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KIERKEGAARD, RELIGION AND

THE NINETEENTH-CENTURY
CRISIS OF CULTURE
Kierkegaard is often viewed in the history of ideas solely
within the academic traditions of philosophy and theology.
The secondary literature generally ignores the fact that he
also took an active role in the public debate about the signi-
cance of the modern age that was taking shape in the ourish-
ing feuilleton literature during the period of his authorship.
Through a series of sharply focussed studies, George Pattison
contextualizes Kierkegaards religious thought in relation to
the debates about religion, culture and society carried on in
the newspapers and journals read by the whole educated stra-
tum of Danish society.
Pattison relates Kierkegaard not only to high art and liter-
ature but also to the ephemera of his contemporary culture.
This has important implications for our understanding of
Kierkegaards view of the nature of religious communication
in modern society.
GEORGE PATTISON is Lecturer in Practical Theology at the
University of Aarhus. Formerly Dean of Chapel at Kings
College, Cambridge, he was before that a parish priest in
the Church of England. His previous publications include
Kierkegaard: The Aesthetic and the Religious, Poor Paris! Kierkegaards
Critique of the Spectacular City and Art, Modernity and Faith.
KIERKEGAARD,
RELIGION AND THE
NINETEENTH-CENTURY
CRISIS OF CULTURE
GEORGE PATTISON
University of Aarhus
iuniisuio n\ rui iiiss s\xoicari oi rui uxiviisir\ oi caxniioci
The Pitt Building, Trumpington Street, Cambridge, United Kingdom
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George Pattison 2004
2002
(Adobe Reader)

To my mother Jean Pattison

Contents
Preface page ix
Acknowledgements xi
List of abbreviations xiv
: The sublime, the city and the present age :
. Kierkegaard and the world of the feuilletons .
The present age: the age of the city o
Cosmopolitan faces .
Food for thought q6
6 A literary scandal ::6
The reception of Either/Or :
8 New Years Day :
q Kierkegaard and the nineteenth century
(:) Manet :
:o Kierkegaard and the nineteenth century
(.) Dostoevsky :q8
:: Learning to read the signs of the times ...
Bibliography .
Index ..
vii
Preface
Although the chapters that follow each appeared or was pro-
duced independently, I believe that they offer a coherent and
focussed exploration of some of the contexts in which and for
which Kierkegaard wrote. Primarily these relate to his critique of
the present age as that is expressed in his response to and appro-
priation of both its popular and its literary culture. It should go
without saying that this is only one aspect of Kierkegaard. There
is little or nothing here of his extensive and intensive probing of
the psychology of the religious life, or, except almost in passing, of
the literary and rhetorical means he employs to enable his readers
to enter more deeply and commitedly into that life as the matter
of their own ultimate concern. Yet this is not about Kierkegaards
viewof culture in the sense that it is not also about his understand-
ing of the religious situation of his time. As I hope the chapters that
follow will suggest, these are not nally separable, even if we have
to separate them for the purposes of commentary.
I am publishing separately a highly focussed study of
Kierkegaards upbuilding writings. This study, Kierkegaards Upbuild-
ing Discourses: Philosophy, Theology, Literature (.oo.), serves as a kind of
companion volume to this book. It offers an exploration of what
could be called the inside aspect of what is here dealt with in
its outward aspect. But given that Kierkegaard himself famously
questioned what he called the Hegelian maxim that the inner and
outer must necessarily coincide, what is the connection between
them? We can scarcely read the inner anguish of a soul nding
itself reduced to nothingness in its desperate search for God from
the outer surface of a culture whose great event was the opening of
Tivoli. If we are to speak of a connection here it can only be one
ix
x Preface
that is oblique, indirect, paradoxical. Anticipating the argument of
Chapter :, perhaps we can put it like this: the emptiness of a culture
that has become pure surface is itself, in that very superciality, the
gure of a sublime void that is, in its turn, an echo of the ontological
indeterminacy of the freedom in and through which our religious
destiny is decided.
Doesnt that meanthat we woulddobetter simply toabandonthe
opening moment of this sequence and go straight to the heart of the
matter? Why waste our time with Kierkegaards involvement in
the ephemera of his immediate cultural situation? Why preoccupy
ourselves with reconstructing a gure of sheer vacuity?
Of course, as I shall acknowledge, there is much in Kierkegaards
world that has simply faded into history. Yet it is integral to
Kierkegaards distinctive writerly watermark that he cannot write
about one aspect in separation from the other: that he is both a
man of the crowd and the poet of religious solitude. If we are to be
Kierkegaardian this will not simply be by repeating his theology,
but by re-enactinginour ownage the double-citizenshipof time and
eternity. To nd out what the temporal dimensionof this citizenship
meant for Kierkegaard, however, we have no alternative but the
kind of historical labour represented in what follows. It is my own
experience (which I certainly would not want to hold up as exem-
plary for anyone else, least of all for those disinclined or unequipped
for historical scholarship) that such labour also and in its own way
offers moments in which the insubstantial ow of time is revealed
as the ssure through which the eternal draws near, beyond words,
beyond knowledge, beyond art.
Acknowledgements
Although extensively revised and reworked, all of the chapters
in this book derive from articles and contributions to collections
published over a number of years. I am therefore grateful to all
those responsible for their previous publication. Chapters :, and
8 are based on essays appearing in the Kierkegaard Studies Yearbooks
for :qq8, :qqq and .ooo, under the titles Kierkegaard and the
Sublime, The Present Age: The Age of the City and New
Years Day: A Comparative Study of the First of the Eighteen
Upbuilding Discourses respectively (and pp. ., :.o, qq
in the respective volumes), all edited by N.-J. Cappelrn and
H. Deuser and published by Walter de Gruyter. Chapter :: is
based on the chapter If Kierkegaard is Right about Reading,
Why Read Kierkegaard?, in N.-J. Cappelrn and J. Stewart eds.),
Kierkegaard Revisited, Berlin, Walter de Gruyter, :qq, pp. .q:oq.
Chapters , and are substantially identical with essays appearing
in the International Kierkegaard Commentary, edited by Robert
L. Perkins respectively Cosmopolitan Faces: The Presence of
the Wandering Jew, in From the Papers of One Still Living, in IKC :
Early Polemical Writings (:qqq), pp. 8:o8; Beyond the Grasp of
Irony, in IKC : The Concept of Irony (.oo:); The Initial Reception
of Either/Or, in IKC : Either/Or Part II (:qq), pp. .q:o. These
are reprinted by permission of Mercer University Press. The germ
of Chapter . appeared as the article Kierkegaard as Feuilleton
Writer, in Enrahonar: Quaderns de Filosoa, No. .q, :qq8. Chapter 6
is a reworking of the article Friedrich Schlegels Lucinde: A Case
Study in the Relation of Religion to Romanticism, published in
the Scottish Journal of Theology 8, :q86, pp. 6, by the Scottish
Academic Press. The section of Chapter q dealing with the
xi
xii Acknowledgements
comparison between Kierkegaard and Manet repoduces the article
Manets Christ Mocked: A Kierkegaardian Discussion of Art,
Suffering andChristianDiscipleshipinthe Context of a Nineteenth
Century Painting, in R. Linnet (ed.), Aesthetic Theory and Artistic
Experience, forthcoming, and is reprinted by permission of the
Museum Tusculanum Press. Chapter :o overlaps with Freedoms
Dangerous Dialogue: Reading Dostoevsky and Kierkegaard
Together, from G. Pattison and D. Thompson (eds.), Dostoevsky
and the Christian Tradition, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press,
.oo:.
Over and above such ofcial acknowledgements, however, it is
necessary to acknowledge the enormous stimulus, assistance and
support of a number of institutions, colleagues, students, friends
and family. Many of the ideas broached here were articulated in the
context of two periods of study leave at the Kierkegaard Research
Centre at the University of Copenhagen in :qq and .ooo, and
I am grateful to Niels-Jrgen Cappelrn and to all colleagues at
the Centre for everything I gained from those well-spent months.
I am also grateful to Kings College, Cambridge, for allowing me
to take leave in those periods. A special stimulus to some of the key
ideas about Kierkegaard and the culture of urbanity came from
the work of Martin Zerlang, and I should also like to acknowl-
edge the input of Ragni Linnet to my thoughts about Kierkegaard
and the visual culture of the nineteenth century. Robert L. Perkins
has always been generous in welcoming my contributions to the
International Kierkegaard Commentary, and I should like to thank
him personally for that. Begonya Saez Tajafuerce elicited from me
the essay on Kierkegaard as feuilleton writer that serves as a kind
of leitmotif throughout the present collection. Diane Thompson
and David Jasper are to be thanked for their part in bringing about
the conference at which I began to work out the comparison be-
tween Kierkegaard and Dostoevsky. The opportunity to respond
to Habib C. Maliks Receiving Sren Kierkegaard at the :qq8 American
Academy of Religion Kierkegaard group session also provided a
useful catalyst for a number of the key insights underlying this
book. Alex Fryzsman, Joakim Garff, Arne Grn, Bruce Kirmmse,
Sue Needham, Peter Tudvad and Julia Watkin have been especially
helpful in a variety of ways: answering queries, providing materials,
Acknowledgements xiii
drawing my attention to relevant texts and sources, and secretar-
ial assistance. This is reaching the point at which I either have to
extend the list of names to monstrous lengths or draw a line. The
latter is probably the better option, as I do not wish to overlook any
of the many fromwhomI have learned and continue to learn more
not only about Kierkegaard but also about the way in which the
rise of the culture of urbanity has provided a transformative provo-
cation to Christian faith. Whether the theology of the Churches
has yet grasped the scale of the transformation is an open question.
Beyond the world of Kierkegaard scholarship in the narrow sense,
it is my hope that this book will also engage those concerned with
such questions a hope that reects my view that the nineteenth
centurys crisis of religion and culture is not a matter of merely
historical interest but lives on in our own concern with essentially
analogous questions.
The cover illustration, Martinus Rrbyes Arrestbygningen ved
Domhuset, is reproduced by permission of the Statens Museum for
Kunst in Copenhagen.
All translations of foreign-language titles not otherwise acknowl-
edged are my own, and though I have been helped with some of
these, any faults are my own.
Abbreviations
The following abbreviations are used for titles of works by
Kierkegaard. Any other abbreviations used are given at the point
of rst use.
CA The Concept of Anxiety
CI The Concept of Irony
COR The Corsair Affair
EO Either/Or (followed by volume number)
EPW Early Polemical Writings
EUD Eighteen Upbuilding Discourses
FSE/JY For Self-Examination and Judge for Yourself !
FT/R Fear and Trembling and Repetition
JP Sren Kierkegaards Journals and Papers (followed by
volume and entry (not page) number)
M The Moment and Late Writings
PC Practice in Christianity
PF Philosophical Fragments
P/WS Prefaces and A Writing Sampler
SKS Sren Kierkegaards Skrifter (followed by volume number)
SLW Stages on Lifes Way
TA Two Ages
UDVS Upbuilding Discourses in Various Spirits
With the exception of JP and SKS these refer to titles in the
Princeton University Press edition of Kierkegaards writings. Full
details are given in the Bibliography.
xiv
CHAPTER :
The sublime, the city and the present age
I
The concept of the sublime is, perhaps necessarily, elusive, a con-
cept that resists incorporation into the domain of clear and distinct
ideas, if concept there is or can be at all in this case. What is sub-
lime is what unsettles, what cannot settle or be settled: a realm of
experiences, representations andideas that is turbulent andunman-
ageable. Such a realm may be gured in the Alpine landscape that
the eighteenth and early nineteenth century saw as the wreckage
of an earlier creation, or in storm and battle, perennial paradigms
of sublime experience. Equally, if paradoxically, the sublime res-
onates with the daily life-experience of the modern city-dweller.
Indeed, it has been argued that there is an intrinsic connection
between the rise of the modern city and the aesthetics of the sub-
lime that developed in the latter part of the eighteenth century.
For the city irreversibly redened the individuals relation to the
environment. This had to do not only with the way in which the
new, expanding cities (beginning with London) overran their me-
dieval walls, were reconstructed in an architecture that reected
the scale and style of imperial ambitions, and so overwhelmed the
individual by virtue of their size (and magnitude, to anticipate, pro-
vided Kant with one of the foci of his discussion of the sublime).
It also had to do with the simultaneous expansion and intensi-
cation of the individuals visual interaction with the urban envi-
ronment, reected in such diverse phenomena as the innovative
art of window-dressing (together with the beginnings of modern
advertising) and the multiplication of new visual and spatial expe-
riences (magic lanterns, dioramas, stereoscopy, photography, etc.).
:
. Kierkegaard, religion and culture
Martin Zerlang, the Danish critic who has done much to explore
the connections between urbanity and sublimity, also draws atten-
tion in this connection to the diseases of urbanity rst diagnosed in
the nineteenth century: vertigo, agoraphobia, claustrophobia and
neurasthenia. His description of neurasthenia as a dysfunction in
mental life characterized by an overstimulation of the senses and
an underdeveloped capacity for motoric reaction, in other words
a kind of blocked mental circulation could be read as an account
of someone chronically overexposed to sublime experiences, some-
one paralysed by the sublime unmasterability of his environment.
:
If the neurasthenic cannot be regarded as normative, he is none
the less symptomatic of the newstresses placed upon the individual
consciousness as it seeks to make sense of its world. He is the man of
the crowd stripped of his functional normality. The neurasthenics
blocked mental circulation manifests itself in the continuous
destabilization and disorientation of representation resulting from
urban cultures characteristic drive to package experience as image,
whilst the scale, complexity and speed of that culture continually
militates against the process of reduction. If the public face of mod-
ern urban culture becomes (or aims at becoming) the continuous
transformation of a complex and even discordant reality into the
represented unity of the spectacle (the modern city, as Mumford
said of its Hellenistic precursor, offering itself as a container
for spectacles), this is only possible by virtue of the simultane-
ous suppression of whatever proves resistant to spectacularization.
Neurasthenia, vertigo, agoraphobia and claustrophobia reveal the
traumas of a spatially disorientated urban self having to sustain a
representation of its environment that is sufciently simple not to
be overwhelming while, at the same time, experiencing the unrep-
resentable reality of the city in all its vast complexity. The tendency
of the new urban culture of the nineteenth century towards an
ever-accelerating banal and supercial over-simplication is thus
matched by a counter-movement of the sublime, or, more pre-
cisely, a counter-movement of resistance and disruption that may
:
M. Zerlang, The City Spectacular of the Nineteenth Century, Copenhagen, Center for Urbanitet
og stetik, Arbejdspapir q, :qq, p. q. See also M. Zerlang, Aesthetics and the Emergence
of the ModernCity: Onthe Sublime andthe Spectacular, inR. Linnet (ed.), Aesthetic Theory
and Artistic Expression, Copenhagen, Museum Tusculanum, forthcoming.
The sublime, the city and the present age
indicate a stirring of the sublime or may simply reect the contin-
uous displacement of the self in an environment that appears to be
dominated by the ephemeral. How can one distinguish between
these responses, between sublimity and bathos? Need one? Can
one?
Such questions, I suggest, take us to the heart of Kierkegaards
critique of modernity, rening and extending his either/or of the
aesthetic or the religious: how, inKierkegaards terms, todistinguish
between the merely reactive protest of the Romantic rebel or the
contemporary art of shock for shocks sake and the radical depth
of Christian existence? The answer, as Kierkegaard develops it, is
not the formulation of a theoretical apparatus that can be applied
across the board. Kierkegaard, indeed, has his theoretical appara-
tus, but, as he might say, what matters is how to apply it. Theory
is nothing unless actualized in the process of concrete judgement.
Kierkegaards answer, then (which, since it belongs to his time and
place, cannot immediately be our answer), is the answer that gets
worked out in the totality of his published and unpublished writ-
ings and that takes the form of a close reading of his contemporary
culture the culture of the early modern city in all its detail.
And it is precisely his eye for this detail that makes Kierkegaard so
contemporary to us. Again: not what he sees, but how he sees and
how he renders what he sees as literature.
Reading Kierkegaard along the plane opened up by the intersec-
tion of theory and culture means no longer reading Kierkegaard
in the role of philosopher, or as a theologian, or even as a gure
of literature. Kierkegaard as critic of the age draws on and speaks
of philosophy, theology and literature, but none of these provides
an a priori limit on the way in which the age manifests itself in its
own singular identity. The line of criticism can only be governed
by the exigencies imposed by that identity itself, an identity that
incorporates the whole lived world of urban culture, inclusive of its
most popular and ephemeral forms no less than of its high art.
Yet, at the same time, the direction of the line is determined by the
question that guides it. Why, then, have I formulated that question
in terms of the sublime? If the sublime belongs to Kierkegaards age
as the age of the modern urban experience, do we have any rea-
son to believe that Kierkegaard himself articulated his own critical
Kierkegaard, religion and culture
question as a question about the sublime? Isnt the evidence rather
the other way? Arent Kierkegaards own aesthetics determinedly
the aesthetics of beauty? Isnt the sublime singularly lacking from
his whole literary output?
.
In any case, wont putting it like this
immediately draw the discussion back into the sphere of abstract
philosophizing and block our access to the plane of lived cultural
experience? In viewof these questions, shouldnt the reader nurture
a suspicion that the sublime is being taken as a point of departure
simply because of its currency in our own recent debates about phi-
losophy and culture? Arent we running the risk of imposing our
questions and our theorizing of the sublime onto Kierkegaards
work?
Such questions cannot, of course, be completely answered in
advance of the work of interpretation itself. The intuition guiding
this study, however, is that the focus on the sublime is of especial
value in relation to Kierkegaards critique of culture because of
the way in which it enables us to draw out the necessary inter-
connection between, on the one side, his philosophical and reli-
gious orientation and, on the other, his characteristic critique of
the age. That is to say, it is precisely an appropriate awakening
and mobilizing of the concept of the sublime that enables us to see
why and how Kierkegaards peculiar philosophical and religious
perspectives got worked out as a critical reading of contempo-
rary culture in the terms just set out. Furthermore, it also helps
us to revisit the characteristically Kierkegaardian pairing of the
aesthetic and the religious, and to redraw the relationship between
them in such a way as to avoid both a simplistic conation and
a too zealous diremption. The resulting reconguration of the aes-
thetic and the religious will also serve to locate the crucial third
term of Kierkegaardian thought, the ethical although this will
not become a theme in this book until the nal chapter. The rst
step, however, is, starting at the theoretical end of the spectrum,
to see what a Kierkegaardian concept of the sublime might look
like.
.
There are only two uses of det Sublime in the published work, and only one of these can be
directly drawn into connection with contemporary discussions of the sublime. Ophietheden
and related adjectival forms occur frequently. However, its use is mostly such as to make
it only problematically assimilable to the topic of the sublime as discussed here.
The sublime, the city and the present age
I I
Dening the sublime could, of course, be the work of an extended
philosophical essay in its own right. I shall not attempt such a def-
inition. Whatever its merits or demerits I shall simply take as a
starting-point the specic concept of the sublime propounded in
Kants Critique of Judgement, a concept that therefore belongs to the
general horizonof the intellectual world of Kierkegaards owntime,
despite the overlay of subsequent Romantic and Hegelian devel-
opments. Kierkegaard himself, as has been hinted, never explicitly
discussed this concept. Nevertheless, one of Kierkegaards central
concepts, the concept of anxiety, has important analogies to the
concept of the sublime, which we shall now explore.

