Kierkegaard

by Stephen Backhouse

  Søren vibrates angrily in his pew. He goes home. He writes a scathing response. He leaves it in his desk. And he bides his time.

  CHAPTER 9

  A Life Concluded

  The visitor is perched on an armchair in the sitting room waiting to be called in to Sunday lunch. Anna is in the corridor outside. “I have so little desire to be at the table today,” she whispers to her husband, Henrik. “Do you think I can stay away?”

  Henrik sadly shakes his head. Duty demands. They both arrange their smiles and bring their guest to the table. “Søren!” Henrik calls out with desperate bonhomie, “Can I tempt you with a little glass of Madeira today?” Anna flutters about, talking about the weather, her children, the servants. Anything at all.

  The attempts at deflection fail utterly. Søren will not be put off his course. Immediately he launches into his favourite topic. What do they think about the old Bishop Mynster, now two months dead? Was he really a witness? A witness to the truth?

  “Oh, Søren, let’s not go into that old dispute,” says Anna. “We are totally familiar with one another’s opinions, and to discuss it further can of course only lead to a quarrel.”

  She should know. Søren has been a guest at their house now every day for a week. And every day the topic is the same.

  Søren begins to gesticulate with his fork. He raises his voice. His comments become more pointed. He considers Anna to be a wise person and he respects her sound judgement. He wants to know, was Jakob Mynster a Christian or a poisonous plant? But there is silence. Anna, finally, has had enough. “You know the man of whom you speak so ill is someone for whom we cherish the greatest respect and to whom we are profoundly grateful. I cannot put up with hearing him scorned unceasingly here.” Anna stands up, collecting her skirts. “Since you will not stop it, I can escape from it only by leaving the room.”

  During the “silent years” from September 10, 1851, until December 18, 1854, Denmark’s most prodigious prose poet published nothing. “Silence” however, is relative, for Søren never actually stopped writing or talking.

  The story of Henrik and Anna comes from their son, Troels Lund. It was Troels’ opinion that Søren was trying out his ideas about Mynster on normal people like Henrik and Anna. It is a credible theory. Søren, no stranger to street experiments and performance art, was yet again testing the limits of his audience. If Søren was wondering how upright citizens would react to an unconscionable attack on the memory of the deceased, then he got a clue from his friends. If the good people of Christendom were anything like the Lunds, they would be utterly confused, annoyed, and offended.

  Søren’s journals during these years see him working out his relationship to himself, to Regine, to Christendom, and to Mynster. The pages return again and again to these familiar topics, with Søren testing out new ways to understand and describe “his task.” He is biding his time and gathering his resources—but for what? Books such as For Self Examination, Sickness unto Death, and Practice in Christianity were barely disguised attacks on the modes of life, thoughts, and beliefs that fell under the banner “Christendom.” Yet Søren repeatedly insisted to himself and others that his attack was, in fact, a defence. Practice had a “Moral,” calling the leaders of the church to admit their failing and fall on God’s mercy for obfuscating real Christianity. The Moral was the mitigating factor, as Søren told Mynster directly in conversation. He tried to convince Mynster that his writings were intended to support the bishop and his church the only way that it could be—by starting anew after admitting it had failed. Unsurprisingly, Mynster did not feel the need to submit to the entreaties of the upstart son of a former hosier. Needless to say, his admission of his church’s guilt was not forthcoming. Søren’s silence was due in large part to Mynster’s silence. He was waiting for the bishop to act. The longer this did not happen, the more we see Søren’s journals sharpen ideas and develop themes that had been long in gestation.

  For one thing, Mynster is found, finally, to be powerless. So it is that by March 1, 1854, two months after Mynster’s funeral, Søren is ready to write:

  Now he is dead. If he could have been prevailed upon to conclude his life with the confession to Christianity that what he has represented actually was not Christianity but an appeasement, it would have been exceedingly desirable, for he carried a whole age. That is why the possibility of this confession had to be kept open to the end, yes, to the very end, in case he should make it on his death bed… . Something he frequently said in our conversations, although not directed at me, was very significant: It does not depend on who has the most power but on who can stick it out the longest.

