegaard did not want them put in water, and he put them inside his closet. “It is the fate of flowers that they must bloom and give off a scent and die,” he confided to Boesen, who presumably understood the symbolism. “At night she is the supervisor [of the hospital]. In the daytime she supervises me,” Kierkegaard subsequently said to Boesen, adding in hushed tones that the night nurse had told him confidentially: “What is more, she [Head Nurse Fibiger] weeps for you.”

THURSDAY, OCTOBER 18. Kierkegaard was very weak. His head hung down on his breast, and his hands were trembling. He dozed a little, but was awakened by his cough. Boesen paid him a visit and asked if he was still able to collect his thoughts. Most of the time it was fine, Kierkegaard replied, though at night it could be a little difficult. And could he pray to God in peace? “Yes, I can do that. So I pray first for the forgiveness of sins, that everything might be forgiven; then I pray that I might be free of despair at the time of my death…. And then I pray for something I very much want, that is, that I might be aware a bit in advance of when death will come.” That Thursday there was fine, clear autumn weather, and Boesen could not keep himself from suggesting that they take a walk together as they had done in the old days. Kierkegaard endorsed the idea, but that was all: “Yes, there is only one thing wrong. I am unable to walk. There is another method of transport, however. I can be lifted up. I have had the feeling of becoming an angel, of getting wings, and that is of course what must happen: to straddle a cloud and sing, Hallelujah, Hallelujah, Hallelujah. Any fool can say this, but it depends on how it is said.”

“And all that, of course, is because you believe in Christ and take refuge in Him in God’s name?”

“Yes, of course, what else?”

Next, Boesen wanted to know whether Kierkegaard might wish to change anything in his final pronouncements, which of course did not correspond to reality, but were altogether too strict.

“Do you think I should tone it down, by speaking first to awaken people, and then to calm them down? Why do you want to bother me with this! … You have no idea what sort of a poisonous plant Mynster was. You have no idea of it; it is staggering how it has spread its corruption. He was a colossus. Great strength was required to topple him, and the person who did it also had to pay for it. When hunters go after a wild boar they choose a certain dog and know very well what will happen: The wild boar will be trapped, but the dog who gets him will pay for it. I will gladly die. Then I will be certain that I have accomplished the task. Often people would rather hear from a dead person than from someone alive.”

When Boesen asked whether Kierkegaard had anything else he wanted said on his behalf, Kierkegaard replied:

“No. Yes, greet everyone for me—I have liked them all very much—and tell them that my life is a great suffering, unknown and inexplicable to other people. Everything looked like pride and vanity, but it wasn’t. I am absolutely no better than other people, and I have said so and have never said otherwise.”

FRIDAY, OCTOBER 19. Visitors from Copenhagen had informed Peter Christian that his younger brother was sick, and had collapsed “between the 27th and the 29th [of September].” In a letter dated October 7, Peter Christian’s nephew Michael Lund, a young physician who had served his internship at Frederik’s Hospital a few years earlier, explained the situation to his uncle, adding that it was probably an “an infection of the spinal cord, with paralysis of both legs.” Several days later, Michael’s father, the merchant Johan Christian Lund, wrote that Søren Aabye’s condition was at best “so-so.” Like his two sons, physicians Henrik and Michael, who visited their uncle “every day,” Johan Christian was absolutely not optimistic about Kierkegaard, inasmuch as “his condition is quite feeble.” He himself had not seen Søren Aabye since the previous Sunday; he had attempted to visit since then, but he had been turned away by the “nurse’s orderly,” who had merely reported that the magister was feeling quite unwell and did not want any visitors. Johan Christian Lund was going to visit the hospital again quite soon, however, and he concluded his note to Peter Christian with these words: “If you want to go there yourself, I’m afraid that you had better not hesitate too long.”

Thus challenged, Peter Christian traveled to Copenhagen from Pedersborg, but when he turned up at Frederik’s Hospital on Friday, October 19, he was denied entry. His dying brother did not want to see him. As Søren Aabye explained to Boesen later that same day, Peter Christian “could be stopped not by debate but by action.” The incident made Boesen uneasy.

“Won’t you take Holy Communion?”

“Yes, but not from a pastor, from a layman.”

“That would be quite difficult to arrange.”

“Then I will die without it.”

“That’s not right!”

“We cannot debate it. I have made my choice. I have chosen. The pastors are civil servants of the Crown; civil servants of the Crown have nothing to do with Christianity.”

“But that is not true, of course. It is not in accord with truth and reality.”

“Yes, you see, God is sovereign, but then there are all these people who want to arrange things comfortably for themselves. So they arrange Christianity for everybody, and there are the thousand pastors, so that no one in the country can die a blessed death without belonging to it. Then they are sovereign, and God’s sovereignty is finished. But He must be obeyed in all things.”

Scarcely had these words been spoken before Kierkegaard drifted off and his voice became weak. On the way home from the hospital, Boesen became seriously concerned. For if Kierkegaard wanted to take communion from a layman, then everything would be turned topsy-turvy—in that case, Boesen reasoned, a layman would of course be a good Christian because he was not a pastor.

SATURDAY, OCTOBER 20. Kierkegaard’s condition was unchanged. He was given folia sennæ, senna leaves, which have a laxative effect. It helped. Kierkegaard himself believed that the effect was attributable to his having eaten rye bread. When Boesen arrived, two nurses were in the process of moving the man, now utterly weak, from one chair to another. Kierkegaard’s head fell forward onto his chest, and he said that his illness was approaching the real death struggle. He asked Boesen to hold his head, and Boesen then stood holding it between his hands. Then Boesen made a gesture as if to leave, promising to return the following day. He answered:

“Yes, you do that, but no one knows, and we might as well say good-bye to one another right now.”

“God bless you, and thank you for everything!”

“Good-bye. Thank you. Forgive me for involving you in difficulties you would otherwise have been spared.”

“Good-bye. Now repose in the peace of God until Our Lord calls you. Good-bye!”

SUNDAY, OCTOBER 21. Boesen only just managed to enter the room when Kierkegaard let him know that this was not a convenient time, though he did mention the names of Thurah and Martensen. On the following day, Monday, the visit was also rather brief. Boesen remarked that Kierkegaard ought to have had a room with a better view, so that he could see the gardens outside, but Kierkegaard brushed off the suggestion: “What good can it do to fool oneself like that? Things are different now. Now it is self-torment. That sort of an idea is now torture. No, when one is to suffer, one must suffer.”

That same day Boesen called on Pastor E. V. Kolthoff, who had once been Kierkegaard’s pastor and was now an associate of Martensen. Years later, there would be additional incidents that would put Boesen’s relation to Martensen in a somewhat ambiguous light. In 1869, when he had become archdeacon in Aarhus, Boesen wrote the following to H. P. Barfod, who was then in the process of preparing Kierkegaard’s posthumous papers for publication: “If you should find attacks upon Martensen in S. K.’s papers, I think Martensen would be sorry to see them published; and of course, whatever S. K. himself wanted to say publicly by way of attacking him is already in print.” Was Boesen’s visit to Kolthoff an attempt to bring about a reconciliation between the wounded Martensen and the dying Kierkegaard? Had Boesen, as we sense reading between the lines, attempted to induce Kierkegaard to change his views?

