 Seren Kierkegaard, Various Readings, Scandinavian Studies and Notes, Volume 6, No. 7, Seren Kierkegaard by David F. Swenson, University of Minnesota, Editor, A. M. Sturtavent, February 1920, Chapters 9 and 10, Pages 36 through 41. From September 1851 to December 1854 there was a pause in the steady stream of publications flowing from Kierkegaard's pen ever since, the year 1843. His reflection had not become sterile, but its energy was consumed in self-preparation for a new role, one more decisive than any he had yet played as the journals of the period bear witness. He was engaged in probing the distance between modern life and the ideals which it professes. And particularly, his reflection seized upon the difference between the life of Christendom and the Christianity of the New Testament. As always, his thought was impassioned, pregnant with indignation in scorn. Real worries, which had assailed him for some time, helped to mature his personality. And there are indications that Kierkegaard began during this period, a course of self-discipline, by means of ascetic exercises, to replace the somewhat luxurious life he had permitted himself earlier to lead. Then in the year 1854 came an opportunity which, in view of his previous publications, appealed to him as a challenge that must be squarely met. In the fall of 1853, Bishop Minster died. He had been a pulpiteer of great ability, and as bishop he had ruled the church with a strong and conservative hand. Kierkegaard maintained close personal relations with him. Minster had been his father's pastor. He admired his ability, and had frequently defended him against attacks which he deemed unjustified. But he had not hesitated to let him know where and how far he differed from him. A few weeks after Minster's death, Professor Martinson, parenthesis, whose Christian dogmatics had so wide a vogue in theological circles at one time in parenthesis, preached a memorial sermon in which the late bishop was eulogized as, quote, one more link in the holy chain of witnesses for the truth, stretching all the way from the days of the apostles to our own times, end, quote. This idealization of bishop Minster seemed to Kierkegaard an impudent falsification of the Christian ideal, symptomatic of that demoralization to which Christendom as a whole was subject. He wrote at once a brief but emphatic protest. Professor Martinson was a candidate for the vacant bishop prick, and hence Kierkegaard postponed publication until the appointment was announced, so as to avoid entanglement with political crosscurrents and other irrelevant considerations. Martinson received the appointment, and in December 1854 the article was published in the columns of a daily newspaper in Copenhagen. It places in question the truth of the assertion that bishop Minster was a witness for the truth, maintaining that both as regards the content of his preaching and the form of his personal life, bishop Minster fell far short of the Christian ideal of a witness. That accuses Professor Martinson of plain Christianity, just as children play it being soldiers. This decisive attack upon the ideal legitimization of the established order created a sensation and naturally awakened a storm of protest. Kierkegaard was accused of attacking the memory of the dead, in a violating the sanctity of the grave, of a lack of earnestness of purpose, of an overweening personal pride, of being insane, and of whatever else the wounded feelings of his antagonists could invent. But Kierkegaard brushed objections and objectors aside, keeping straight to his main theme and maintaining it with increasing intensity. For four months, publishing altogether a score of articles at irregular intervals, Kierkegaard kept up the agitation in the columns of Federlandet, Fatherland. It quickly became clear that here was no attack upon the reputation of bishop Minster, as that phrase would be ordinarily understood, but that Denmark was confronted with the most searching critique of the whole established order which bishop Minster represented. If bishop Minster is a witness for the truth, then every clergyman in the country, as even the blindest can see, is also a witness for the truth. What we call being a clergyman, priest, or bishop, is a means of livelihood, just like every other in the community, and a means of livelihood carried on, if you please, within a community where all call themselves Christians, where there is therefore not the slightest danger connected with the preaching of the Christian doctrine, but where on the contrary this situation in life must be regarded as one of the most respected and attractive. Now I ask, is there the slightest resemblance between these clergymen, priests, bishops, and what Christ calls his witnesses, or is it not ridiculous to call such clergymen, priests, bishops, quote, witnesses, end quote, in the sense of the New Testament, as ridiculous as to call field maneuvers in the time of peace, war? But Bishop Martenson persists in calling them witnesses, witnesses for the truth. If the clergy understood their own interests in the matter, they would without delay petition the bishop to give up his terminology, which puts the whole profession, to say the least, in a ridiculous light. For I know several most respectable and able, very able clergymen, but I venture to say that in the whole kingdom there is not one who, when viewed in the light of a witness for the truth, does not present the comic figure, end quote. With rapid strides and bold strokes Kurtigord advanced to the position that the notion of a Christian people, or nation, is an illusion, that a Christianity with official sanction and authority is directly contrary to the teaching of Christ, that Protestantism in general is a silly dishonest perversion of Christianity, and that New Testament Christianity is so completely non-existent in modern states that it is nonsense, even to talk of a reformation, there being nothing to reform. In two separately published leaflets the situation was intensify almost to the breaking