  For another, Søren’s long-held antipathy to Christendom hardens during the silent years, as does his conviction that it is now beyond redemption. Ultimately, it is the Christendom over which Mynster and his successors preside that is the issue, more than any one priest. The official relationship of state and church, whereby clergymen were effectively civil servants of the country and agents of civilisation is clearly a problem for Kierkegaard:

  A modern clergyman [is] an active, adroit, quick person who knows how to introduce a little Christianity very mildly, attractively, and in beautiful language, etc.—but as mildly as possible. In the New Testament Christianity is the deepest wound that can be dealt to a man, designed to collide with everything on the most appalling scale—and now the clergyman is perfectly trained to introduce Christianity in such a way that it means nothing; and when he can do it perfectly, he is a paragon like Mynster. How disgusting!

  Yet “Christendom” does not begin and end with the established church. In short, the “established church” might well be Christendom, but not all “Christendoms” are established churches. Christendom is a way of being, thinking, and feeling that has far more to do with the cultural appropriation of Christianity than it does with any specific legal agreement between church and state. Christendom is what happens when people presume they are Christians as a matter of inherited tradition, as a matter of nationality, or because they agree with a number of commonsense propositions and Christianised moral guidelines. Kierkegaard sees Christendom as a process by which groups adopt, absorb, and neuter Christianity into oblivion, all the while assuming they are still Christian. Christendom is adept at shielding itself from its own source, for Christianity’s original documents offer a deep challenge precisely to the form of civilised life that Christendom represents.

  The matter is quite simple. The New Testament is very easy to understand. But we human beings are really a bunch of scheming swindlers; we pretend to be unable to understand it because we understand very well that the minute we understand we are obliged to act accordingly at once. But in order to make it up to the New Testament a little, lest it become angry with us and find us altogether wrong, we flatter it, tell it that it is so tremendously profound, so wonderfully beautiful, so unfathomably sublime, and all that, somewhat as a little child pretends it cannot understand what has been commanded and then is cunning enough to flatter Papa. Therefore we humans pretend to be unable to understand the N.T.; we do not want to understand it. Here Christian scholarship has its place. Christian scholarship is the human race’s prodigious invention to defend itself against the N.T., to ensure that one can continue to be a Christian without letting the N.T. come too close… . I open the N.T. and read: “If you want to be perfect, then sell all your goods and give to the poor and come and follow me.” Good God, all the capitalists, the officeholders, and the pensioners, the whole race no less, would be almost beggars: we would be sunk if it were not for … scholarship!

  During this time, Søren begins to sound out medicinal, frequently gastroenterological, ways of talking about the situation. An 1854 entry reads simply: “Christianity in repose, stagnant Christianity, creates an obstruction, and this formidable obstruction is the sickness of Christendom.”

  Søren Kierkegaard. Artist and wood engraver Hans Peter Hansen drew this likeness in 1854. Søren was unaware that he was being sk
etched at the time.

  Fatal sickness requires radical cure. So it is that during the silent years, Søren’s own self-identity as an author, too, undergoes development. He weighs his own communication style and finds it wanting. Up until 1851, Søren would confidently describe himself along poetic lines. His preface to Two Discourses at the Communion on Fridays (August 1851) stipulated clearly that he was not a witness to the truth, he was without authority, and he was not claiming to say anything new that the New Testament has not already made clear. What Søren was, however, was “an unusual kind of poet.” Now, during this time of waiting and abiding the poet language begins to fall by the wayside. He had long realised that Christendom, with its emphasis on culture, rhetoric, and respectability had become more “art” than “religion.” “All modern Christendom is a shifting of the essentially Christian back into the aesthetic.” The last thing it needed was more people waxing lyrical. Søren never fully abandons poet language, but he does begin to question its worth and suggest alternative solutions to the problem of Christendom. Significantly, “corrective” language, present since 1849, comes to the fore. Correctives, by necessity, are sharp, effective, and one-sided. Poets are diffuse, subtle, languorous. Poets have all the time in the world. Correctives have to act—now!—if they are to be of any use. “After all, the essentially Christian thing to do is not to write but to exist.”