In any case, it would have been too late. Kierkegaard felt weaker and weaker and was visibly wasting away in his bed. He had pain in his hip, and one leg was turned sideways. His pulse was 100. He passed water involuntarily, especially at night. He continued to be bothered by his cough, and the hospital journal noted: “The expectorant consists of purulent clots, some of which are thoroughly mixed with light red blood.” On Tuesday, October 23, Boesen came by again, but they had only spoken briefly about Miss Fibiger’s flowers before Kierkegaard felt quite ill. Later that same day, Kierkegaard’s brother-in-law Henrik Ferdinand Lund paid a visit. He had heard that Peter Christian had been turned away, and he wanted to attempt to mediate and to alleviate the situation a little. He therefore asked if he might be permitted to convey a “friendly and brotherly greeting” to Peter Christian. The patient had nothing against this, just as long as such a greeting was not linked to the two brothers’ “literary dispute.” On Wednesday, October 24, the twenty-five-year-old nephew Carl Lund, whom Kierkegaard had once held on his lap and told of his new apartment, sent Peter Christian a harrowing account of his visit with his uncle, now so greatly changed: “He was sitting in an armchair wearing a robe, but bent over, with his head fallen forward, and was totally unable to help himself. His hands trembled a great deal, and at times he coughed. I was with him for a while, and he complained in particular about his weakness and about the fact that he couldn’t sleep at night…. I parted from him with the thought that he did not have many days left here on this earth.”

THURSDAY, OCTOBER 25. Kierkegaard had a rectal injection of soapy water, with good results. He himself believed that the effect was attributable to his having eaten a couple of pears. Toward noon, Boesen came by. Kierkegaard complained that his hands were trembling and that the trembling had now spread to his body. Boesen had brought with him a copy of a valedictory sermon by Ferdinand Fenger, a Grundtvigian, but Kierkegaard merely gave it a glance and asked Boesen to return it. Boesen was a little offended by this, for the sermon had been an expression of good will on Fenger’s part, and it could not simply be sent back. And Boesen suddenly felt moved to say a few words in defense of the Grundtvigians whom Kierkegaard had attacked. “It is possible, of course, that there is a way to salvation that leads through the Established Church,” Boesen objected, to which Kierkegaard merely replied, “I cannot stand talking about this. It is too much of a strain on me.” So Boesen changed the subject.

“Was there bad air in the bedroom [in his apartment] you had before?”

“Yes. I get very irritated when I think about it. I certainly noticed it.”

“Then why didn’t you move?”

“I was under too much strain to do it. I still had several issues of The Moment that I had to get out and several hundred rixdollars left to be used for that purpose. So I could have set it aside and spared myself, or I could continue and then fall. I rightly chose the latter; then I was finished.”

“Then you got out the issues of The Moment that you wanted to?”

“Yes!”

“How strange that so many things in your life have just sufficed!”

“Yes. And I am very happy about it, and very sad, because I cannot share my joy with anyone.”

FRIDAY, OCTOBER 26. When Boesen visited the next day, Kierkegaard kept the two nurses in the room with him. They spoke only about matters so insignificant that Boesen did not even bother to write them down. This scene repeated itself the next day. Kierkegaard felt “burdened.” The streets outside were busier than usual, and the sounds of life found their way into the hospital that was otherwise so hushed. “Yes, that was what used to agree with me so much,” Kierkegaard said. Sometime later—we do not know exactly when—Boesen saw him for the last time. Kierkegaard was almost unable to speak, and Boesen did not take any notes. Shortly thereafter he returned to his wife and young son in Horsens, where, after all, he had a pastoral position that wanted tending.

NOVEMBER 1–11. During the first week of November a number of attempts were made, shortly after nightfall, to electrify Kierkegaard’s lower extremities. The effects on the patient, now in a state of complete collapse, were very minor; the legs trembled a little, but Kierkegaard himself scarcely noticed it. His general condition remained unchanged. Kierkegaard continued to cough. Urination was involuntary, and he had to have enemas on a regular basis. On the other hand, the patient’s intellectual capacities were undiminished. Perhaps this was why the daily dose of one hundred drops of valeriane was replaced by infusum tonico nervina, a powerful sedative and anxiety-relieving medicine. Kierkegaard was given fifty grams a day.

During the final week, he lay without speaking a word. He was diagnosed with bedsores; he was given wet dressings and his bed linen was changed daily. The electric treatments continued, with a slight improvement in the effect on his legs. The senna leaves were effective in alleviating his constipation. His appetite remained rather good, however. On Friday, November 9, the medical journal notes that Kierkegaard lay in a stupor. He did not speak, nor did he eat or drink anything. Urine and excrement passed involuntarily. The bedsores remained, but looked cleaner. The pulse had increased to 130 and was irregular. His face now had a certain lopsidedness because the left corner of the mouth was pulled up a little. The next day, the right side of the mouth followed suit, and the patient now had double facial pareses that forced him into a stiff, straight-ahead smile, like a petrified ironist. The disease had now progressed to the uppermost part of the brain stem, and Kierkegaard was no longer capable of communicating with the outside world. If his arms were lifted up and released, they fell heavily. Kierkegaard could still blink his eyes and was breathing rapidly and soundlessly. He had lost the ability to cough, and the rapid pulse and breathing were signs that he also had a fever, probably caused by the double pneumonia brought on by the accumulation of secretions in his lungs. He was still conscious but was totally paralyzed. Johan Christian Lund visited the hospital on November 9, and the next day he wrote to Peter Christian that it would not be long: “I saw him yesterday, and unfortunately I must confirm his nurse’s inauspicious prognosis.” Lund also had a quite blunt message:

“Given the situation, just in case, I must not neglect to inquire whether you have the deed to the family burial plot, or if you know where it is.”

Sunday, November 11, was Kierkegaard’s final day. He now lay in a completely unconscious, comatose state. His pulse was slow, his breathing was heavy and abbreviated. He was gradually suffocating, just like Socrates, when the hemlock approached his heart. Death came at nine in the evening.

Twelve hours later, when the pale winter sun rose, he was transferred to the hospital morgue.

Postmortem

“The doctors do not understand my illness. It is psychical, and now they want to treat it in the usual medical fashion,” Kierkegaard had remarked during one of his first hospital conversations with Boesen. But he was not treated entirely in the usual medical fashion: No autopsy was performed, presumably because he had been opposed to having himself cut up into pieces. A number of students at the medical faculty were unhappy about Kierkegaard’s decision. They had wanted to get their hands on his brain and had spoken passionately on behalf of science, but to no avail. Others also directed their attention to this abnormal organ. As Peter Christian Zahle wrote, “Perhaps an all-too-strenuous use of the brain had damaged the spinal meninges, thereby paralyzing the lower body.” And only a day after Kierkegaard’s death, Paulli had said to one of his friends, “He was said to have suffered from a softness of the brain. Was this responsible for his writings, or were the writings responsible for it?”

Paulli’s question was almost as good as the brain had been brilliant, but since no autopsy was performed on Kierkegaard, there is no pathology data to help answer the question. Kierkegaard’s hospital journal is bound together with those of sixty-nine other patients who left department A in one way or another in November 1855. Symbolically, Kierkegaard’s journal is the last one in the book. The first page of Kierkegaard’s journal has a preliminary suggested diagnosis of “hemiplegia,” but it has been crossed out. Hemiplegia is an immobility on one side of the body. The final diagnosis is “paralysis”—that is, total immobility—but this is a description of a symptom and not a real etiological diagnosis. Therefore someone added, in parentheses, “tuberculosis?”