The rst point of analogy concerns the position of the concepts

of the sublime and of anxiety in the overall architectonic structures
of Kants critical philosophy and Kierkegaards pseudonymous au-
thorship respectively.
Kants best-known discussion of the sublime is found in The
Critique of Judgement, a critique that, Kant says, is needed in order
to make sense of the relationship between the theoretical under-
standing and the practical or moral reason.

Without the mediating

function of judgement, these two primary forms of reason would,
in Kants view, become disconnected and we would be left with a
kind of dualismthat Kant (for all the jibes about Kantian dualism)
nds unacceptable: a dualism that sets a world of knowable objects
irrelevant to human strivings against a world of values undisci-
plined by the requirement of engaging with empirical reality. If the

These connections are also noted in Jrgen Dehs, in Ikke Phantasiens kunstrige
Vven, men tankens Gysen: Kierkegaard og bruddet med idealismens stetik, Slagmark,
No. , Spring :q8; also Jrgen Dehs, Den tabte verden, in P. E. Tjner, J. Garff and
J. Dehs (eds.), Kierkegaards stetik, Copenhagen, Gyldendal, :qq, esp. pp. :q6. They
are also discussed in S. Agacinski, We are not Sublime: Love and Sacrice, Abraham
and ourselves, in Jonathan R ee and Jane Chamberlain (eds.), Kierkegaard: A Critical Reader,
Oxford, Blackwell, :qq. It is also striking that Lyotards discussion of Kants Analytic of
the Sublime links anguish and sublimity at a number of points: cf. J.-F. Lyotard, Lessons
on the Analytic of the Sublime, Stanford, CA, Stanford University Press, :qq, pp. 68, , ::,
:o. Cf. also John Milbank, The Sublime in Kierkegaard, in P. Blond (ed.), Post-Secular
Philosophy: Between Philosophy and Theology, London and New York, Routledge, :qq8,
pp. ::6.

