Kierkegaard (22 page)

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 Punishmen
t!” 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.”

A typical charge that people tried to make stick against Kierkegaard during this time was the accusation of hypocrisy. Many of the letter writers and opinion formers took enormous satisfaction in pointing out that Søren was no ideal Christian or truth witness himself. One example
was Aron Goldschmidt, who, back from his self-imposed exile and now the editor of the respectable literary journal
North And South
, opined “
this new Reformer
—who would like even to be called a Hero of the Faith or a Martyr for the Faith—absolutely cannot work with love and disinterestedness for the improvement of the world.”

The problem was, of course, that Søren repeatedly, loudly, and in multiple ways never claimed to be any of these things. “Reformer,” “Hero,” “Martyr,” and especially “Christian” are labels of special significance, all the more so because they have been diluted by Christendom. “
What Do I Want
?” Søren asked in the
Fatherland
on March 31, 1855. “Very simply—I want honesty.” The Christianity of Christendom is not the Christianity of the New Testament.

For this honesty I am willing to venture. However, I am not saying that it is for Christianity I venture. Suppose, just suppose, that I become quite literally a sacrifice—I would still not become a sacrifice for Christianity but because I wanted honesty. But although I do not dare to say that I venture for Christianity, I remain fully and blissfully convinced that this, my venturing, is pleasing to God, as his approval. Indeed, I know it; it has his approval that in a world of Christians where millions and millions call themselves Christians—that there one person expresses: I dare not call myself a Christian; but I want honesty, and to that end I will venture.

Days before this article came out, Søren met Regine for the last time. Fritz Schlegel had accepted an appointment to become the governor of the Danish West Indies. The day of their departure, March 17, Regine deliberately sought out Søren on the streets. Turning a corner, she found him. Startled, Søren had time only to step back as he raised his hat in greeting. Regine pressed close, saying in a low voice, “
God bless you
—may all go well with you.” Then she was gone. The memory is Regine's. Of their final meeting, Søren records not a word.

This act of closure did not in any event mark an end to Søren's zealous attack upon Christendom. If anything, it spurred him on. The
Fatherland
articles continued for a few months more, the title of the last one on May 26, 1855, saying it all: “
That Bishop Martensen's silence
is, Christianly, (1) unjustifiable, (2) comical, (3) low-cunning, (4) in more than one respect contemptible.” The end of the
Fatherland
articles signalled only the close of phase one of the campaign. Phase two belonged to the
Moment
, Søren's self-published, self-financed journal.

For reasons not too difficult to fathom, Søren was wary of the newspaper culture of his day. Giøwad and the
Fatherland
had been good to him, but who knew what twists of fortune might beset the one who got too close to these organs of popular public opinion? Søren's solution was to issue his own newsletter, initially at his own expense with the hope that subscriptions would subsidise the rest. To cover costs he drew from his remaining savings of the sale of the family home. The endeavour was expensive, but it seemed to pay off. By the second edition of the
Moment
, Søren was able to note with satisfaction that his pamphlet had a
circulation
comparable to the
Fatherland
.

Sometimes translated into English as the “Instant,” the journal's original Danish name is
Øieblikket
. It is an important word for Kierkegaard and occurs at key junctures in his philosophy. A prosaic English translation of
Øieblikket
could be “eye-blink,” but the more faithful evocation is to the glance or moment of vision in which everything becomes clear. The
Moment
ran for nine substantial issues, from May to September 1855. A tenth was completed but not published in Søren's lifetime. The
Moment
continues all the themes already familiar to
Fatherland
readers but widens its scope to include more trenchant attacks on Grundtvig and the notion of the People's Church. The hits on Grundtvig spilled over to his followers as collateral damage, including Peter Christian. Peter spoke openly against Søren at a pastors' convention, and Søren wrote a rebuttal, which he chose not to publish. Søren met with his brother in the spring, but the two quarrelled and Peter left
in anger. Neither was to know their meeting on June 7 would be the last. The issues of the
Moment
continued.

It is in the
Moment
that Søren publicly repudiates his earlier role of “poet,” confessing that as Christendom has already turned Christianity into poetry, the role has become useless. Although Søren uses his own name and speaks forthrightly in these texts, it is hardly a straightforward example of direct communication. “S. Kierkegaard” might have given up poetry, but he never gives up playing some sort of role. In the
Moment
he likens himself to an obedient hunting dog who ignores the taunts of the crowd until set loose by his master, a police detective, a fire marshal ringing an alarm, an apothecary with an emetic, a surgeon with a scalpel, a gadfly with a sting—anything that rouses the slumbering public by causing short term pain for a greater good. The language is righteously indignant, spirited, angry, and populist. It is also funny.