The question mark indicates that they were confronted with an illness with which they were not familiar. It resembled tuberculosis but was nonetheless something else, and the medical people at Seligmann Meyer Trier’s department were those best equipped to know that it was not tuberculosis. During 1855 alone they had had no fewer than twenty-eight patients with that illness. Trier had furthermore written the first Danish textbook on the use of the stethoscope—Indications for the Recognition of Diseases of the Lungs and Heart—so it is unlikely that a typical tuberculosis case would have slipped by. Neither was there anything in the course of the illness that would lead a person to suspect syphilis, even though some accounts mentioned “spinal consumption,” which can be a symptom of syphilis. Modern medical investigations have advanced the claim that it was a case of a progressive neurological disease called ascending spinal paralysis or acute ascending polyradiculitis or Guillain-Barré syndrome, of unknown etiology, but in which allergic mechanisms appear to play some role.

“And when you get right down to it,” Kierkegaard had written in 1846, “what do the physiologist and the physician really know, then?” Well, in any case, they did not know what Kierkegaard died of. That he died of a “longing for eternity,” as he himself had prophesied in The Point of View, is of course not a clinically tenable diagnosis, but it is scarcely the worst explanation.

A Little Corpse with Nowhere to Go

Throughout his life, Peter Christian Kierkegaard always had to consider things again and yet again, and so it was not he, but Flyve-Posten and Kjøbenhavnsposten that broke the news of his younger brother’s death, publishing cautious, lenient, almost indulgent obituaries of the man who had made war on the church. But three days later, Friday, November 16, 1855, one could read the following announcement in the morning supplement to Berlingske Tidende: “On the evening of Sunday, the eleventh of this month, after an illness of six weeks, Dr. Søren Aabye Kierkegaard was taken from this earthly life, in his forty-third year, by a calm death, which hereby is sorrowfully announced on his own behalf and on behalf of the rest of the family by his brother / P. Chr. Kierkegaard.”

During the ensuing week this was followed by obituaries great and small. Kierkegaard’s preferred organ, Fædrelandet, carried a very brief, but on the other hand quite uncritical notice concerning “Denmark’s greatest religious writer,” while the National Liberal paper Dagbladet ran the most beautiful of all the obituaries, which not only said nothing of Kierkegaard’s imperfections and his one-sidedness, but also emphasized his vital significance for the times and for posterity. “Kierkegaard will assume a prominent place in Danish history, in the history of literature, and in the history of the Church,” the newspaper wrote, as it added Kierkegaard’s name to the series of remarkable personalities the country had lost in recent years: Bertel Thorvaldsen, Hans Christian Ørsted, and Adam Oehlenschläger.

Moreover, the event echoed across most of the country, receiving much attention in many of the small-town papers. The news soon spread to neighboring countries, appearing in the columns of the Swedish Aftonbladet as early as November 16, and appearing in the Norwegian Christiania-Posten the following week. Kierkegaard’s death—and the graveside protest by his nephew, Henrik Lund—were material well-suited for ideological use by various agitators: The newspaper Morgenposten did not disguise its belief that it was “every Christian’s duty to work to overturn the entire [ecclesiastical] structure, including its privileged clergy, the sooner, the better.” Clever versifiers seized the occasion to make a little money, peddling pieces with titles like “Who Will Follow in Kierkegaard’s Footsteps?—A Word for His Adherents to Consider” and the elegy “Søren Kierkegaard’s Final Hours.” Supposedly, all profits from the sale of this latter poem would go to an impoverished couple with seven small children, and the first of its twelve stanzas went as follows:

Like a refugee, homeless,

Abandoned by all,

He ended his days,

Bereft of all cheer,

Absent love, absent hope,

At his predestined goal.

And, I surely believe,

With his cheeks wet with tears.

This should provide an idea of the piece’s tone and its level of sophistication, but nevertheless, in own peculiar way, the seventh stanza did manage to communicate something quite true:

True, a martyr indeed

For the moment it took

For the jeers of the mob

To crush body and soul.

But the roar of the crowd

Its victim forsook

Even before

His body was cold.

On November 15, Goldschmidt discussed the death in North and South, writing in opposition to the view that it was the finger of God that had stopped Kierkegaard in the midst of his attack on the church. “He was without doubt,” Goldschmidt asserted, “one of the greatest intellects Denmark has produced, but he died a timely death because his most recent activities had begun to gain him precisely the sort of popularity that he could never have harmonized with his personality. The most dangerous part of his actions against the clergy and the official Church is now only just beginning, because his fate undeniably has something of the martyr about it.”

As might have been expected, Grundtvig looked upon the matter entirely differently. He preached the day Kierkegaard was buried, speaking with rapture about the good news that one of the icicles hanging from the underside of the Church roof had now melted and fallen to the ground. In a letter to Pastor Holten written shortly thereafter, Grundtvig wrote of “S. K.’s sin unto death”: On the one hand, Kierkegaard had presented “the only true Christianity as the most inhuman of things and as the most impossible thing under the sun for a human being,” and in this way Kierkegaard had helped confirm the unbelieving world in its unbelief. On the other hand, Kierkegaard had branded as a bald-faced liar and hypocrite every believer who would not “renounce his Lord and his name as a Christian.” So, invoking a peculiar logic of edification, Grundtvig concluded, “I do not wonder that he was surprised by death, for as long as the day of the Antichrist has not yet come, those who tinker with [God’s] masterpiece will always come to grief, and quickly, just like false Messiahs.”

During the final years of his life Kierkegaard had resided in the parish of the Church of Our Lady. His family, for many years attached to Mynster, therefore thought it only natural that the funeral should take place at the Church of Our Lady. On November 15 a family council was held at the home of Henrik Ferdinand Lund, where they discussed the practical problems connected with the funeral and attempted to find a way out of the dilemma that everyone seated around the oval table was aware of: If the funeral were to take place in the quietest, most private manner possible, it would indirectly dishonor the deceased by appearing to consign him to historical oblivion, while if the funeral were permitted to take place in the usual manner, it could be viewed as a provocation. What in all the world should they do with that little corpse? Finally, Peter Christian pulled himself together and decided that the funeral would take place on Sunday, November 18, at 12:30 P.M. He would deliver the eulogy himself and he wanted everything to be as normal as possible.

People started flocking to the church from quite early in the morning. According to Berlingske Tidende, “a great many people were there, certainly as many as the church could hold,” and Fædrelandet told of “the thousands who filled every spot in the Church of Our Lady,” while Morgenposten soberly noted that “the church was packed.” The first two rows of seats were reserved for members of the family. Just behind them sat Rasmus Nielsen, who, in his rush, had managed to close the little door to the pew so firmly that, rather symbolically, it got jammed shut. Hans Christian Andersen was also there, and in a letter he subsequently wrote to August Bournonville, who was down in Vienna, Andersen recounted that the scene in the church had been chaotic and absolutely inappropriate for a funeral: “Ladies in red and blue hats were coming and going,” he reported in indignation, and he had also seen “a dog with a muzzle.” The little flower-bedecked casket was surrounded by a group of sinister-looking fellows, common men from the street, but suddenly a phalanx of university students pushed their way through the church and encircled the casket.