The discussion that follows refers to I. Kant, Kritik der Urteilskraft, in Werke, Vol. V, Berlin,
Walter de Gruyter, :q68, especially I.ii, .q.
6 Kierkegaard, religion and culture
sphere of judgement as a whole mediates between these two worlds,
the concept of the sublime occupies a pivotal point within the struc-
ture of this mediation. Whereas, according to Kant, the beautiful
must always express itself in a material form shaped out of the
manifold of appearances (and is thereby limited to the same eld
of objects as the understanding, i.e., the form of reason that is con-
cerned with knowledge of the empirical world), the sublime comes
into play at the precise point where appearances resist or escape
being formed into a single, beautiful representation. The reasons
for this may be various. In the case of what Kant calls the mathe-
matical sublime it may be because of a sense of absolute magnitude
that stands outside any scale of comparison (Die Gr osse). In the case
of the dynamic sublime encountered in nature (and the sublime,
in Kants opinion, is only truly encountered in nature, not in art),
it may be because we are unable to circumscribe a seascape or a
view of the Alps in the compass of a single image we cant take
it all in. Such experiences are not, however, merely chaotic. It is
not that we make no sense of what we see, since, although we are
unable to organize such sights into the unity of an adequate sensu-
ous representation, our reason is none the less able to grasp them
as single phenomena: Look at that ne view, we say, judging as
one thing (that view) what the eye cannot itself see as one.
If judgement in general and the aesthetic, as a part of judgement,
are to link the spheres of sensuous representation (the world of
appearances) and reason (the world of ideas), it is in the region of
the sublime and not in experiences of beauty that the link is actually
to be effected: for beauty, as we have seen, is constrained by the
requirements of sensuous representation in a way that the sublime
is not.
Features of this account closely parallel elements in the descrip-
tion of anxiety in Kierkegaards thought. In The Concept of Anxiety
itself, reference is repeatedly made to the way in which anxiety
functions as a border-concept, the point of indifference, as it were,
between the realms of nature and freedom, the state at which the
subject is no longer mere nature but not yet fully free either.
In The Concept of Anxiety this is for the most part related to the
disciplines that Kierkegaard calls psychology and dogmatics, but,
as I have argued elsewhere, it can readily be activated in other
The sublime, the city and the present age
contexts such as the relationship between the aesthetic and the
religious, where the aesthetic is construed as involving an external
and visible form of expression, whereas the religious has as its
point of departure the principle of subjectivity, i.e., what human
beings are in respect of their freedom, and which, as a matter
of inwardness, can never be adequately expressed in an outward
form.

The basic denition and the systematic role of the sublime

and of anxiety in Kant and Kierkegaard therefore imply that each
concept marks the problematizing of representation as such.
In the case of the sublime, Kant insists that we only improperly
ascribe sublimity to the object, the storm or the mountain range,
since it is only in relation to our reason and our freedom that they
are experienced as sublime. When I judge a storm to be sublime,
I am able to do so only because, with Pascal, I recognize that even
if it should destroy me physically, there is that in me which is of
another order than mere physical force and which enables me to
confront even actual danger as marvellous! sublime!. The sublime
is the elevated (Das Erhabene) and true elevation is, for Kant, the
elevation of human reason above the realm of objects, no matter
how overwhelming in size, grandeur or danger.
It follows from this that whereas a beautiful landscape will be a
landscape that perfectly expresses what belongs to the beautiful, a
sublime landscape does not express sublimity in itself. The relation
of the perceived landscape to its sublime character is oblique and
indirect. Indeed, according to Kant, it is little more than the occa-
sion for the sublime feelings aroused in the subject. The sublime is
less in what we see than in what we bring to the seeing, although it
may be precisely the seeing that makes us aware of what we bring.
Anxiety likewise calls representation into question. Anxiety and
nothing always correspond, writes Kierkegaard in The Concept of
Anxiety (CA, p. q6), and there can therefore be no adequate form in
which anxiety can be seen in its essence. Insofar as Kierkegaards
writings about anxiety, in The Concept of Anxiety and elsewhere (for
example, in his upbuilding writings or in aesthetic works such as
Quidams Diary in Stages on Lifes Way
6
), do provide what has been

See G. Pattison, Kierkegaard: The Aesthetic and the Religious, London, SCM, :qqq.
6
Again, this is something I have argued for in Kierkegaard: The Aesthetic and the Religious: see
pp. :o.
8 Kierkegaard, religion and culture
called a phenomenology of anxiety,

this cannot be thought of as if

it offered a direct representation. The phenomena in which anxiety
makes itself known require interpretation if anxiety is to be seen in
them since anxiety, like the sublime, is not a characteristic of any
perceived object but essentially concerns the subject whose own
capacity for freedom is the stake in anxiety.
Mediating between sense and spirit and marking a crisis in repre-
sentation, Kantian sublimity and Kierkegaardian anxiety are also
analogous with respect to the complex relation that each has to
fear.
Kant argues that fear is a highly characteristic feature of sublime
experiences. None the less, the fear that belongs tothe sublime is not
mere fright. If I am to experience a storm as sublime, I must allow
myself to sense its fearful aspect, whilst simultaneously keeping the
fear in check. This may have to do with my not being immediately
threatened in my own person (I may be on dry land watching
a storm several miles out at sea), or it may be because although
I am myself exposed to physical danger, I sense myself to be above
or beyond it in the moral sense of the superiority of personality
to brute nature (as, perhaps, in the case of heroism in war, when
the hero ignores or rises above the real and present danger: Kant
does in fact cite war in these terms as providing an example of the
sublime).
Anxiety too is a kind of fear, but again it is fear of a peculiar
kind. Heidegger certainly interprets Kierkegaard correctly here
when he says that anxiety, as opposed to fear in the everyday sense,
has no object, or, if it does seize on an object, this is precisely a
manifestation of the subject eeing what is revealed in anxiety: its
own capacity for freedom and its responsibility towards itself (what
Kierkegaard calls grasping at nitude (CA, p. 6:, amended) to
escape the vertigo of anxiety).
8
What the subject fears in anxiety
is itself. However, although this can also be said of religious fear,
there is a distinction between anxiety and religious fear in the full
sense of the word. We may approach this distinction through Frater