  Once again, ironically, Søren’s sense of urgent, decisive action appears more in his diary than it does in reality. A new manuscript, Judge for Yourself!, was completed. The book pulls no punches, but its author did, and the draft was not sent to the publisher. Instead, Søren continued to practice his attacks on his uncomprehending friends. He sharpened his polemics in the privacy of his journals. He wrote a stinging rejoinder to Martensen’s sermon a mere few days after Mynster’s funeral but the fateful letter was not sent to the newspapers until almost a full year later.

  Apart from Søren’s habitual prevarication, which accompanied almost every decisive action of his life, an external reason for the delay was political. Bishop Martensen was formally consecrated as Mynster’s successor on Pentecost Sunday, April 1854. (Søren’s journal does not disappoint: “you can be sure that there will be a lot of rhetoric about ‘the Spirit’—how nauseating, how revolting, when the true situation is that there is not a single one of us who dares pray for the Holy Spirit in earnest.”) The happy occasion was marked by fierce political in-fighting. The deeply conservative Prime Minister Ørsted wanted Martensen as Bishop of all Denmark. The National-Liberal opposition did not. Søren kept his powder dry during this time, as he did not want his attack on Christendom via Mynster via Martensen to be associated with the party politics of either the left or the right. The partisan fight waged on for months even after Martensen’s installation and contributed to the sitting government’s instability. When Ørsted was ousted on December 12, the liberals gained power, bringing with them, amongst other things, a more relaxed attitude towards public libel. The time seemed right to make a move.

  Bishop Hans Lassen Martensen

  Søren’s article, entitled “Was Bishop Mynster a ‘witness to the truth,’—is this the truth?” burst like a bombshell, dropped by the Fatherland on December 18, 1854. It opens with more than an insinuation that Martensen’s “memorial” address was not in memory of Mynster but in recollection there was a recent job opening. Martensen the protégé has placed himself in the great chain stretching back to the apostles by claiming that Mynster was a witness to the truth:

  To this I must raise an objection—and now that Bishop Mynster is dead I am able and willing to speak … one does not need to be especially sharp to be able to see, when the New Testament is placed alongside Mynster’s preaching, that Bishop Mynster’s proclamation of Christianity (to take just one thing) tones down, veils, suppresses, omits some of what is most decisively Christian.

  The article continues for a few pages, spelling out what a “truth-witness” is (“it unconditionally requires suffering for the doctrine”) and accusing Martensen outright of “playing at Christianity” by applying this label to the advantages, refinement, and power that Mynster and all clergy in the land enjoy. Martensen’s memorial speech was certainly a worthy monument—“I would prefer to say: a worthy monument to Prof. Martensen himself.” For his part, Mynster was worldly, “weak, self-indulgent,” a good orator who did not live as he preached. The polemic concludes:

  So the silence can no longer continue; the objection must be raised … the objection to representing—from the pulpit, consequently before God—Bishop Mynster as a truth-witness, because it is untrue, but proclaimed in this way it becomes an untruth that cries to heaven.

  Søren had done his homework. The double assault on the memory of a beloved dead old man and a prominent living public figure elicited exactly the response he doubtless expected: confusion, annoyance, and offence. The broadside against Martensen and Mynster brought forth an outcry, but not before the gathered masses expressed a sense of befuddlement. The timing of the attack—a year after the events—was strange, as was the target. For the majority of Copenhagen’s reading public, the names of Mynster and Kierkegaard were closely connected. Søren had never spoken so brazenly against the old bishop before. Quite the opposite in fact. Attentive readers who had followed the pseudonymous trail may have been less surprised, but they were few and far between. There were, of course, no readers yet of the private journals, so there was no one who could see that this surprise attack had been long, long in the planning, nor see that the “catastrophe” and apparent madness of the action was part of the plan. Perhaps the longsuffering Lunds were the only ones not taken aback.