Old Archdeacon Tryde, who was responsible for the funeral and burial arrangements, was uncomfortable with the entire affair. He had “heatedly and earnestly” attempted to persuade the family to transfer the ceremony to Frederik’s Hospital or to the chapel at Holy Spirit Church. He feverishly pushed his little skullcap back and forth on his head, and his face, usually so placid, was contorted with nervous tension. His face, like his skullcap, did not relax until Peter Christian stood by the casket to deliver his talk.

Peter Christian had not brought any notes, only a little calling card on which, as was his custom on such occasions, he had “suggested to myself something of the elements to be included.” It was not until 1881 that he attempted to reconstruct his eulogy, basing his reconstruction in part on “a slightly hostile or clumsy summary that appeared in a newspaper.” On the basis of this reconstruction we can conclude that Peter Christian wisely refrained from direct polemics against the deceased, but merely expressed regret that neither he nor anyone else had succeeded, “with the confident gaze and the mild embraces of love,” in “luring or compelling” the deceased to take a sorely needed “long and quiet rest, and to collect himself calmly after the excessive stress.” Peter Christian’s unpolemical tone was attested to in a summary published in a provincial newspaper, which noted, among other things, that “the religious polemic, which most likely had been a nail in the coffin of the deceased, [was] not touched upon at all.” Nonetheless, there was sensation in the air, and no sooner had Peter Christian returned home from the funeral than the always overzealous book dealer A.C.D.F.G. Iversen (not to be confused with A.B.C.D.E.F. Goodhope!) contacted him with a request to publish his eulogy, for—as the book dealer unctuously uttered—“this wish has been expressed by so many people who have been here in the bookshop today.”

After the ceremony at the Church of Our Lady, the hearse drove out to Assistens Cemetery. People were busy, so no one noticed Martensen up in the window of the episcopal residence on the other side of the square. They wanted to get out to the cemetery, which soon became a sea of people; groups large and small surged over the graves and their little gated plots of flowers, trying to arrive by the time Kierkegaard’s coffin showed up. Immediately after Tryde had cast earth on the grave, a tall, pale man, clad in black, stepped forward from the crowd. He removed his hat, looked around, and apparently wanted to speak, but this was the against the rules, so Tryde protested. The man was not to be deterred, however, and cried out to the crowd: “In the name of God. One moment, gentlemen, if you will permit me!” Fifteen-year-old Troels Frederik Lund, who was just old enough to be able to follow what happened, suddenly recognized the pale man as his cousin Henrik, the physician, who was usually so friendly and who not so long ago had written Troels an amusing letter from Paris in which he had included a drawing of a tin soldier. “Who is that?” could be heard emanating from various points in the crowd. “I am Lund, a medical graduate,” the black-clad figure replied. “Hear, hear!” shouted someone, while another could give assurances that “He’s pretty good! … Just let him speak!”

And then Lund spoke his words of protest against the church burial of this ferocious warrior against the Church, who had “been brought here against his repeatedly expressed will,” and had thus “in a way been violated.” As support for the truth of his claim, he referred to the articles that the deceased had published in Fædrelandet as well as to the various issues of The Moment; he also quoted from the third chapter of the Revelation of Saint John, about the judgment that awaits all who are neither cold nor hot. After reading a short piece titled “We Are All Christians” that had appeared in the second issue of The Moment, Lund asked the multitude: “Isn’t this description of the situation correct? Is not what we are all witnessing today—namely, that this poor man, despite all his energetic protests in thought, word, and deed, in life and death, is being buried by ‘the Official Church’ as a beloved member—isn’t this in accordance with his words? It would never have happened in a Jewish society, not even among the Turks and Mohammedans: that a member of their society, who had left it so decisively, would, after his death and without any prior recantation of his views, nevertheless be viewed as a member of that society. That was something reserved for ‘official Christianity’ to commit. Can this be ‘God’s true Church,’ then?”

When Henrik Lund’s speech was over, there was scattered applause in the crowd. People stood about waiting to see what would happen next, for something had to happen. But nothing happened. Henrik Lund stepped down, and Rasmus Nielsen, who perhaps had had plans of saying something at the grave himself, walked away, his large face bearing an expression of annoyance. It was a source of some amusement when a slightly drunk fellow shouted to one of his comrades, “Let’s go home, then, Chrishan!” And they did, Chrishan and the others went home; nothing else was going to happen in the cemetery that day.

Troels Frederik could remember that he had run across “the trampled grave sites” and finally reached the carriage where his father and Peter Christian were sitting. Only when he was inside the carriage at last did he realize how terribly cold he was.

The Will, the Auctions, and a Psychopathic Missionary

After the funeral and the burial, the newspapers passed their judgments, ranging from exaggerated condemnation to neutral versions of events to striking stupidity. Naturally, Peter Christian was also mentioned, but he refused to speak out in connection with the matter. “In my internal struggle, I ignored the views of the newspapers,” the sorely tried man wrote in his diary, in which an entry from December 1855 anticipated the coming darkness. He wrote merely, “Despair and loneliness.”

Others despaired somewhat less and knew how to inflate their spiritlessness into a hollow pathos, thus helping to prove the deceased correct in his prophecy that after his death he would be praised as much as he had been despised while alive. More or less undocumented stories began to circulate. Thus, Morgenposten informed its readers that “it is said that” the deceased had supposedly “willed his great fortune to the poor,” and that his “last wish” had been that he bear no “other grave garments than the linen he was wearing at the time of his death, plus a sheet.” Supposedly, the only “ornament” he took with him in his coffin was a “breast cloth of white satin upon which a woman had embroidered blossoms of everlasting, forming an inscription that said ‘The Only Truthful One.’” From Stockholm, Fredrika Bremer wrote to Hans Christian Andersen, “With S. Kierkegaard, I say, God’s will be done. Would that we might have a sense of assurance that we are following His exhortation and carrying out His commandment to us!” Andersen informed August Bournonville in a letter dated November 24, 1855, about Henrik Lund’s scandalous behavior at the grave: “He declared—this was the point, more or less—that Søren Kierkegaard had resigned from our society.” And on February 8, 1856, Andersen sent Henriette Wulff the latest news of l’affaire Kierkegaard: “Professor Rasmus Nielsen has begun to hold twice-weekly lectures on Kierkegaard, the author and the man; they are very well attended.” Solicitude for the deceased suddenly knew no bounds. Even Goldschmidt, who had once been equally busy in both satiric and satyric activity, drew in his hooves and ended up making penitential and gently lugubrious gestures: “Whoever would speak ill of S. Kierkegaard commits a sin of the sort the ancients called nefas. Despite his flaws, there was about him a certain inhuman loftiness and also something quite moving—yes, in the deepest sense, something tragic…. That at a certain moment I wrote about him in hostile fashion, or aroused his anger, or caused him any suffering—is outside of and beyond all regret.” The only thing lacking was a sympathy card and some funeral flowers from the expatriate P. L. Møller!

Quite understandably, Martensen was irritated at Kierkegaard’s posthumous success, and toward the end of the year he asked Gude to write a “piece about the Kierkegaardian tendency,” in which he must not spare the “polemical salt.” Gude did not really want to do it, however, and a mere three weeks later Martensen had become almost indifferent about the matter, for Kierkegaard was lying out there under a couple of yards of earth and the worms had begun to do their work. By mid-February 1856, the tranquil bishop could write to Gude that “there is nothing here worth commenting on.”