See, for example, Arne Grn, Subjektivitet og Negativitet: Kierkegaard, Copenhagen, Gyldendal,
:qq, pp. ff.
8
See M. Heidegger, Sein und Zeit, T ubingen, Niemeyer, :qq, esp. pp. :8ff. ( pagination as
per :st edition).
The sublime, the city and the present age q
Taciturnus discussion of aesthetic and religious fear in the closing
section of Stages on Lifes Way. Religious fear, he says, is to be distin-
guished fromthe kind of fear of which Aristotle speaks in discussing
the nature of tragedy. The spectator of a tragedy fears for the hero,
but the person gripped by religious fear fears for himself, fearing
to be found in his sin, cut off from grace and excluded from the
blessedness of the saints. Such fear motivates the religious person,
through repentance, to resolve upon renewed obedience to Gods
will. Here, it would seem, fear has acquired an object. Yet this
object is actually the subject himself in his concern for an eter-
nal happiness, so (given that anxiety is also orientated towards the
subject) what distinguishes religious fear and anxiety? The answer
to this question has to do with the status of anxiety as a border-
concept in the sense already discussed. Anxiety as such stops short
of making any religious resolutions. It is, as Kierkegaard puts it, the
preceding state out of which either good or evil action can proceed,
but it is not itself either. It is a state of suspense, in which action
is present as possibility, not as fact. Its characteristic fear cannot
therefore achieve a clearly dened focus: it has no object as such.
Yet fear is not the only emotive element in the experience of sub-
limity. As anaesthetic concept the sublime must, according to Kant,
be able to elicit a feeling of pleasure. If there is displeasure in the
troubling awareness of our inability to nd a formof representation
adequate to an experience of the sublime and the consequent sense
of a constraint placed upon our sense of freedom, there is none the
less a more-than-compensatory pleasure in the ability of reason to
grasp the experience as a unitary, sublime experience. Similarly, if
there is displeasure in the threat posed by the object of a sublime
experience (the tumult of the storm or the onrush of the enemy
forces), there is none the less a more-than-compensatory pleasure
in the sense of moral elevation by which I understand myself as
sublimely elevated above mere natural fear, as in the joy of battle.
Anxiety, however, would seem entirely to preclude pleasure.
What could be pleasurable about anxiety? But, in an important
formulation, Kierkegaard speaks of anxiety as a sympathetic antipa-
thy and an antipathetic sympathy (CA, p. . Kierkegaards italics).
Anxiety is not just a negative response, not just fear of freedom.
Anxiety is also attracted, spellbound even, by what arouses it. It is
:o Kierkegaard, religion and culture
worth reecting that sympathy was a key term in Romantic aes-
thetics: the universal sympathy of animate life being understood
as a condition of all artistic communication. We might also think
of the imagery of the pietistic hymnody that Kierkegaard valued,
imagery in which sorrow for sin and a sweet longing for God melt
together into an eroticized anxiety that, again, cannot perhaps be
called pleasurable in an everyday sense, but that in Kants techni-
cal sense is nevertheless a kind of pleasure. Even when Kierkegaard
portrays a character such as the Quidam of Stages on Lifes Way,
whose experience of anxiety is depicted as a kind of suffering, anx-
iety has a mesmerizing quality that entices its victim and makes
him consent to his thralldom.
Mediating between nature and freedom, bringing representa-
tion into crisis and arousing a fear that does not preclude an an-
tipathetic sympathy, the analogies between Kantian sublimity and
Kierkegaardian anxiety go to the heart of each concept. Neverthe-
less, they would also seem to diverge signicantly in other, no less
important respects. This is particularly evident with regard to what
lies on the far side of the sublime moment.
For Kant the sublime involves an anticipation of the innite,
rational, free activity of the moral subject. In fullling the free-
dom to which the sublime points, such a subject will understand
himself as acting in accord with the nal teleology of nature and
history: acting rationally in a rational universe. Kant specically
and pointedly rejects the view that the religious attitude towards
which the sublime points is one in which God is depicted as rid-
ing on the storm clouds of wrath and imposing His heteronomous
will on His quivering human subjects. Instead, he says, religion
should be grounded on the individuals tranquil sense of moral in-
dependence and elevation of mind, and it is to such religion that
the sublime in fact directs us. The religious life that Kierkegaard
envisages arising on the far side of anxiety would seem to be of
a very different character. Fear and trembling are not just char-
acteristics of the passage to religion; they are abiding character-
istics of the religious life. However, it would be a caricature of
Kierkegaards position to say that he sought to promote fear in the
manner of a hell-re preacher. In a text such as Purity of Heart he
is at pains to argue that the good must be done solely because it
The sublime, the city and the present age ::
is good and not in order to escape punishment or gain eternal life
as some sort of extrinsic reward. Again and again he exposes a
rewards-and-punishments kind of religiosity as, in his expression,
double-mindedness. The Kantian resonances have not been lost
on commentators.
q
There are complex interpretative issues here, but no matter how
much we manage to close the gap between Kant and Kierkegaard
there would seem to be an important and perhaps decisive differ-
ence. Even if it is unjust to accuse Kierkegaard of the kind of sado-
masochistic understanding of religion that Kant so vehemently
rejects, his conception of the religious life does have a dimension of
passivity, and envisages the subject more as the recipient of grace
than as a fully autonomous moral agent in a way to which Kant
could scarcely have acceded. Although Kierkegaard, no less than
Kant, insists that freedom is the goal of anxiety (CA, p. q:), his con-
ception of freedom is never simply autonomous but belongs in a
two-termed relationship in which Gods view of my life has a kind
of priority over my own view over myself and an inscrutability that
I can never penetrate rationally. The freedom of faith, according
to Kierkegaard, is not something I do: it is something I must wait
upon, and acquire in patient submission to Gods will, receiving it
as a gift from the giver of every good and perfect gift. Even though
this does not necessarily or immediately mean that such freedom
is antipathetic to autonomy (we might think of it, as Tillich did, in
terms of theonomy, i.e., an autonomy that is no longer sufcient
unto itself but that is open to its divine depths
:o
), there is a real point
of distinction from the Kantian ideal in this area. Furthermore, if
Kierkegaardian faith can be said to be essentially communicative,
demanding and facilitating revelation, it would also seem to call
for a kind of individuation that concentrates itself into what is sin-
gular, unique and essentially secret in the life of each individual.
Faith therefore sets a limit both to autonomy and to the rational
universality of Kants practical reason.
q
Cf. George Connell, To be One Thing: Personal Unity in Kierkegaards Thought, Macon, GA,
Mercer University Press, :q8; Ronald M. Green, Kierkegaard and Kant: The Hidden Debt,
Albany, Suny Press, :qq.; Alastair Hannay, Kierkegaard, London, Routledge &Kegan Paul,
:q8., especially Chapter 6.
:o
See, for example, P. Tillich, Perspectives on Nineteenth and Twentieth Century Theology, London,
SCM, :q6, especially Chapter ., The Enlightenment and its Problems.
:. Kierkegaard, religion and culture
If, then, we are to speak of Kierkegaardian anxiety as a kind
of sublimity, we cannot simply transfer the Kantian concept into
Kierkegaards thought-world. The point is, rather, to expand the
conception of anxiety as the boundary between the aesthetic and
the religious in a manner that is essentially conformable to the
shape of Kierkegaards thought, although such an expansion is
not specically thematized by Kierkegaard himself. To be more
specic: by speaking of anxiety as sublime, and by drawing the
analogy with Kant, I seek to reconceive that boundary so that it is
no longer merely privative but is expanded to enfold a Janus-like
doubling by which the-religious-or-the-aesthetic is at the same time
the-religious-and-the-aesthetic, enabling us to articulate a presence
of the aesthetic in the religious and the religious in the aesthetic.
The ttingness of an aesthetic term such as the sublime in re-
lation to Kierkegaard receives an indirect and even paradoxical
testimony from Hegel. Although it is never safe to assume that
Hegels thought is adequately summarized in the kind of aphorisms
excerpted from his texts by less than sympathetic critics (such as
Kierkegaard himself !), the correspondence of inner and outer, or of
appearance and idea, would seemto be a basic and non-negotiable
aspiration of the system. If this is so, then we shall hardly expect
Hegel to be enthusiastic about a concept suchas the sublime that, in
Hegels own expression, involves the mutual non-correspondence
(Sichnichtentsprechen) of these polarities. Moreover, when Hegel does
get round to discussing the sublime in his lectures on aesthetics, it is
almost exclusively in the context of the poetry of the HebrewBible.
Given the awkward marginality of Hebrewreligion in Hegels over-
all view of history, this is itself a pointer to the difculty he has with
the concept.
The principle of the sublime, he says, is that of Gods transcen-
dence over the world, a transcendence by which the creature is
reduced to evanescence and powerlessness and God alone ac-
counted just. As opposed to the realm of the beautiful and the
world of symbolic art, the external form is little more than acci-
dental with regard to that which is to be expressed in and through
it. Whereas symbolic religious art, like that of India or Egypt, seeks
an appropriate form in which to clothe its religious idea, sublime
religious art is concerned only with meaning (Bedeutung), not form.
The sublime, the city and the present age :
Following from the absolute transcendence of God, the world is
de-divinized and experienced in its nitude. No longer the do-
main of demi-gods or spirits of innumerable kinds, it has become
the stage of human history, nite, limited, neither self-sustaining
nor self-supporting.
::
The human being whose existence comes to
expression in sublime psalmody is consequently one who keenly
feels his nitude and the insuperable distance that separates him
from God. He believes himself to be mortal, without worth and
sinful.
If Kant spoke of pleasure in connection with the intertwining of
rational capacity and sensuous incapacity, there would seem to be
little pleasure in such sublime art. It would seem far more appro-
priate to speak of it as a formof unhappy consciousness. Alife lived
within these sublime categories demands of the individual a recog-
nition of human nitude and separation fromGod, a confrontation
with mortality, worthlessness and, in the last account, sin. Hegel,
like Kant, understands this confrontation quite differently from
Kierkegaard. None the less, by connecting the concept of the sub-
lime withthe spirit of the psalms he helps to ll inthe picture of what
might be involved in the aesthetic-and-religious concept of anxious
sublimity. One aspect of what this mutual non-correspondence of
inner and outer, appearance and idea, meaning and representa-
tion might mean is suggested by the well-known Kierkegaardian
melancholy.
:.
The comparison with Kant and Hegel provides us with a rst
formulation of a Kierkegaardian concept of the sublime that might
be called the anxious sublime or anxious sublimity. There are,
though, further features to which we must be attentive if we are to
understand the value of this concept in interpreting Kierkegaard.
The rst of these concerns the way in which the concept of time
is illuminated by being brought into conjunction with the sublime.
::
G. W. F. Hegel, Vorlesungen uber die