point. Quote, wherever you are, my friend, and whatever your life may be, by refusing any longer to take part, parenthesis, if you have hitherto done so, end parenthesis, in the public worship as it is now conducted, with the pretense of being the New Testament Christianity, you will have one less crime, and a heavy one upon your conscience, for you will no longer take part in making a mockery of God, end quote. And shortly after this pronouncement he sharply called the attention of the public to the fact that the clergy were bombed by oath to the New Testament, and then went on to apply the words of Christ in Matthew 23 verses 29 through 33, and Luke 11, 47 and 48, without reservation to an official Christianity of every description, and particularly to that of the Danish Church. The last week in May, Kierkegaard began the publication of a pamphlet called The Moment, in which all together nine numbers appeared up to the end of September, a tenth number was made ready for publication, but its appearance was delayed by Kierkegaard's last illness, so that it came to be published posthumously. In these stirring pamphlets the agitation is carried on to its last consequences, and the measure of the distance between the Christian ideal and the actual life of the Christian world is taken with a certainty and an accuracy that leaves no illusion unexposed. He was a great agitator, says Brandes. His soul was full to the brim with a living indignation, and he had the language completely in his power. By his religious writings he had trained himself to speak the plain man's tongue, and his quiver was full of the sharpest arrows of wit. He was just the man to carry on an agitation of which the nineteenth century will scarcely see the equal. He united the personal weight of a lasso to the eloquence of an O'Connell and the biting scorn of a Dean Swift. It is impossible to describe his procedure. One must see how he chisels his scorn into linguistic form, and hammers the word until it shapes itself into the greatest possible, the bloodiest injury, without for a moment ceasing to be the vehicle of an idea. His purpose was ideal. He had no finite end in view, no proposal of a changed organization, no displacement of authorities, no derogation of persons, nothing but a clarification of consciousness in the direction of greater honesty and sincerity. For those who wondered what his motive might be, he replied, quote, I want honesty. I do not represent Christian severity as over against Christian mildness by no means. I represent neither severity nor mildness. I stand for human honesty. And if the human race, or my contemporaries, wish honestly, sincerely, frankly, openly, to rebel against Christianity, and to say to God, quote, We cannot and will not subject ourselves to this power, end quote, well and good, providing this be done openly, frankly, and sincerely, then however strange it may seem to me to say this, I am with them, for I want honesty, end quote. In October 1855 he fell in a faint on the street, and was taken to a hospital. In the notes of the young intern who kept an account of the case, there are incorporated certain expressions to which Kierkegaard gave utterance. The following is from the first day's journal, quote, He considers his disease mortal. His death is necessary to the cause. He has used all his spiritual and intellectual powers to further the cause for which alone he has lived, in which he considers himself especially called and fitted to serve, whence the great intellectual powers with which he has been endowed in connection with so frail a body. If he were to live, he would have to continue his religious agitation, but people would soon tire of it. If he dies, on the other hand, the strength of his cause will be maintained, and as he thinks it's victory. End quote. On the 11th of November he died, forty-two years and six months old. It appeals as a fitting poetic symbolism that the patrimony which had made his untiring literary labours possible should have been found just exhausted at the time of his death. Chapter 10 It would be interesting to speculate upon the reputation that Kierkegaard might have attained and the extent of the influence he might have exerted if he had written in one of the major European languages, instead of in the tongue of one of the smallest countries in the world. An idealism more powerful and more consistent than that of either Emerson or Carlisle, a democratic individualism as thoroughgoing as the aristocratic individualism of Nietzsche, and presented with an equally passionate intensity, an ethical voluntarism clothed in a literary form as persuasive as that of Schopenhauer's philosophy, and a species of pragmatism more carefully and thoroughly worked out than that of either James or Bergson. These qualities must have attracted worldwide attention, and yet he himself believed that the limitations under which he was compelled to labor and the consequent lack of any effective opposition from the outside was a necessary factor in the peculiar development of his personality, and one demanded by his peculiar task. Had he written in English or in German, there would have naturally been enough significant opposition to have consumed a great part of his energy in external polemic. As it was, the outward opposition was negligible. He was compelled to set his own standard and to be his own critic. His reflection was thus turned inward in a greater measure than would otherwise have been possible. This he regarded as essential for the kind of literature it was his mission to produce. This literature will always remain, in one sense, a luxury. It does not have the kind of one-sidedness which would adapt it for the foundation of a school or the promotion of a movement. Nevertheless, it is bound to have an enduring significance. For it, quote, delineates the essential thought determinations of life and of individual existence. In a manner more dialectically precise and more emotionally primitive than anything comparable to be found in any modern literature. David F. Swenson, University of Minnesota. End of article Scandinavian Studies and Notes, volume 6, number 7, Søren Körkegård by David F. Swenson, University of Minnesota. Editor, A. M. Sturdevent, February 1920. Pages 1 through 41. Søren Körkegård, Various Readings. The Philosophy of Religion on the Basis of its History, volume 2, by Otto Flederer, 1887. Pages 209 to 213. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. The Anti-Rational View of Christianity. But it must be said that we cannot arrive at a clear and decided judgment of any form of Christianity, which is not consistently worked out. Cofton's view appears to me to stop short of its legitimate conclusion, as he attributes value not only to the supreme good of the beyond, but also in a relative degree to the moral ends of this world, which stand in no necessary connection with the former. The full energy of the purely transcendental, and therefore anti-rational view of Christianity, we do not find in Cofton, we find it in the Dane, Søren Körkegård. Note 1. One of his works is translated into German. This exercises in Christianity, translated by A Bartholk, Holly, 1878, and gives a tolerably clear representation of Körkegård's original style of thought. I have also had at my disposal a number of papers by the Danish scholars H. Brokner and S. Heegard, which Dr. Alexander Thorsow of Copenhagen was good enough to translate for me. End of note. Søren Körkegård sets out like the Neocontians from the position that truth is not a matter of objective thought at all, since such thought has for its contents some form or other of being, and hence is quite inadequate for the existing, which is not a being but a becoming. Christianity in particular is not a truth which could ever be the subject of scientific knowledge, whether called philosophical or theological or historical. It is rather a relation of existence, which can only be the subject of personal experience of passionate, infinitely interested appropriation. The truth of it consists entirely in the subjective inwardness and passionateness of personal appropriation of and absorption in the absolute relation of existences on which salvation or its opposite depends. The way to Christianity accordingly does not lead through objective thought, which, so far as it is philosophical, is a delusion. So far as it is historical, can only attain to an approximation to the truth, not to the truth itself. But equally little does the way to Christianity lead through the Church, which in its character as Christendom existing in alliance with the world is rather a declension from true Christianity than the way to it. The way to it is no other than subjective thought, self-collection about one's own existence, infinite concern about one's self and one's sins, and the infinite passion of faith or of absorption arising from the deepest, subjective interest in one's personal relation to the divine. But this way possesses several stages and leads through various forms of existence. The first stage is that of immediate or ascetic existence, where life is directed to enjoyment and consists in the passionate lanehold of the moment and of its fortuitous goods at each time without any constancy of direction or any consciousness of the eternal value of the spirit. This stage leads to despair, which is finite, which as finite leads to hardening, but as absolute to submission and so to healing. The ego has to choose between its fortuitous individuality and its eternal spiritual validity. As it determines for the latter, it has gained itself in its freedom or absoluteness and has passed therewith to the position of ethical existence. But the self which has attained its freedom can only maintain it by constantly realizing it. The ethical man is io ipso, the acting man. The absolute freedom can only be realized as one with absolute dependence, for example, in the fulfillment of duty, especially of the man's calling in which the universally human comes to individual expression. But the individual feints under the absolute demand of infinity and comes to require higher assistance. And so the ethical is shown to be a mere transitional sphere on the way to the higher, the religious sphere. The first form of this existence, not yet specifically Christian, is that of general religious inwardness or of absolute direction to the absolute end of eternal salvation. But this absolute end does not admit of being reconciled with the relative ends of finiteness. And so the man who directs himself to that end finds himself confronted with the task of renouncing his finite existence in its relative ends, no longer having his life in them, and in this pathos of self renunciation, accomplishing an act which transcends merely moral action. The fundamental quality of the religious life is suffering. To be without suffering is to be without religion. But the meaning of suffering is self-effacement, which, however, is not a spiritless giving up of ourself, but the strenuous exertion of an uninterrupted struggle for self-mastery. The relation of man to the eternal presents itself primarily as a consciousness of sin and guilt. And out of this comes the specific Christian religious spirit through the faith which lays hold of the paradox. God manifested in time as man and looks for its salvation from its relation to the eternal who came into the limits of time to the divine which put on an individual existence. It is the very essence of Christian faith, Kierkegaard strongly insists, that it conflicts with all the laws and forms of thought, declaring the birth of the eternal in a particular moment of time and the union of God with an individual man in the historical God-man. But this very paradox, which to thought is the inconceivable itself, is all the more the highest, certainly to faith. Faith lays hold of it, a fresh every moment with the infinite energy of a passionate desire of salvation and carries it off as it were in spite of the opposition of the understanding, maintaining it on the strength of its own subjective feeling