Kierkegaard had not said what he wanted done with his worldly possessions. The day after the funeral, Peter Christian went to Mrs. Borries’ house with Israel Levin and the antiquarian book dealer H.H.J. Lynge to inspect the household furnishings and books in the home of the deceased. Levin would later remember that everything had been left in the best order, as though Kierkegaard had simply gone off to spend a few days in the country and was not the least bit dead. Had Kierkegaard prepared his own exit as elegantly as all this? This possibility cannot be excluded, but it is more likely that the order that characterized his home was the result of the work of a private secretary named Nørregaard, representing the Copenhagen probate court, and Henrik Lund, who had visited the apartment during the previous week to draw up a list of the household property belonging to the deceased. What Lund and Nørregaard had encountered when they entered the apartment was a “great quantity of paper, mostly manuscripts, located in various places,” and they placed these piles of paper “in a writing desk, which was sealed by the Court, as well as in a chest of drawers and a cabinet.”

Nonetheless, on the occasion of his visit, Peter Christian still had to look for quite a while before finding the key to the locked desk, but at length he found it, and shortly thereafter he stood holding a pair of small, sealed envelopes. Both bore the same inscription on the outside: “To Reverend Dr. Kierkegaard. To be opened after my death.” The only difference between the two envelopes was the color of the wax seal on each; one was black, the other red. When Peter Christian broke the black seal he gained access to the following text, which turned out to be his younger brother’s will: “Dear Brother! It is, of course, my will that my former fiancée, Mrs. Regine Schlegel, should inherit unconditionally whatever little I may leave behind. If she herself refuses to accept it, it is to be offered to her on the condition that she distribute it to the poor. What I wish to express is that for me an engagement was and is just as binding as a marriage, and that therefore my estate is to revert to her in exactly the same manner as if I had been married to her. Your brother, S. Kierkegaard.” This letter was undated, though perhaps it had been written at the same time as the message in the envelope with the red seal, which was dated August 1851 and had the following text: “‘The unnamed person, whose name will one day be named,’ to whom the entirety of my authorial activity is dedicated, is my former fiancée, Mrs. Regine Schlegel.” Period. Levin recounted that after having read the two letters, Peter Christian had had to sit down on a chair for a few minutes to catch his breath before he was himself again. He had hoped for a reconciliation, merely a word or two. After all, both letters had been addressed to him, but they dealt only with Regine, whom Søren Aabye had apparently regarded as his lawfully wedded wife and had therefore made his sole heir. Peter Christian now had the dubious honor of having to inform the governor on Saint Croix that he was married to a bigamist!

Quite understandably, Peter Christian shrank from this task, and it was only a number of days later, after Johan Christian Lund had expressly enjoined him to inform the Schlegels of the testamentary wishes of the deceased, that he began to think about writing a letter that—at length—was ready for posting on November 23. The letter reached Saint Croix on New Year’s Day 1856, and Governor Schlegel, proper as ever, used the next departing “steam packet” to send Peter Christian his reply, dated January 14. After thanking him for the discretion observed by those involved in this “matter, that, for many reasons, we do not wish to be an object of public discussion,” Schlegel explained that at first his wife had been in some doubt concerning the extent to which the aforementioned “declaration of the will of the deceased” contained a last wish, for in that case it would necessarily have been her “obligation to fulfill it.” Regine, however, as the husband’s bureaucratese informed the reader, no longer entertained such doubts, and she therefore requested that Peter Christian and his coheirs “proceed entirely as if the above-mentioned will did not exist.” She wished only that she might have “some letters and several small items found among the property of the deceased,” that had once belonged to her. Among the things Kierkegaard left at his death was a package addressed to her, containing several of his writings in light-colored bindings and with exclusive gilt-edged pages, but she did not wish this to be sent. She notified Henrik Lund of this latter detail, while Schlegel himself informed Mr. Maag, the attorney who was handling the matter, of “my wife’s decision.” Schlegel concluded his letter to Peter Christian “with the greatest of esteem,” et cetera.

Henrik Lund informed Peter Christian of various of these details on February 27, noting that the letters from the period of the engagement and several pieces of jewelry connected with Regine had been “taken out and sent to her on the most recently departing ship.” Lund explained further that everything else would go to auction, books and furniture and whatever else there might be, “excepting his own wearing apparel, that is, his outer garments, such as jackets, coats, trousers, et cetera, which could probably most appropriately be given to his serving man and serving woman, and perhaps to Struve [sic] (the carpenter who had been his servant).” In a postscript attached to this letter, Lund related that his sister Sophie was in possession of “several locks of Uncle Søren’s hair.” Two small locks had been enclosed in little frames; “the families here in town have accepted one of them in common, since they did not want to diminish their value by multiplying their number.” If Peter Christian would like, the remaining “portion is at your command.” Peter Christian apparently expressed an interest in receiving such a special hair relic, for in a letter dated March 10, Lund enclosed “a lock of Uncle Søren’s hair in the form of a sheaf.” Toward the end of that month, the merchant Johan Christian Lund informed Peter Christian that the cellar of the deceased had been found to contain “a little supply of about thirty bottles of wine,” which he would arrange to have sent off to Peter Christian. Furthermore, in this same shipment Peter Christian would be receiving the portion of “Søren’s wardrobe” that they did not want to sell at the public auction of his assorted personal property, now planned to be held in Østergade on April 2 and 3.

“List of Some Good-Quality Furniture and Personal Effects” is written on the outside cover of the little auction catalog that was to assist in the final dispersal of the home of the deceased. The catalog, listing almost three hundred items, bears silent testimony to a life lived. The items listed appear strangely random, almost seeming to want to organize themselves in accordance with the spirit they once had served: seven pairs of glasses, pipe heads with silver fittings, engagement ring, silent butler, globe on a stand, cocoa and coffee pots, serving bowl with cover, six bunches of cigars, two bobeches, round coffee table with columnar legs, pine bed, mahogany chairs upholstered in horsehair, leather traveling case, washstand, chests of drawers; countless venetian blinds, curtains, and sun blinds; one bottle eau de cologne, ruler, paper press, scissors, stool, writing desk, desk chair, wicker chair with embroidered seat, lacquered rocking chair, books of music, table bell, clothes brush, gilded plaster figurines, bronzed ship’s eagle, fire tongs, bellows, air cushion, walking sticks, lantern, funnel, thermometer, coffee canister, stepladder, pink duvet cover, light duvet with striped cover, large pillow, embroidered foot-warmer, cylindrical sofa cushions, sofa bolster, wool socks, silk handkerchieves, black silk cravats, dickies with attached collars, woolen underwear, checked dressing gown, morning cap, slippers, cap, tin bucket, brass spittoon, folding fire screen with two wings, yellowpainted table, washstand, flower trellis, tin savings bank, entry light, popover pan, copper pudding form with cover, waffle iron, pan balance with weights, water barrel, axe, clothes iron with heating elements, sack containing three pounds of feathers. Hans Brøchner called this a “modest” collection of household goods, but at the auction it fetched the quite tidy sum of 1,004 rixdollars, 2 marks, and 15 shillings. Peter Christian purchased a mahogany sofa, for 27 rixdollars and 3 marks, a bit high, but then—according to the assurances given by Johan Christian Lund, who bid for him at the auction—it had, after all “recently been generously stuffed with curled horsehair and upholstered with woolen material, and was excellent to sleep on in a pinch.”