Asthetik, in Werke in Zwanzig B ande, Vol. XIII, Frankfurt,
Suhrkamp, :qo, p. 8o.
:.
Again Kant would scarcely have wanted to see anything sublime in melancholy, since
he would regard melancholy as derogating from freedom rather than leading towards it.
Yet Kierkegaard for his part would not have accepted Kants view that melancholy is a
kind of weakness. He would acknowledge that melancholy can be a cowardly evasion of
the ethical, but he would also claim that, under certain circumstances, it can itself be a
summons to an ethically serious view of life.
: Kierkegaard, religion and culture
Considering this will gradually bring us down from the abstract
level on which the discussion has been operating up to now, and
return us to the very specic location of Kierkegaards authorship
in the dynamics of the early modern spectacular city. In doing so
it will also move us into what might seem like a very different con-
ceptual and experiential world from that of the psalms. For time
does not only engage Kierkegaard as a category of metaphysical,
anthropological or psychological thought it also concerns him as
a category of cultural life. Our experience and understanding of
time are, for Kierkegaard, inseparable from our lived experience
and understanding of the times in which we live.
I I I
Kierkegaard shared the assumption, widespread amongst aesthetic
theorists of his period, that the internal structure of the sphere of
the aesthetic as well as its overall place in the economy of spirit
was determined by the interrelationship between space and time
exemplied in the various forms and stages of aesthetic production
and experience. Following Lessing, it became customary to divide
the arts into the plastic (architecture, sculpture and painting) and
the musical (music itself, dance, poetry and drama), according to
whether space or time had a larger or smaller role in the formal
constitution of the particular form of art concerned. It was further
assumedthat it was possible tocorrelate spatiality withsensuousness
and temporality withspirit, althoughit was also believed that all art,
qua art, was marked by some vestige of spatiality or sensuousness.
Naturally, judgements varied as to what should be made of all
this. For a Romantic philosopher of art such as Schelling it meant
that art was pre-eminently suited to be the organon of philosophy
because of its capacity to embrace both sense and spirit and to
represent their unity in aesthetic form. For Hegel, on the other
hand, it meant that art could never be more than a stage on the way
towards the realization of spirit. Art, he taught, no longer fulls our
highest needs, which are better served by thought and reection.
In this respect at least Kierkegaard would appear to be closer to
Hegel than to Schelling. It is typical of his critique of the aesthetic
that arts inability to express the truth of temporality is one of the
The sublime, the city and the present age :
characteristics that makes it ineligible to serve the articulation of
religious faith.
:
The territory which we are penetrating is, as will be obvious,
one that is criss-crossed by a sequence of disputed boundaries.
There are, for example, the boundaries between the aesthetic and
the religious, appearance and idea, sense and spirit, and time and
space, and, as the reference to Hegel and Schelling might also
suggest, there are further complexities arising from philosophys
claims to dene and regulate what these boundaries are. As this
study is directed towards one aspect of the cultural implications of
Kierkegaards critical aesthetics, it would not be appropriate, even
if it was feasible, to attempt to settle the multitude of claims and
counter-claims besetting those who venture into such regions. My
aim is simply to show how the co-implication of the aesthetic and
the religious in the anxious sublime manifests itself in the mode of
our experience of time.
The point we are seeking would seem to be provided by
Kierkegaards discussion of the moment of vision (ieblikket). This
moment of vision is intimately bound up with the awakening of
anxiety. Also, as Kierkegaard says (perhaps introducing yet an-
other boundary into an already overcrowded map), it marks the
intersection and interpenetration of time and eternity. Now, inso-
far as the moment of vision is regarded as the revelation of eternity,
it would seem to constitute the point at which the uneasy alliance
between time and representation, an alliance that is normative for
the whole sphere of the aesthetic, is dissolved. Thereby it also be-
comes the boundary uniting and dividing, dividing and uniting
between representation and the unrepresentable.
In his arguably epochal discussion of time in Chapter of
The Concept of Anxiety, Kierkegaard addresses himself to the question
as to how we can think time according to its truth, since, typically,
we think of it by means of a spatialized schema of past, present
and future. Why does Kierkegaard call this schema spatialized?
Because, he says, it presupposes an understanding of the present as
a xed point in relation to which past and future are represented.
But such a geometrical projection cannot help us to think time
:
For a ne discussion of this see Jan Patocka, Die Lehre von der Vergangenheit der Kunst,
in Kunst und Zeit, Stuttgart, Klett-Cotta, :q8, pp. .:.
:6 Kierkegaard, religion and culture
according to its temporality. To do this we would need to face up
to the situation that there are no xed points in the endless ux of
time. No moment is ever really present, because even the present
itself is in ux, and without the presence of a present, past and
future likewise dissolve into unrepresentable ux.
Is time, then, simply unrepresentable?
No, because if the moment as the mathematically conceived
atom of time proves insubstantial, the moment of vision provides
a way of thinking time that does not falsify times temporality, while
allowing time to give itself to representation after a manner. It is im-
portant to note that Kierkegaard has been ill-served by translation
here not that anyone can envy the translators task of providing an
English equivalent to a style that depends on rich overlays of poetic,
religious and philosophical connotations and makes much play of
the resulting possibilities of ambiguity, irony and humour. Thus,
we need to notice that when Kierkegaard speaks of the moment
as the geometrical point from which the schema of past, present
and future is projected, he consistently uses the Latin-derived term
moment, and it is noticeable that he also makes unusual use of
another Latin-derived term, spatiere, for to spatialize.
:
In contrast
to this, the term I have rendered moment of vision (following
Heideggers translators in their translation of the cognate German
term) is the Danish term ieblikket, paraphrased in the most recent
English version as the blink of an eye, but better rendered the
glance or even gaze of an/the eye.
:
Given this gurative charge
it therefore seems peculiar that Kierkegaard has chosen just this
term, since the emphasis on visuality would seem to lock it into the
sphere of the spatial and, therefore, the aesthetic. What makes it
:
The term is itself derived from the technical printing use of the term spatium, and it is
very possible that Kierkegaard was the rst to make it the basis of a verb, since such a
usage is only acknowledged by dictionaries of loan-words subsequent to Kierkegaards
time.
:
The earlier English translation by Lowrie did give glance rather than blink in expli-
cation of the term. Hong and Hong draw a distinction between the Latin and Danish
terms by enclosing the latter in quotation marks. The point being made is not, however,
going to be obvious to the reader. Gaze would seem to take away from the momentary
character of what is being talked about, although there are contexts where this would
be a more appropriate translation of the term Blik, as in art-historical discussions of the
gaze. Cf. R. Linnet, Kierkegaard og blikkets koder, Copenhagen, Center for Urbanitet og
stetik, Arbejdspapir .o, :qq6.
The sublime, the city and the present age :
appropriate to use it of the coming-to-consciousness of the division
between time and eternity?
Kierkegaard is acutely aware of the problem. The glance of
the eye is a gurative expression and therefore it is not easy to deal
with, he acknowledges. However, he continues, it is a beautiful
word to consider. Nothing is as swift as a glance of the eye, and
yet it is commensurate with the content of the eternal. Thus when
Ingeborg looks out over the sea after Frithiof, this is a picture of
what is expressed in the gurative word (CA, p. 8).
Still, we might be uneasy. We might, for instance, recall the
constant emphasis on the visual quality of aesthetic existence epit-
omized in the role of the eye in The Seducers Diary, and the
Seducers pride in his side-glance, as he calls it, and his use of the
eye both to capture interesting images and to impress his own im-
age onto the consciousness of others. We might also recall that the
preoccupation with seeing and being seen in contemporary society
is, for Kierkegaard, indicative of its inherent vacuity and triviality.
:6
Like many Christian moralists since Augustine, Kierkegaard read-
ily identies the glance or gaze as the lust of the eye, the epitome
of those seductive powers that chain us to the realm of sense.
Kierkegaards example of Ingeborgs glance, however, points to
another way of understanding things.
:
In the rst instance, as the
text tells us, her glance looks across the sea, after her departing lover
Frithiof. What she is looking at is a vanishing object, something
in the process of disappearing from her eld of vision. Moreover,
Ingeborg knows that while Frithiof is away, she will be forcibly
married by her brothers to another, a situation of which Frithiof is
unaware. She is therefore in possession of knowledge that, for var-
ious reasons, she cannot communicate to him, i.e., the knowledge
that their separation is nal and irrevocable.
In The Concept of Anxiety Kierkegaard goes on to say that the in-
stant she expresses her feelings in a sigh or a word the moment
of vision in the strong sense is essentially past, because a sigh or a
:6
See, for example, JP V: :8:, IV: q:. For a further discussion of this aspect of
Kierkegaards contemporary culture, see Chapter below.
:
For the interpretation of Ingeborgs glance that follows I am essentially indebted to
N. N. Eriksen, Kierkegaards Category of Repetition: A Reconstruction, Kierkegaard Monograph
Series , Berlin and New York, Walter de Gruyter, .ooo, esp. pp. 6qff.
:8 Kierkegaard, religion and culture
word would be an attempt to articulate what she feels within the
relativistic web of language and temporally determined commu-
nication. The pure moment of vision, however, is the unqualied,
because unarticulated, apprehension of the eternal in, with and
under the incognito of a temporal moment: the apprehension, in
this case, that the parting is for ever.
In a couple of later journal entries Kierkegaard raises the ques-
tion of what he calls an eternal image.
:8
The examples he gives
suggest that what he means by this is an image that would capture
a single moment that was both unique and expressive. Its eternal
quality would arise from the innite internal reciprocity between
form and content, no matter how insignicant the content might
be in itself. (One example he gives is of a man shing for eels from
a boat.) There is no ssure in its internal consistency. The conjunc-
tion of eternity and time called the moment of vision, however,
is very different. What the image of Ingeborgs glance gives us is
precisely that which cannot come to expression within the image
we are given: the eternal separation of the lovers.
The metaphor of the moment of vision will not and cannot
therefore allowus to think of the eternal as the object of a particular
kind of experience. It is not a special sort of moment within a
concatenation of moments. If we are to understand it as a temporal
term at all (and, especially, as a term that provides the key to the
meaning of time), we have to renounce what Heidegger would call
the everyday conceptionof time, the conceptionof time that thinks
it more geometrico. In its strong sense it is the fullness of time, the
kairos of the New Testament, the moment that yields a vision
of the meaning of life as lived before the face of the eternal. In
its most decisive application it is understood by Kierkegaard in
a Christological sense, as the moment of the incarnation, the
moment in which the eternal comes into time and makes time
meaningful.
The moment of vision is, potentially, all this. More to our
present purpose it also indicates the possibility that the visible might
show forth the invisible, the gurative gure the ungurable, and
the metaphorical name what withdraws from all expression and
:8
JP I: :6 and Pap. VIII : A 6. See also my article Aesthetics and the Aesthetic, British
Journal of Aesthetics :, No. ., :qq:, pp. :o:.
The sublime, the city and the present age :q
naming. By choosing, with deliberation, precisely this metaphor of
the glance of the eye, Kierkegaard thus lays open the whole eld
of the seeable to a double interpretation, according to whether we
direct our gaze spectator-wise towards the seen (and nothing more)
or see the seen itself as bearing an unseen and unseeable surplus
of meaning that can never be stabilized or regulated within the
parameters of the seeable. It is notable in this respect that in an
etymological aside, Kierkegaard brings the moment of vision into
connection with the Greek term exaiphantes, which he understands
as the invisible and which he regards as more pregnant than the
Latin-derived moment, which he connects with motion and the
simple evanescence of time (CA, p. 88).
However, and this moves us closer to what will be the main
focus of the present enquiry, the moment of vision is, in another
aspect, indistinguishable from the moment in the sense of the mo-
mentary, the succession of gured experiences, the moving pictures
that make up the content of everyday consciousness.
I V
To see how this is so, and what the cultural implications of this
ambiguity might be, let us turn to the work Kierkegaard called,
simply, A Literary Review and that dealt with Madame Thomasine
Gyllembourgs novel Two Ages. This review is of particular interest
because Kierkegaard used it to make his most sustained critique
of modernity as the age of reection. However, if this critique
provides the climax of Kierkegaards book, it opens with a consid-
eration of the literary character of the author of Two Ages that is
also full of important insights into Kierkegaards understanding of
modernity. The author is said by Kierkegaard to have contributed
faithfully to the Danish literary scene for twenty years and through-
out that time to have produced works that reect a consistent life-
view. She has been faithful to her public, but also faithful to herself,
and this has been rewarded by her readers faithfulness to her.
Her novels are said to inspire condence in life and in the essen-
tial goodness of human relationships, despite the passage of time
and the disappointments and reversals that time brings in its train.
Her qualities are said to be very much those of an older generation,
.o Kierkegaard, religion and culture
and they are qualities with corresponding values and achievements
that Kierkegaard claims should be respected and preserved. The
younger generation, however, has a very different outlook. It does
not value continuity with the past but, instead, the momentary
(Det ieblikkelige), a brilliant beginning, and a new era dating from
this are the little that is understood, that is, if it is indeed possible
to understand the momentary and the beginning, inasmuch as the
momentary, after all, lacks the eternal and the beginning lacks the
conclusion (TA, p. :o).
The slogan of the younger generation is What the Age requires.
However, Kierkegaards own expression here contains an ambigu-
ity that, once more, English loses. The term for the Age is, simply,
Tiden, a word that could, in other contexts, be translated time.
In the expression what the Age requires it is therefore possible
also to hear what time requires. The Age, heard like this, might
be interpreted as what a life lived in time without any perspective
on eternity might give itself over to and what such a life in fact
gives itself over to is the momentary. This may (in the form least
respected by Kierkegaard) express itself as jumping on political
bandwagons, or it may appear as the dedicated following of fash-