  Between December 1854 and May 1855 Søren would publish twenty-one articles in the Fatherland. The public reaction began slowly but soon picked up steam. Letters of protest against Søren began to appear in the newspapers. Martensen published a rebuttal essay in the Berling’s Times on December 28. Amongst the many things he said in defence of Mynster and against Kierkegaard, Martensen also managed to smuggle in an allusion to Thersites—the vulgar truth-telling social critic from the Iliad whom Homer goes out of his way to describe as bowlegged, hunchbacked, and ugly. This low blow elicited a reprimand from some of Martensen’s friends, but in general it was obvious that official public opinion was on the bishop’s side. Søren fired off another missive on December 30, and then many more over the course of the next five months. Martensen’s failure to answer the charges became a running theme of the Fatherland material but it was to no avail. Martensen would not be drawn out again. After his one response, Martensen was content to let lesser clergy and university figures take over. He would not break his silence again until well after Søren’s death.

  One figure who did jump into the fray was Rasmus Nielsen, the university professor who harboured pretensions to be Søren’s disciple, a pretension that Søren himself had at one time entertained until he realised Nielsen’s plodding nature. Unperturbed, Nielsen tried to position himself as the mediator between Martensen and Kierkegaard, in the process setting himself against both. To the annoyance of both men he made visits and wrote editorials to that effect, offering at one point, bizarrely, to present a public admission of Christendom’s failure on behalf of Martensen. Another figure, Dean Victor Bloch, wrote to the Fatherland, calling for Kierkegaard to be barred from attending church. “What Cruel Punishment!” came Søren’s rejoinder on April 27. “I, the silly sheep who can neither read nor write, and who therefore, excluded in this way, must spiritually languish, die of hunger by being excluded from what can truly be called nutritious, inasmuch as it feeds the pastor and his family!” What Victor perhaps did not know was that Søren had given up attending church long before, ostentatiously sitting in the reading room of his club on Sunday mornings instead. In any case, the world would soon get Søren’s clear justification for ecclesiastical absence. “This must be said: by ceasing to participate (if you usually do participate) in the public divine worship as
it now is, you always have one and a great guilt less—you are not participating in making a fool of God.” Other people would write to the papers, and in similar fashion, whether they wrote for or against Kierkegaard, they would invariably receive short shrift in a subsequent Fatherland article.

  With each new salvo Søren ramped up the attack on Christendom, moving quickly from Mynster and Martensen to clergymen in general and other Establishment figures who greased society’s wheels: capitalists, civil servants, teachers, and the like. The material that had been stocked up over the past three years was now being put to good use. Between themselves, the great and good of Danish society expressed revulsion, incomprehension, and (very occasionally) sympathy with Kierkegaard’s polemics. “Naturally, Kierkegaard’s battle against the late bishop also has all of us agitated,” wrote Hans Rørdam to his brother (and Søren’s friend) Peter. “Kierkegaard drags his corpse through the most disgusting filth. It is villainous.” “The little war around here,” wrote the poet Ingemann, “has made me very angry, mostly because of the support that the impudence and shamelessness of this sophistry has found among young people.” Won’t somebody please think of the children! Søren’s old friend and teacher Sibbern found only “arrogance and ingratitude” in the attacks. No friend of Mynster or Martensen, nevertheless Grundtvig too weighed in with a thundering sermon against Søren the “blasphemer.” Magdalene Hansen, a prominent Grundtvigian supporter, was less sure than her leader. “It has also been a continuing source of sorrow to me to hear people tear S. K. apart,” she wrote to a friend, “as if the question were, What sort of person is S. K.? and not, Am I a Christian?”

  Not all the ears that Søren’s polemics fell on were deaf or hostile. Ingemann’s outburst reveals that he, at any rate, thought the youth were listening. So too were many members of that nebulous group classed as “the common man.” During the course of his attack Søren received a trickle of humble, nervous well-wishers knocking at his door. Even though his funds were running low, Søren would nevertheless take occasional cabs into the countryside where he made a special point to talk to cow-herders and stone-breakers. A favourite friend on these trips was another Regine, Miss Regine Reinhard, called Tagine by the guests at the inn she kept. Søren would seek her out for long conversations about religion. The matronly Tagine made sure to keep up with Søren’s publications. One day someone saw her sitting and reading one of Søren’s articles and mockingly asked her whether she understood what she was looking at. “Do I understand it?” she sniffed. “Yes, you can believe I understand every word.” Of course she did. Søren had spent enough time writing for cultured literati and their opinion pieces. It was Tagine’s turn now. “You common man! I have not segregated my life from yours, you know that; I have lived on the street, am known by all.”