Then, the next week, Kierkegaard’s books went under the gavel at an auction that had been advertised with unusual diligence: In Adresseavisen alone, there had been ten advertisements since the first week of March, including a large advertisement on the front page of the paper on April 8, the first of the three days the auction was to last. The auction was held in Kierkegaard’s rooms, from which the furnishings had now been removed, but people were nonetheless packed in quite tightly because attendance was much greater than had been expected. Book dealer Lynge was flabbergasted at the bids; everything went “for enormously high prices, especially his own writings, which went for two or three times the bookstore price.” The total of 2,748 books in Kierkegaard’s library brought in 1,730 rixdollars. Among those who bid were A. P. Adler, Hans Brøchner, Henrik Lund, Andreas Rudelbach, Christian Winther, the actor Frederik Ludvig Høedt, as well as book dealer Lynge himself. People from the Royal Library also turned up, acquiring about fifty books for their institution, almost all of which have been preserved in their original bindings. A couple of weeks after the auction—a bit late, one might think—Morgenposten, the organ of the peasant party, cleared almost its entire front page in order to play up the event. After column upon column attacking the clergy, the paper stated: “But, thank God, the auction … offered many important and welcome indications that Kierkegaard has not lived, has not suffered, in vain, but that his words have penetrated into many hearts; that in his life he opened the eyes of many to the falsity and corruption in the lazy habits and self-deification of our Church; that he won many true friends who value him and his work and will preserve and propagate his memory.”

One of those who most doggedly sought to “propagate the memory” of Kierkegaard during these years was Mogens Abraham Sommer. He was a charlatan, charismatic, great as a plagiarist, and a religious chameleon with a varied background in Grundtvigianism, the Inner Mission movement, the Baptists, the Adventists, and other circles. Similarly, in the worldly sphere, this son of a sailor from Ribe tried his luck at a little of everything, ranging from carpenter, to tailor, office worker, copyist, self-styled homeopath, and as a private tutor specializing in the cure of souls at Haderslev Prison. Even his name was false, inasmuch as in the language of Jutland, the Jewish “Schomêr,” meaning “watchman,” had become the “Sommer” [Danish: “summer”] that seemed so full of promise. He was already in full swing when Kierkegaard’s attack on the church broke out, but the nine issues of The Moment truly fired him up. In his memoirs, modestly entitled Stages on Life’s Way, Sommer referred to the articles in the various issues of The Moment as some of his most important sources. It is not clear whether or to what extent he ever had personal contact with Kierkegaard. He himself claimed that after writing to Kierkegaard a number of times, he had gone to call on the master one day and had managed to tell the man “what I felt about him.” Kierkegaard had supposedly listened and then replied: “That is good, my friend! Just keep to the New Testament and you will not go wrong. Go with God!” Thereupon, Sommer recounted, “Tears ran down my cheeks. My heart said ‘Amen!’” Sommer omitted this emotiondrenched scene in the second edition of his memoirs, perhaps because it had only been a dream. Although he was not one to insist on the petty distinction between dream and reality, Sommer nonetheless wanted to appear credible.

Sommer saw himself as Kierkegaard’s legitimate heir, and the dundering demagogue proclaimed this to all the world on his endless road trips, arguing for the formation of small, “pure” Kierkegaard-congregations that would cut themselves off from the world and break with the church. Through his private pestering and public pamphleteering, Sommer managed to harass Peter Christian Kierkegaard (who, in Sommer’s view, did not represent “the Christianity of the New Testament”) to the point that in 1866 the bishop was compelled to rebut Sommer’s criticisms at a public forum in Aalborg. Sommer’s message was quite compatible with the socialism he embraced in the early 1870s, and as late as 1881, he was issuing demands for the dissolution of parliament, for the separation of church and state, for pensioning off the clergy, and (here he was truly ahead of his time) for heavy taxation of alcohol and tobacco as a means of improving public morals. At the death of Archdeacon Paulli in 1865, Sommer, displaying the zeal of a plagiarist, attempted to repeat Kierkegaard’s actions with respect to Mynster. But since Sommer had had no personal bone to pick with the deceased, he instead attacked Martensen’s speech in Paulli’s memory, urging his followers to read it if they needed an “emetic.”

Employing book dealer Lynge as his agent at the auction of Kierkegaard’s personal effects, Sommer had managed to acquire a walking stick that had belonged to the deceased. It served him as a sort of pilgrim’s staff in his restless missionary wanderings through Denmark, Norway, Sweden, Germany, and all the way to America, where he supported himself by drawing portraits. According to his account, he sold sixty-six drawings of Kierkegaard, who was thus introduced to the New World by a psychopath. The only times Sommer rested were during his frequent stays in jail, which gave him the peace and leisure he needed in order to write his books and pamphlets. When he calculated how many “tens of thousands of miles” he had traveled—nothing fewer than nine times around the world—in the service of Søren Kierkegaard, he depicted himself as a modern Apostle Paul. But neither Sommer nor his son, Mogens Abraham Søren Aabye Kierkegaard Sommer, who followed in his father’s footsteps, managed to accomplish their objectives, and today both have been consigned to a well-deserved oblivion. Sommer himself died in 1901, a bitter, impoverished, and burnt-out man.

Sommer’s mission was one of the first examples (and is the thus far the best one) that make it clear that Kierkegaard’s campaign cannot be repeated without ending in embarrassing plagiarism. This was yet another respect in which Kierkegaard was, in fact, “the man of The Moment.”

The Papers No One Wanted

Several weeks after the funeral, Henrik Lund had gone up to have a look at his uncle’s papers. The young physician felt called to publish these literary remains, and he used the ensuing months to acquaint himself with the cases and boxes and sacks and chests of drawers, in which rolled-up manuscripts and portfolios and notebooks and letters and bills and loose strips and scraps of paper lay, awaiting the future. The laborious business of cataloging the materials had a tempering effect on the immediacy of Lund’s passion, and on November 27, 1856, he informed Peter Christian that he now found it necessary to put the task of publication aside because he had been appointed physician on the island of Saint John—thus just across the water from Saint Croix, where Regine and Fritz Schlegel were living. He suggested that Emil Boesen might perhaps continue the work where he left off, but Boesen begged off, so Kierkegaard’s papers were stored at the Lund family home, where they remained until 1858, when Johan Christian Lund sent them over to Peter Christian in Aalborg. By 1865 many of them were “covered with a thick layer of mould, mildew, et cetera,” as their first editor, H. P. Barfod, was disturbed to discover when he looked into the cardboard boxes. The subsequent fate of the papers is a story that was as problematic as it was dramatic, but it has been told elsewhere [in Written Images; see bibliography] and will not be repeated here.

In 1869, when the first volume of Kierkegaard’s Posthumous Papers saw the light of day, there were many still living who felt that the past had caught up with them in an unpleasant fashion. Martensen called the publication “tactless and lacking in consideration for the deceased,” because they provided the most “incontrovertible evidence” of how “the sickly nature in that profound sensibility increasingly got the upper hand as the years passed.” In his memoirs, Martensen was primarily concerned with making sure that history would be on his side, and he did not harbor any doubts concerning Kierkegaard’s significance: “If we consider the whole of his activity and ask, What, in the end, has been accomplished with these rich gifts, with these remarkable talents?—then the answer must certainly be, Not very much! It is certainly true that he has awakened a profound and fervent sort of unrest in many souls. But the many half-truths, the many false paradoxes and false witticisms can hardly have assisted any soul in finding serenity and peace…. He himself also seems increasingly to have viewed his mission as that of an accusing angel.” But since Martensen did not want to appear inhumane, not to mention un-Christian, he concluded by invoking a somatic explanation of Kierkegaard’s final, very singular activities: “In my opinion, the disturbing influences that emanated from his physical condition can in no small degree serve to mitigate the judgment of his behavior. It would be impossible for anyone to determine the extent of his sanity.”