ion in music, clothes, art, the whole merry-go-round of seeing and
being-seen, the world of the eye, the gaze, in which people keep a
careful eye on each other ( passe paa hinanden med inene) (TA, p. 8),
but not in such a way as to allow the otherness of the other to be
seen for what it is. Nevertheless, in all of this, at every moment, the
moment may become, may be seen as, the moment of vision. Every
time and every triviality is equally near and equally far from the
eternal. The culture of modernity, as described by Kierkegaard, is
precisely the culture of those whose horizons are completely lled
by the-time-that-now-is, the momentary, the shock of the new. It
is therefore a culture that systematically excludes the fearful fas-
cination of anxiety and sublimity yet the temporal structure of
even the most eeting and ephemeral novelty means that it has the
possibility of revealing the interlacing of the two meanings of the
moment in their mutual non-correspondence, and this revelation
is, to reiterate, the revelation of the anxious sublime. It cannot be
surprising that the affective correlate of this moment often takes
the form of melancholy, a sense of loss, emptiness or absence in the
The sublime, the city and the present age .:
midst of the density of a purely momentary life, an unfocussed,
unnameable and ungraspable sense of something missing from the
pressure of the present age, the time that is too much with us, early
and late and melancholy, of course, is not what the age requires!
It is, however, an afiction that has insinuated itself deeply into
the culture of modernity, permeating the art, literature and music
of Romanticism and being raised to a ne art in the ennui of the
Baudelairean dandy. Melancholy is the shadow permanently ac-
companying the forward rush of the age: yet in eeing this shadow
it ees that which would give it the possibility of deeper insight into
its own truths, limitations and possibilities. And behind such melan-
choly lurks the omnipresent but systematically ignored spectre of
death ignored by the dazzling culture of the ephemeral, but the
chosen dancing partner of Kierkegaards most urbane pseudonym,
Johannes Climacus (see PF, p. 8).
:q
Mention of the Baudelairean dandy suggests a further aspect
of the interrelationship between the sublime, the moment and
the momentary in the context of the present age. This present
age (Nutiden: the now-time, the time-that-now-is), also known as
modernity, is not simply a conceptual construct, although the
conceptual analysis and modelling of modernity are both possible
and important. Nor is it sufcient to add a historical periodization,
for modernity has not only a time, but also a quite specic place: the
modern city. Modernity, in an essential sense, is urbanity. But, as we have
seen, the city was the site in which the modern discourse of the sub-
lime originated. The undecidability of the sublime experience
an experience that in every case is equally readable as sublime
or banal mirrors and is mirrored in the ambivalence of the mo-
ment that in every case is equally readable as a potential moment
of vision, as a paradoxical conjunction of time and eternity, and as
the merely momentary. Analogously the city itself is simultaneously
experienceable as the heightening and the levelling of experience,
relationships, values. The city brings into the compass of a single
:q
The critical role of Kierkegaardian melancholy in relation to the culture of modernity
has been explored by Harvie Ferguson in his Melancholy and the Critique of Modernity: Sren
Kierkegaards Religious Psychology, London, Routledge, :qq. Cf. Julia Kristevas study of the
place of melancholy in the culture of modernity in her Soleil noir: depression et melancolie,
Paris, Gallimard, :q8.
.. Kierkegaard, religion and culture
human space the highest achievements of human political, cultural
and intellectual life and, as the ultimate triumph over what Marx
called the idiocy of rural life, is the epitome of the sublime: but
it is again and again experienced and decried by its inhabitants
as no more than the swarm, the anthill of man of the masses, a
banal realization of the mathematical sublime in all its endlessly
repeatable meaninglessness.
It might be objectedthat the worldof the spectacularizedcity was
alien to Kierkegaard. His Copenhagen was, after all, still a walled
city, a market town even. Adornos comment that Kierkegaard did
not inhabit the hour of the metropolis is well known, although,
as so often, Adorno offers no evidence in support of his assertion.
In reality the evidence is that although Kierkegaards Copenhagen
was clearly not Baudelaires Paris, the same dynamics that created
the Paris of the :86os were already active in the Copenhagen of the
:8os, and were, perhaps, all the clearer because of the smaller scale
and relative backwardness of the latter. In Copenhagens provincial
atmosphere any signicant change was immediately and strikingly
visible, no matter how small it might appear in comparison with
the Parisian antitype. The shape of things to come was already
manifesting itself in a variety of ways to those who had eyes to see,
and I believe that it is not only possible but illuminating to think
of Kierkegaard as a man of the spectacular city of the nineteenth
century. It was precisely and even literally the city (his city of
Copenhagen) that provided the site onwhichthe ambiguous drama
of the moment was enacted.
.o
A quotation from the pamphlets attacking the Church that
Kierkegaard published in the last year of his life pamphlets col-
lectively entitled The Moment of Vision pulls together the threads
we have been attempting to disentangle and demonstrates their in-
terconnectedness more eloquently than any secondary comment:
On these assumptions [that we are all Christians], the New Testament,
considered as a guide for the Christian, becomes a historical curiosity,
somewhat like a handbook for travellers in some country when everything
.o
For a full defence of this claimsee my study Poor Paris! Kierkegaards Critique of the Spectacular
City, Kierkegaard Monograph Series ., Berlin and New York, Walter de Gruyter, :qqq,
especially Chapter :, Kierkegaard Enters the Spectacular City. For a discussion of
Adornos comment see p. :.
The sublime, the city and the present age .
in that country is completely changed. Such a handbook is of no more
serious use to travellers in that land, but is of great value in light reading.
While one is comfortably riding along in the train, one reads in the hand-
book that Here is the frightful Wolf Ravine, where one plunges o,ooo
fathoms down under the earth; while one is sitting and smoking a cigar
in a welcoming caf e, one reads in the handbook that Here is the hideout
of a robber band that attacks and beats up travellers here it is, that is,
here it was, since now (how amusing to imagine how it was), now it is not
the Wolf s Ravine but a railway, and not a robber band but a welcoming
caf e. (M, p. :., amended)
In the substitution of the railway and the caf e for the Wolf Ravine
and the badlands as in the substitution of the travellers guide-book
for the NewTestament we see the epitome of how, for Kierkegaard,
the sublime and the everyday modern life of the city, the eternal and
the merely momentary, are so folded together that each place and
each time retains the memory or the possibility of the other, whilst,
at the same time, their essential difference is all the more highlighted
by their very juxtaposition. Kierkegaard nds in the surface world
of modern urbanitys ephemeral culture of diversion, spectacular-
ity and commodied exchange a text capable of disclosing a very
different eld of possibilities aesthetically: the sublimity of the
o,ooo fathoms, religiously: the choice of the eternal in the lived
singularity of the moment of vision. The vacuity of the present age
becomes the gure under which the desert and mountain of the
psalmist become, once more, an existential possibility.
It is the main task of this book to open up and to begin to explore
some of the moments of Kierkegaards authorship in which this
ambiguous intertwining of seemingly incommensurable discourses
comes most clearly to view. It means reading Kierkegaard pre-
cisely as a writer of his place and time in an utterly prosaic sense,
whilst simultaneously reading him as a religious commentator on
and critic of that same place and time. Humanly and as a writer
Kierkegaard, rejecting the escapism of Romantic exoticism and
medievalism, sought to discover how to practise Christianity here
in Copenhagen, in Amager Square, in the everyday hustle and bus-
tle of weekday life (PC, p. q, amended). Insisting on maintaining
the perspective of the extraordinary in the midst of a culture of
levelling, he wanted to believe that every ordinary occasion can be
. Kierkegaard, religion and culture
the extraordinary. As another poet of the early modern city put it,
every grain of sand can reveal innity, and every hour eternity (but
they dont have to, and it is always a kind of grace when they do).
Whether in any particular case we are to read the cultural text in
this way or in that, or to read in it the co-present yet contradictory
entwining of both, the sublime judgement is precisely a judgement
that can never be assimilated into a technical discourse, turned into
a law or norm or cultivated as a habit. It always bursts out with an
element of surprise, and to articulate it is to put oneself at risk of
making the most appalling errors of judgement, calling sublime
what is merely nugatory, and honouring with the term religious
what is mere ostentation.
CHAPTER .
Kierkegaard and the world of the feuilletons
I
In the preceding chapter I attempted to show how the motif of
anxious sublimity brings into focus a region of Kierkegaardian
thought marked by deeply divergent but tightly intertwined dua-
lities. Such dualities include nature and freedom, representation
and what eludes representation, the moment of time that is mere
ux and the moment that is the moment of vision in which time is
grasped as the possibility of a relation to the eternal. Following on
from this I suggested that, for Kierkegaard, these tensions become
most urgently concrete at the point at which the apparently empty,
trivial ephemerality of contemporary urban culture (and, quite
specically, the culture of his contemporary Copenhagen) discloses
the possibility of the eternal.
But in what medium is such a disclosure to be communicated?
What kind of visible script must be used by the writer whose task
it is to write the invisible script of the eternals presence here in
Amager Square? Kierkegaards answer, we might say, is simply
the authorship that he bequeathed us, the pseudonymous and the
signed works, the published works and the journals and papers
a single, complex and epochal report to history of the possibil-
ity of Christian existence in, with and under the conditions of a
merely aesthetic urbanized age of reection. In recent years it is
above all the indirect aspect of this authorship, the subversive,
oblique, ironic and coquettish war-games of the pseudonyms, that
has most engaged the attention of commentators. Undoubtedly,
this is where Kierkegaard seems to be at his most original, his
most Kierkegaardian. But there is an aspect of this authorship that
.
.6 Kierkegaard, religion and culture
remains signicantly under-represented in the secondary litera-
ture: its relation to the world of contemporary popular culture,
especially as that was mirrored in and shaped by the feuilleton
literature that ourished in Kierkegaards time. Intriguingly the
most striking points of overlap between Kierkegaards own author-
ship and the world of the feuilletons belong to pseudonymous and
signed, published and unpublished, aesthetic and religious works
alike, hinting at the extensive nature of the afnities and connec-
tions between them.
Henrik Hertz, a dramatist and writer who knew Kierkegaard
socially and who, like Kierkegaard, was associated with the circle
around Johan Ludvig Heiberg (the then dominant gure in Danish
literary culture), gives us a preliminary warrant for guessing at the
importance of the relationship between Kierkegaard and the feuil-
leton literature. Hertz noted in his journal that S. Kierkegaard
often seems to me although only in his humorous writings
to be nothing other than a very talented and well-read feuilleton
writer . . . His style is altogether that of a feuilleton writer, not ex-
actly of the French style but a mixture of Jules Janins and a young,
philosophically educated German.
:
Hertzs remark seems almost casual and does not belong to any
sustained discussion of Kierkegaards literary signicance nor
is it even clear what Hertz means by Kierkegaards humorous
writings: the pseudonymous works, or only some of them, and,
if so, which? Although it would therefore be extremely rash, foolish
even, to make this passing comment the basis for a new reading of
Kierkegaards entire authorship, it does illuminate that authorship
from an unusual and interesting angle.
What, then, did Hertz mean by a feuilleton writer?
The term itself is still used in a number of European newspa-
pers and, broadly, stands for what in the British context might
be called the Arts or Review section. Growing out of simple
listings of current events, the feuilleton literature that emerged
from France in the early nineteenth century aspired not only to
reect but also to mould the point of view of a public that wished
:
Quoted in Bruce H. Kirmmse (ed.), Sren Kierkegaard truffet: et liv set af hans samtidige,
Copenhagen, Reitzel, :qq6, p. .q8.
Kierkegaard and the world of the feuilletons .
to be both fashionable and cultured. As such it was (and is) as
profusely variedinits subject-matter as the eldof culture itself. The
feuilletons of Kierkegaards time presented material that ranged
from sermons to actresses. The point is nicely illustrated by Figaros
feuilleton for September :8: (Figaro was a Danish periodical
to which we shall return). It reports such items of interest as the
Vaticans ban on works by Lammenais, George Sand and the Abb e
Constant; a competition announced by the French minister of
war for a book celebrating the courage of the French soldiery; an
amusing story about a performance by an actor of the Com edie-
Fran caise in a provincial town; the issuing of a new medallion
depicting Lizst; a childrens concert in Munich; the visit of three
English prima donnas to Italy; the launch of a new musical peri-
odical, Le Courier musical, in Paris; news of a production of Giselle
(alsoinParis); aneditionof previously unpublishedworks by Mozart
and a whole list of further such items, featuring, amongst others,
Ingres, Meyerbeer, Scribe, Rossini and the Spanish actress Mlle
Rachel (of whom it is said that she is eagerly learning English
in order to be able to appear in Shakespeare and whose visit
to England and meeting with the Duke of Wellington had been
reported the previous week). A similar diversity is reected in
the bookseller P. G. Philipsens Announcements in Figaro for
:o October :8:, which, alongside Kierkegaards own On the Concept
of Irony, also lists such varied stock as a Danish translation of Geneva
Novellas, a text-book entitled The Historical Development of Speculative
Philosophy from Kant to Hegel, a collection of songs, a Poetical Reading
Book for Children and Child-like Souls, and a book of engravings of
Danish landscapes.
A nice statement of the implications for a literary production
shaped by this kind of heterogeneity is made by Bakhtin. Bakhtins
point relates to Dostoevsky, but, I suggest, could easily be applied
also to Kierkegaard if we are prepared to take the evidence for
his proximity to the world of the feuilletons seriously (and I shall,
shortly, be surveying some of the most striking points in the author-
ship at which this proximity comes into view). Bakhtin writes that
the newspaper page [is] a living reection of the contradictions of
contemporary society in the cross-section of a single day, where the
most diverse and contradictory material is laid out, extensively, side
.8 Kierkegaard, religion and culture
by side and one side against the other.
.
It is clear from the context
that the image of the newspaper page focusses certain key aspects
of Bakhtins concept of literary polyphony. Crucial to the point
being made is that there is no evolution, no growth in general
within Dostoevskys ctional world, a situation reecting a social
world where planes were not stages but opposing camps . . . not the
rising or descending of an individual personality, but the condition
of society . . . not evolution, but coexistence and interaction.