in spite of everything objective. Faith, according to Kierkegaard, conflicts not merely with particular forms of thought but with thought itself and entirely. It throws all the rational contents of consciousness overboard on principle and loses itself with its consciousness of sin in the paradox of the grace which appeared in time in the God-man in this absolute miracle, thus becoming contemporary with Christ. But this opposition contained in faith to what is naturally human is not limited to the intellectual side. It affects the practical side as well. As the miracle of faith can never be reconciled with reason, the life of faith can never have anything in common with the life of the world. As a need of salvation demands the breach with thought, so it demands that a breach should be made with the finite interests of the world. The absolute religious relation does not, according to Kierkegaard, transcend the relative ethical relations of the life of the world in the sense that it embraces them in itself and seeks to develop its power in them and to elevate them to absolute divine worth and importance. Its relation to them is that of indifference, exclusion, negation. It claims man's whole strength for itself, requires him to refer himself absolutely to the absolute at every moment and sum up all his desires in a convulsive assertion of his entirely subjective relation to God, to his eternal end, to salvation. Then he has no strength left for ethical relations, he must of necessity disappear as unessential and valueless in comparison to the infinite religious relation because they fall outside of it. Hence, Kierkegaard can only find true Christianity in entire renunciation of the world in the following of Christ in lowliness and suffering, especially when met by hatred and persecution on the part of the world. Hence his passionate polemic against ecclesiastical Christianity, which he says has fallen away from Christ by coming to a peaceful understanding with the world and conforming itself to the world's life. True Christianity, on the contrary, is a constant polemical pathos, a battle against reason, nature, and the world. Its commandment is enmity with the world. Its way of life is the death of the naturally human. Not only was this negative relation characteristic of it at its first appearance, this is still its abiding essence. And hence, so long as Christianity remains true to its nature, it can only call forth the most extreme opposition, hatred, and scorn on the part of the world. Where this is not the case, as in the Christianity of the church, it is a sign that true Christianity is adulterated and perverted since it can never be the affair of the mass, but only of the individuals who renounce the world in order to find God and to save their souls. This is a consistent theory. It teaches with a resolution worthy of Tertullian, not in theory only, but in earnest, contempt of reason and science, of nature and of cultivation, of the morals and customs of the world, of marriage as well as others, and of a church which conforms to the world. And there is something refreshing, something commanding in this resolute consistency when we contrast it with the half measures and ambiguities of our Neocontian theologians. It has also the advantage of being incapable of refutation, since refutation can only take place by grounds of reason, the validity of which is here denied in advance. The position is therefore unassailable, yet its trees will not grow till they reach heaven. That is certain from the constitution of human nature, the reason in which cannot be uprooted and was not abolished by Christianity either, so that abstinence from the use of reason in thought and action cannot be permanently epidemic. End of Recording. The Philosophy of Religion on the Basis of Its History, volume two by Otto Flederer, 1887, pages 209 to 213. Seren Kierkegaard, Various Readings. The Expository Times, volume the 13th. Editors, James Hastings, Ann Wilson Hastings, Edward Hastings. September 1903, page 404. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. A great Danish thinker by H.R. Macintosh. Kierkegaard has come to his kingdom slowly. For many years after his death, his name was almost unknown beyond the Danish frontier, and even yet one or two magazine articles represent all the influence he exerts in this country. Yet he is not a man to be neglected without loss. One who has been variously designated the Christian Socrates and the Tycho Bra of modern ethics has surely some deep truth to impart to the world. He did not write for the general public. His methods are altogether different from those of the professed theologian. He wrote because he must. And from the first he found discerning readers whose number at present bits fair to increase. These two essays were written as far back as 1847 and have at last been admirably translated into German by a loving disciple. They utterly defy analysis or criticism of the conventional kind. The first, entitled, ought a man to let himself be killed for the truth's sake, deals with the absolute voluntary character of Christ's atoning passion. The second treats of the difference between a genius and an apostle and contains many memorable sayings upon the authority of the New Testament scriptures. Suffice it to testify that very seldom indeed do we remember to have read papers of alike originality, ingenuity, subtlety, and elemental and passionate power. Their spirit is profoundly Christian. Like the work of all really great minds, they leave irritating trifles on one side and go straight to the center of things. Had Kroekergaard written in German, or which is more difficult to imagine, French, his name would long ago have been a household word. Will someone not translate a selection of his shorter pieces into English? The task would be a comparatively light one, for his style has all the simplicity of nature and his or thoughts which appeal to the universal heart. HR Macintosh, Aberdeen, End of Recording. A Great Danish Thinker by HR Macintosh, page 404.