The Schlegels had an obvious interest in having a look at Kierkegaard’s journal entries that dealt with their shared past. Indeed, when they had been a newly engaged couple they had sat up in the gloaming, reading Kierkegaard’s writings aloud to one another. So when the first volume of the Posthumous Papers appeared in 1869, Fritz purchased it at Regine’s behest. Hopes of reliving their cozy evenings of reading aloud were soon disappointed, however; indeed, Regine actually felt “upset” by Kierkegaard’s journals and therefore had no desire to acquire the subsequent volumes.

Neither was Goldschmidt exactly delighted when the volume containing Kierkegaard’s journal entries about The Corsair and its crew was published in 1872, supplying the public with an extremely one-sided picture of the old dispute. Goldschmidt quickly came to feel just as scandalized about his connection with The Corsair as Kierkegaard had felt in his day, and he thus felt compelled to undertake a sort of “de-Corsairification” of his character. This took the form of lengthy exchanges of letters with editor H. P. Barfod and with the journalist Otto Borchsenius, who had covered the matter in the late 1870s, publishing a series of well-written but very tendentious articles that had presented Kierkegaard “as something of a saintly figure with a halo around his head,” while Goldschmidt had been made into a scoundrel and a malefactor. “Finally,” as Goldschmidt wrote to Borchsenius in late March 1878, “I come to the abusive language itself, which you copy down and reprint repeatedly with a certain literary relish. For you it is a fact that I have been abused so ‘mightily’ and ‘violently.’ You seem to forget the fact that I am alive, and that the renewed brutality can inflict injury.” Borchsenius and his readers were not very worried about that, however, and Goldschmidt remained the loser; he could point to “facts” until the cows came home, for all the good it would do him. Against this background of increasing interest in Kierkegaard, Goldschmidt jotted down some sketchy and fragmentary impressions of the long-deceased magister, and then suddenly he came to write a sort of obituary that is truly impressive in its sober objectivity, devoid of all hatred: “He belonged to an enormous, shining world of thought. He carried it within himself. There was a sort of Olympus in his head—clear, blessèd gods of thought…. And when he stood before me in that form, I realized that he was the sort of person before whom one must really give way with hat in hand.”

Peter Christian’s Misery

After all the homage that the funeral had occasioned, Peter Christian returned to Pedersborg, and one would hope that the wool-covered sofa that had been so generously stuffed with curled horsehair was, in fact, excellent to sleep on in a pinch, because things came to pinch more and more. On the night of November 10–11, 1856—“Søren’s death day”—he dreamed about his younger brother, who had granted that he “was right in a matter concerning religion.” After that, he dozed off again, and then—“after a period of being half-awake”—he dreamed that Bishop Mynster had “examined me very strictly, but gradually became a bit more friendly, and then finally … permitted me to preach next Sunday.” It is not so easy to break free from traumatic experiences.

Two days after having had these dreams, Peter Christian received a letter from Cultus Minister C. C. Hall, informing him that—at the suggestion of Martensen, among others—he had been nominated for the episcopal chair in Aalborg. Peter Christian traveled to Copenhagen, where he spent the night of November 14–15 at the home of his brother-in-law, the merchant Johan Christian Lund, in the “same chalet room where I spent the sleepless nights in conjunction with Søren’s funeral exactly a year ago.” As usual, he could not make up his mind about the bishopric. He looked for omens, and he saw it as the finger of Governance at work that he had come to visit Martensen precisely eleven months after he had found a lily in the Book of Common Prayer, left there by the book’s previous owner, marking Psalm 75: 3, which is about postponing things. At the Church of Our Lady, on February 22, 1857, Martensen consecrated him a bishop. That evening there was a dinner party at Bishop Martensen’s residence, and a couple of days later it was Royal Confessor Tryde’s turn to wine and dine the new bishop. The witnesses to the truth were convened once again.

Under the date March 8, 1857, Peter Christian’s diary reports the following: “finally reached Aalborg at five o’clock.” The newly appointed bishop still had thirty-two years of life ahead of him, years that would be spent in “the Siberia of northern Jutland,” as his wife Henriette called the place. During the final twenty years of her joyless life, she herself would remain sitting, partially paralysed, staring into the quiet rooms of the episcopal residence. Sometimes she would scream, presumably because some kidney stones were rummaging about inside her pale, thin body. The local physician had no idea whatever of what to do, and he prescribed one ineffective water cure after another. “A pious, lovable wretch,” Eline Boisen called her, “for she was sick—but she had to be sick—if her husband was to be happy. Yes, there really are some peculiar people—I think he was jealous of everyone.”

Things also went completely awry with their son Poul. After passing his university matriculation examinations, he had traveled to Copenhagen and taken a degree in theology, receiving high honors. But then he had come into bad company in a group that included such literati as Hans Sofus Vodskov and Jens Peter Jacobsen, whose radicalism and naturalistic view of life formed a glaring contrast to the pious belief in Providence that had characterized his ancestral home. He drank and fornicated and ran up debts all over the place; it was terrible. He refused to become a pastor but instead translated Ludwig Feuerbach’s The Essence of Christianity, which argues that Christianity consists of one gigantic illusion, a world-historical misunderstanding. To the horror of his aged parents, when he returned home to the episcopal residence he was “full of bitterness, sarcasm, abusive language, and witticisms,” as his ill mother put it in a letter to Peter Christian. Things came to a head during the summer of 1872. Peter Christian had to make the journey to Copenhagen, and together with the philosopher Harald Høffding, he accompanied his son to the insane asylum in Oringe, where Professor Jensen made the diagnosis of dementia præcox, or schizophrenia. The following year his medical journal reported the following: “For a time he is more deeply depressed, anxious, whimpering, dares not eat, is completely confused, asks about ‘the Tribunal,’ to which he wants to make a confession, talks about being buried alive.” After one of his depressing visits to the asylum, Peter Christian wrote in his diary, “the results seem dismal to me.”

Shortly after Poul’s admission to the asylum, Peter Christian received a letter from Henrik Lund, who told him that he had “placed himself under the care of Prof. Jensen,” at the very same insane asylum in Oringe. So, for a period of time, Peter Christian could make one trip and call upon two sick members of the unfortunate remnants of the Kierkegaard family. It is easy to understand the reasons for the complaints Peter Christian noted in his diary concerning lack of appetite and serious insomnia. For quite some time, his dreams had also been rather horrid, and a couple of days before what would have been Søren Aabye’s fifty-eighth birthday, he noted: “The ship on the ways, its crew taken, the robbers use thirst in an attempt to force me to promise to remain silent.” Two days later we read: “The dream about a group of people intoxicated with opium.”