Like the
newspaper page and like Philipsens book-stock the feuilleton liter-
ature brought together the most heterogeneous material within the
eld of culture. Its aim was not so much to offer or to promote any
particular theory of culture (though particular theoretical positions
might from time to time be represented within it) but to lay out the
eld of the greatest possible variety of potential cultural objects for
scrutiny and evaluation, a shifting display in which the great and
the ephemeral mix for a moment before going their separate ways.
In keeping with his role as mediator of contemporary culture
in all its diversity, the feuilleton writer developed a particular style,
spoken of by one practitioner as ce droit de bavardage, and whose per-
sona was summarizedby the Russiancritic Belinsky as a chatterer,
apparently good-natured and sincere, but in truth often malicious
and evil-tongued, someone who knows everything, sees everything,
keeps quiet about a good deal but denitely manages to express
everything, stings with epigrams and insinuations, and amuses with
a lively and clever word as well as a childish joke.

(Was he think-
ing of Kierkegaard?!)
An anonymous article, Literary Quicksilver or A Venture in
the Higher Lunacy with Lucida Intervalla, which appeared in
Ny Portefeuille (another journal owned by Carstensen) just a few
days before the publication of Either/Or, provides an especially vivid
example of the feuilleton writers style. At the time this article was
.
M. M. Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevskys Poetics, translated by Caryl Emerson, Minneapolis,
University of Minnesota Press, :q8, pp. .qo.

Ibid., pp. .8. Intriguingly, Bakhtin also relates this scenario to the idea of the Church:
If we were to seek an image toward which this whole world gravitates . . . then it would be
the Church as a communion of unmerged souls, where sinners and righteous men come
together (pp. .6).

This and the previous quotation are from J. Frank, Dostoevsky: The Seeds of Revolt ,
Princeton, Princeton University Press, :q6, p. .:q.
Kierkegaard and the world of the feuilletons .q
widely attributed to Kierkegaard, although he himself clearly be-
lievedthat, like some other articles withwhichhe hadbeenlinked, it
was written by P. V. Christensen (my little secretary Christensen),
with whom he had been working on Either/Or and who was there-
fore privy to some of the insider knowledge that made the article
a credible pastiche. Literary Quicksilver illustrates precisely those
features of feuilleton writing that Hertz discerned in Kierkegaard
himself: a rapid-re succession of whimsically articulated thoughts,
interspersed with classical references, Latin and French sayings,
wilfully over-elaborated or ingeniously misapplied similes, obser-
vations of everyday life, plus some vernacular jocularity. In this it
intensively mimics the extensive heterogeneity of feuilleton litera-
ture, turning the promiscuous and carnivalesque juxtaposition of
diverse materials and subjects into the driving force of a new way
of writing. Precisely in this pastiche of Kierkegaard we see how it
could be that the feuilletons are of signicance for the interpreta-
tion of Kierkegaards literary persona. The very possibility of such
an article being ascribed to him by his contemporaries also testies
to the way in which his writing career and style belong, in one
aspect, in the orbit of the feuilletons.
In Kierkegaards Copenhagen a typical example of this genre
was the kind of publication promoted by George Carstensen,
founder of the Tivoli Gardens, and sometime owner of journals
such as Figaro and Ny Portefeuille, or Claude Rosenhoff, who
reviewed Kierkegaards Either/Or (chiey by printing several
lengthy extracts from it) in The Free Enquirer (Den Frisindede).

These
largely limited themselves to informing their readers as to what
was worth seeing or reading, providing extracts from fashionable
novels or serialized stories together with short items of news and
gossip about literary and stage personalities and, in the more lavi-
shly produced examples of the genre (such as Figaro), illustrations of
contemporary stars, of dramatic incidents from literature or from
life and reproductions of famous paintings.
Amore intellectual variant of the genre could be illustrated from
publications like Heibergs own Copenhagens Flying Post (Kbenhavns
Flyvende Post) and Intelligensblade or their political opposite numbers

For which he was duly taken to task by Kierkegaard see Chapter below.
o Kierkegaard, religion and culture
The Copenhagen Post (Kbenhavnsposten) and The Fatherland (Fdrelandet).
In these, mixed in with the airing of opinions about culture and the
arts, one might also nd discussions of political, critical and philo-
sophical principles. Relations between the two types of publication
can be gauged by Heibergs remarks about Figaro in a review of the
responses of contemporary newspapers to a debate about censor-
ship and the theatre. Heiberg begins by deliberately misnaming it
Pierrot: Pierrot no, its true, he calls himself Figaro: the represen-
tative of stupidity has taken his name from that of wit so, then:
Figaro Figaro thinks . . . [sic] But who cares what that fool thinks,
its all the same.
6
As a preliminary comment on Kierkegaards own links with this
literature we note that he himself was rst published in Kbenhavns
Flyvende Post (in the form of a rather silly piece on womens eman-
cipation that perfectly exemplies the feuilletonistes penchant for
bavardage). Either/Or was reviewed extensively in both the more triv-
ial and the more serious feuilletons. A decade later Kierkegaard
published the opening salvoes of his nal attack on established
Christianity in Fdrelandet (a newspaper that, strangely, generally
represented a very different political stance from Kierkegaards
own), an attack which, despite its serious intent, also displayed
Kierkegaards talent for the kind of man-about-town raillery and
sarcasm typical of the feuilleton writer. And as is well known, per-
haps the most bitter experience of his life was his polemical struggle
with the satirical periodical The Corsair.
We shall return to the specic detail of Kierkegaards relation
to the feuilletons, but it will probably be helpful to set the stage
by sketching something of the cultural scenario within which this
relation developed.
Heibergs sarcasmover Carstensens Figaro was by nomeans arbi-
trary. Carstensen was not only the entrepreneurial mover behind a
series of journalistic ventures; he was also known at this time as the
impresario responsible for a series of highly successful Vauxhall
entertainments (modelled on the London pleasure gardens) that
he staged in Copenhagens Rosenborg Gardens, complete with
Bengal lights and spectacular rework displays. In :8 he opened
6
In Intelligensblade q, : July :8., p. ..8.
Kierkegaard and the world of the feuilletons :
the permanent Tivoli Gardens. Heiberg, for his part, had led a
long-running campaign to banish what he labelled as dilettantism
fromDanish cultural life and to reformaesthetic and cultural taste.
In a series of articles in the Flying Post in the :8.os and :8os
(articles which were collected in :8: under the title A Contri-
bution to an Aesthetic Morality) he sought to raise the tone of
Danish public life to that exemplied by his own circle (central to
which were also his mother, the novelist Thomasine Gyllembourg,
and his wife, the actress Johanne Luise Heiberg) an embodiment
of what it meant, in Denmark, at that time, to be cultured. The
issue between Heiberg and Carstensen, then, was not merely a
clash of personalities: it concerned the very nature of public life in
Denmark whether this should be determined by the wishes of the
public for the kind of entertainments offered by Tivoli or directed
by the standards laid down by the cultured.

As we shall see, this

debate was to echo on in Kierkegaards own authorship.
I have already claimed that the characteristic moment of moder-
nity brought to expression in Kierkegaards writing is that of the
early modern city. This too, however, is the very historical moment
that (rst in London) sees the emergence and denition of the
modern press out of a multiplicity of gazettes, advertisement lists,
newssheets, political pamphlets and other ephemeral publications
and, quite specically, the kind of journalistic writing characteristic
of the feuilletons. The reasons for the city being the specic matrix
for this occurrence have been well stated by Anthony Smith in his
study The Newspaper: An International History: The city represented a
concentration of activity, in which individuals confronted travellers
andimmigrants fromquite different societies who tradedor worked
at crafts or fought as mercenaries or took refuge. Within such cities
there arose the sense of a world of public affairs on which citizens
could take intellectual or moral positions.
8
Although this kind of
proto-bourgeois culture, which was to prove hospitable to the rise of
the press, can already be discerned in the sixteenth and, especially,
the seventeenth centuries, it was in eighteenth-century London, in