During the winter of 1874, Poul was placed with some relatives on the estate of Annissegaard, but when he heard voices inside the walls, he returned to the episcopal residence, where he allowed himself to be cared for like a little child. In December 1876, one of Poul’s friends from earlier days wrote the following to Jens Peter Jacobsen: “I have received two more letters from [Poul] Kierkegaard, one of them twelve pages long. The second letter, four pages long, is absolute proof that he is raving mad. Every religion and philosophical system dances the most desperate cancan in his unfortunate brain.” But a couple of years later his condition had improved sufficiently for him to be able to accept sheltered employment at the diocesan library in the loft of the Cathedral School. The final thirty-five years of his life were spent in Aalborg, behind the closed shutters of number 4 Grønnegade, where he wrote five diminutive collections of verse with titles like “Merlin, or the Son of the Devil,” “Family Studies,” and “The Sin against the Holy Spirit, or The Accursed House.” The mere titles of these satanic verses, resembling primitive party songs in their rhyme and rhythm, indicate their posture of rebellion against the family tradition. Indeed, Høffding believed that the cause of Poul’s illness was to be found in the principles, hostile to life itself, by which he had been raised as a child. A generation earlier those principles had helped foster the genius of the uncle from whose shadow Poul never succeeded in freeing himself. In one of his few lucid moments, Poul wrote, “My uncle was Either-Or, my father Both-And, and I am Neither-Nor.” And this was the person whose proud and hopeful uncle, back in 1846, had called “the preserver of the family line.” It was scarcely the cause of much rejoicing to Peter Christian when his nephew Carl Lund proudly informed him, in a letter dated June 2, 1876, that Peter Christian had once again become an “uncle”—this time to a baby boy, whose name was to be Søren Aabye Kierkegaard Lund!

Just before Christmas 1875, when Peter Christian was about to prepare a sermon, he suddenly became dizzy and fell over backwards. He could still manage his job and preach at the poorhouse, however. But on March 3, 1876, just before he was supposed to take charge of “Bible readings on the passion story,” his powers failed him. He was bedridden all that spring, stricken with “pains on my left side, and near my heart, as well as at the upper opening of my stomach,” and was plagued by severe religious scruples. On April 23 of that year he tendered his resignation as bishop, not because of illness but because he felt unworthy to hold ecclesiastical office. Similarly, in 1879 he returned his royal decorations to the government, and in 1884 he gave up his legal majority, voluntarily assuming the legal status of a child. In a letter to the probate court from this period, he cited 1 John 3:15 as the explanation for why he also felt that he could no longer receive communion. The biblical passage reads as follows: “Anyone who hates his brother is a murderer, and you know that no murderer has eternal life abiding in him.”

One February night in 1888, this peculiar mixture of brilliant intellectuality and the oppressive pietism of the common people, so characteristic of the Kierkegaard family, finally released its grip on Peter Christian Kierkegaard, his soul totally broken.

Today, when you ask people in Aalborg where he lies buried, they don’t know whom you are talking about.

The Woman among the Graves

His difficult younger brother, on the other hand, knew how to secure himself a more lasting place in history. On a loose, quarto-sized sheet of paper, probably dating from early 1846, he carefully noted his plans, down to the least detail, regarding the arrangement of the family burial plot and the future placement of the white marble tablets: “The upright little column (bearing the text about Father’s first wife) is to be removed. The little fence behind it is to be closed. The little fence is to be put into good condition. Just inside the fence, where the little column stood, is to be placed a carved gravestone with a marble cross. The words that formerly were on the little column will be put on this gravestone. Leaning against this gravestone will be placed the tablet with Father’s and Mother’s names and the rest; of course it was Father who decided the wording. Then another tablet, matching the previously mentioned tablet, is to be made, and on it is be written what is now written on the large flat stone (though with smaller letters, arranged so that more space will be left) that is lying on top of the grave—the large stone is to be removed altogether. This tablet should also lean against the gravestone. The entire grave site is then to be leveled and sown with a fine species of low grass, but the four corners will each have a little spot of exposed earth, and in each such corner there should be planted a little bush of Turkish roses, as I believe they are called, some very tiny, dark red ones. On the tablet (the one on which is to be written what had been written on the large flat stone, specifically the names of my late sister and brother) there will thus be plenty of room, so that my name can also be placed there:

Søren Aabye, born May 5, 1813, died —

and then there will also be room for a little poem, which can be set in small letters:

In a little while,

I shall have won,

The entire battle

Will at once be done. Then I may rest

In halls of roses

And unceasingly,

And unceasingly Speak with my Jesus.”

There was a terrible discrepancy between these elegant instructions and the chaotic circumstances of the burial. Still more embarrassing, however, was that almost twenty years would pass before anyone seriously began to do anything about it. It is true that Barfod had only discovered Kierkegaard’s decisions about the grave site in 1865, but nothing was done, and as late as the summer of 1870, First Lieutenant August Wolff sent the following request to Bishop Kierkegaard: “The occasion for my writing you is to request that you grant me permission to place a gravestone on your late brother’s grave. Every time I stand there, it hurts me to see it so forsaken; it pains me in a way, and I cannot imagine that setting a name on the grave would in any way be a cause of publicity or of any unpleasant agitation.” Even though the first lieutenant emphasized that the gravestone would be quite unostentatious—“bearing only the name Søren A. Kierkegaard”—Peter Christian refused. He justified his refusal with a letter consisting of several pages of impenetrably nebulous reasoning. Sometime later, Wolff again wrote to the bishop, explaining diplomatically that the placing of a memorial at the grave “would in fact keep your brother in the profoundly self-denying concealment he had chosen.” Wolff further suggested that perhaps “the difficulty could be solved in an easy and felicitous manner” merely by having “that single individual” inscribed on the stone, a possibility broached by Kierkegaard himself in The Point of View.

As when his first wife, Elise Marie Boisen, died, Peter Christian did nothing at all. At his own expense, the enterprising first lieutenant had a marble plaque bearing the famous Dane’s biographical data affixed to the old Kierkegaard home at 2 Nytorv. When Peter Christian learned of this, the note he wrote in his diary was marked by a bitterness that perhaps explains the vagueness of his letter to Wolff: “Plaque attached to our old place—about Søren.”

Not until four years after that, in 1874, when the daily press began to complain that Kierkegaard had now lain buried anonymously for almost twenty years, like some sort of Mozart, was there finally any action. The energetic Johan Christian Lund’s nieces and nephews requested that Lund take action. At this point, true to form, Peter Christian declared himself willing to underwrite maintenance expenses for the grave for the next sixty years.

Nowadays, people come from near and far and leave wreaths of flowers, especially on ten-year anniversaries of the magister’s birth. People dwell on his memory with great devotion, but they also ought to bear in mind these words of Kierkegaard: “Why is it, then, that no contemporary age can get along with witnesses to the truth—but as soon as a man is dead everyone can get along with him so wonderfully? This is because, as long as he is alive … they feel the sting of his existence; he compels them to make more difficult decisions. But when he is dead, people can be good friends with him and admire him.”

Mr. and Mrs. Schlegel returned home from the West Indies in 1860. Fritz’s health had been destroyed out there, and he never really recovered. He died in 1896 and was buried in Assistens Cemetery, a couple of stones’ throws away from his old rival. When Regine left her apartment out on Alhambravej to visit her spouse’s grave—since she was in the memorial park anyway—might she not have walked over, quietly and unobserved, to Kierkegaard’s grave? That was what she had done when both men had been alive—she had followed her own paths. And him, the man down there, it was he, after all, who had once told her that since in Heaven there is neither marrying nor giving in marriage, all three of them would be together in the hereafter, Fritz and Søren and Regine.

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