For a further discussion of the public and, particularly, of Kierkegaards appropriation

and critique of Heibergs analysis, see Chapter below.
8
Anthony Smith, The Newspaper: An International History, London, Thames &Hudson, :qq,
pp. ::8.
. Kierkegaard, religion and culture
close connection with the coffee-house society of that period, that
the new paradigm of the newspaper became rmly established.
q
Not only didthe city provide anappropriately attentive audience for
the newspaper, but it alsoprovideda sufciently large distributionto
sustain production in the era before railway systems made possible
the nation-wide distribution of daily publications. The press that
Kierkegaard knew belongs primarily to this urban phase rather
than to its subsequent national development, a distinction easily
overlooked in connection with Copenhagen, which, at that time,
was the more or less exclusive focus of national culture.
:o
An anec-
dote recalls that when M. E. Goldschmidt oated the idea of the
satirical newspaper The Corsair amongst a group of friends, one of
them replied, Just as in Paris!. The Corsair was, famously, not only
to serve Kierkegaard as the epitome of the very worst aspect of the
symbiosis of press-and-public, with its scurrilous attacks on every-
thing worthy of respect; it was also to become his own personal
persecutor, when the cartoons of P. Klaestrup created the almost
indelible image of Kierkegaard as the man with the hunched back,
the peculiar gait and the odd trousers. It is striking, then, that
The Corsair was already associated in the minds of its founders
with the urban style of Paris, the emblematic capital of the nine-
teenth century. Paradoxically, Paris was not only the model for the
republican Corsair, but also provided the prototype for Carstensens
Tivoli and for Heibergs reformation of the Danish theatre, which
saw a massive growth in works translated from the French. The
question was: which Paris was best suited to serve Copenhagen as
a model for its own future development the Paris of revolutions,
the Paris of pleasure parks and promenading aneurs, or the Paris
that epitomized the most exquisite aesthetic renement?
Here, from another side, we see how the heterogeneous content
of such publications reects, institutionalizes and celebrates the
q
See, for example, Michael Harris, London Newspapers in the Age of Walpole, London and
Toronto, Associated University Presses, :q8; Jeremy Black, The English Press in the
Eighteenth Century, London, Croom Helm, :q8 (reprinted :qq:).
:o
It is perhaps telling that many of the key newspapers originating in this period openly
display their afliation with the cities where they are produced and whose life and
times they represent (for example, The New York Times, The Washington Post, the Frankfurter
Allgemeine and it is only relatively recently that it is has ceased to be common to speak
of the London Times or the Manchester Guardian).
Kierkegaard and the world of the feuilletons
varied nature of the city itself. This literature is not so much a
genre as the exhibition alongside each other of all possible genres
without blending or fusion, just as the city itself provides a milieu
for the simultaneous and unresolved co-existence of the maximum
diversity of interests, ideologies and life-styles. In their essential
internal heterogeneity, the city and its journalistic literature are
both, necessarily, improper, contaminated and promiscuous. The
main point, however, is that it is precisely this social context that
makes the feuilletons the tting medium in which to carry out
the debate about the meaning and direction of life in the city. If
Kierkegaard, for his part, wanted to enter this debate, then, as
a writer whose strategy as a Christian communicator had to begin
where his audience actually found itself, he would know not only
what he should write, but also in what medium he should write it.
I I
Kierkegaards presence in the world of the feuilletons (over and
above the fact that his books were advertised in them) is therefore
important to note. The dominant impression created by the au-
thorship is of unrelieved hostility towards all forms of journalism.
The press, Kierkegaaard claims in A Literary Review, is precisely
what gives birth to the phantom of the public, an abstraction that
both furthers and represents in itself the process of levelling that
Kierkegaard so excoriates the levelling out of all qualitative social,
political, cultural and religious distinctions such as those between
rulers and ruled, educated and ignorant, well-wrought and mass-
produced, right and wrong, Church and world, divine and human.
In this connection Kierkegaard can state quite categorically in his
journals that the press is the evil principle in the modern world
( JP II: .:8).
::
A major factor here was undoubtedly the conict
with The Corsair that had such devastating consequences for him,
in terms not only of what it did to his popular image but also of
fostering a more general disillusionment with his contemporaries.
However, it would be simplistic merely to say that The Corsair
Affair demonstrated Kierkegaards utter rejection of the popular
::
For further comment on the connection between the press, the public and the dynamics
of levelling see Chapter below.
Kierkegaard, religion and culture
press. It was, after all, in response to a provocation on his part that
the affair developed, and the issue was precisely whether he should
be in The Corsair. It is, in Hegelian terms, a question of a deter-
minate negation: Kierkegaards hostility to the press was not that
of Olympian detachment or mere aristocratic scorn but precisely
the hostility of one who nds himself engaged and touched by it
and, in terms of his own analysis, it could not have been otherwise
if the press had indeed become an (or even the) omnipresent power
in the modern world.
Here, as elsewhere, Kierkegaards voice is not unequivocal. In
accordance with the ineluctable ambiguity of the moment and of
the inseparability of the eternal and the ephemeral, Kierkegaard
himself wrote in and for the media of contemporary journalistic
literature. The simple facts bespeak an association with the world of
journalism that is more extensive than at rst appears, that persists
throughout his career and that relates to the most diverse aspects of
his own authorship. Following the :8 article on womens eman-
cipation alluded to above, Kierkegaards next publication (also in
Copenhagens Flying Post) was a series of articles about the freedom of
the press, opposing his own conservative view to that expressed in
the liberal Copenhagen Post.
:.
In :8. Kierkegaard writes an article, A Public Confession, in
the liberal Fatherland (a frequently used outlet for his subsequent
journalistic writings) dissociating himself from a string of articles
that have been ascribed to him. Even the terms of this dissoci-
ation, however (and the very fact of the article itself ), signal the
proximity of Kierkegaard to the world of popular journalistic lit-
erature: Many times during the last four months, I have enjoyed
:.
It is worth noting that Kierkegaards rst independent publication, a review of Hans
Christian Andersens novel Only A Fiddler, published as From the Papers of One Still Living,
was probably originally conceived for publication in Heibergs journal Perseus: A Journal
for the Speculative Idea. Although Perseus (which, in fact, only ran for two editions) operated
on a different intellectual level from the customary feuilleton literature, with articles on
Hegelian logic, the idea of the State and the Trinity, it does in some respects illustrate
the possibility of a bridge between the worlds of academic debate and the feuilletons.
Such a possibility is demonstrated by the person of Heiberg himself, who spanned the
most diverse areas of contemporary Danish culture, as well as the presence in Perseus of
contemporary theatre criticism in the form of a review of Hertzs tragedy Sven Dyrings
House. Kierkegaards review, addressing as it does the signicance of a recent popular
novel, would have belonged to this end of Perseuss range of interests, namely, the analysis
of the speculative idea as it appears in, with and under the forms of contemporary culture.
Kierkegaard and the world of the feuilletons
the undeserved honor of being regarded and considered to be the
author of a number of substantial, informative, and witty articles in
various newspapers, of several iers that were iers only outwardly,
since their contents were solid, weighty, and unpadded, assuring
them much more than ephemeral signicance (COR, p. ). This
article also suggests ironically how the very superciality of the
terms in which contemporary journalismis pufng the importance
of the present age makes the question as to the real signicance of
the moment all the more necessary:
Everything indicates that the decisive moment is approaching. There are
a yeastiness and ferment that cannot possibly zzle out. There is a vig-
orous party spirit astir everywhere . . . It is a momentous age. If anyone
is still unconvinced by my statements, if he does not feel the tremendous
energy in every individual, to say nothing of the sum of them, then I
will cite another feature. Carstensen has gained importance not by virtue
of the way he wears his hair, for on that point we all acknowledge him
as master, but by virtue of his head; Professor Heibergs importance has
dwindled. This is a gallant expression of the momentousness of the age.
(COR, pp. 68)
Kierkegaards passing allusion to the polemics between Cars-
tensen and Heiberg is a clear gesture of allegiance to the latter.
His point is that the preoccupation of the public with trivia makes
it impossible for contemporaries (or those of them absorbed in
the ephemera of city life) to distinguish between a man whose
chief claim to fame is his hair-style and one whose reputation is
groundedonintellectual ability andartistic taste. The issue between
Carstensen and Heiberg as to the nature and future of Danish
(that is to say: Copenhagen) culture, Kierkegaard implies, must be
brought to a decision though perhaps not the decision the age,
or either side in this debate, expects.
If our knowledge of Kierkegaards subsequent authorship makes
it obvious to us that Kierkegaard was from the beginning work-
ing to or towards a different agenda from either Carstensen or
Heiberg, this was by no means so obvious to his contemporaries.
Many years later in the journals he notes that at the time when
Carstensen ran Figaro and Portefeuille the entrepreneur once offered
himan extraordinarily large sumto write an article against Heiberg
( JP VI: 66.). That this triangular spat was noticed by others is
6 Kierkegaard, religion and culture
evidenced by one of The Corsairs articles ridiculing Kierkegaard.
In it he is portrayed in conversation with Heiberg, and discussing,
amongst other things, the debate with Carstensen. Even more
strangely, the satirical focus of this article is on Heibergs sudden
interest in astronomy and closely mirrors both the tone and the
content of one of Kierkegaards own unpublished ironic sketches
on just this topic, in one of which he specically conates Heiberg
and Carstensen, reecting the anger and disappointment he expe-
rienced as a result of Heibergs incomprehension of Either/Or and,
later, Repetition.
:
None of this suggests that Kierkegaardmaintained
the kind of ironic, aristocratic distance fromsuch literary ephemera
that many of his writings about himself might suggest.
On its publication in :8 Either/Or proved to be of interest not
simply to a philosophical readership but (as Kierkegaard had in-
tended) to a more general public. It was even a moderate commer-
cial success. We shall be looking at the critical response to Either/Or
in Chapter below, but it should be noted here that in a series
of articles in The Fatherland Kierkegaard himself was active in con-
tributing to the journalistic hue and cry about the true authorship
of the work and how it should be understood. Interestingly, the last
of these relates specically to the ctional sermon appended to
the second volume of Either/Or, illustrating from another side how
the feuilleton genre allows for the mingling and contamination
of the most diverse forms of literature from observations about
hair-cuts to sermons. This diversity is reected within Either/Or
itself. Here there are points of contact with contemporary culture
very different from anything that might, for example, be discussed
in a journal for the speculative idea. Most conspicuous in this re-
gard is the extended review of Scribes comedy The First Love, the
signicance of which will be discussed below. The opening essay
(after Victor Eremitas editorial introduction and the aphoristic
Diapsalmata), devoted to Mozarts Don Giovanni, demonstrates a fa-
miliarity with Hegelian aesthetic but it also deals with a work that
is not only classical inthe specic sense developed inthe essay itself
but is (and was already in Kierkegaards time) popular. Indeed, in
these reviews contained within the body of Either/Or Kierkegaard
:
See also Chapter below.
Kierkegaard and the world of the feuilletons
continues the beginning made in From the Papers of One Still Living,
namely, in taking the texts of contemporary popular culture as the
mirror in which to read the inner meaning of the present age.
Kierkegaard returned to Don Giovanni two years later in the feuil-
leton section of The Fatherland when he took issue with the interpre-
tation of the seduction of Zerlina in a contemporary production.
Like From the Papers of One Still Living, Two Ages: A Literary Review
had originally been intended for publication as a periodical article
(in this case in The Nordic Literary Times (Nordisk Literatur-Tidende)).
Here, as we have seen,
:
Kierkegaard paid tribute to the novelist
Mme Gyllembourg as well as setting out his most sustained pub-
lished critique of the age. These two works effectively provide a
frame for the entirety of the rst phase of Kierkegaards pseudony-
mous authorship, i.e., the so-called aesthetic works spanning the
period from Either/Or to Concluding Unscientic Postscript. This struc-
tural feature further underlines the extent to which Kierkegaard
understood that authorship precisely as a critical reading of the
age in its most characteristic but therefore also necessarily tran-
sient and ephemeral productions.
The same pattern of a small literary-critical work originally con-
ceived for periodical publication (in this case The Fatherlands feuil-
leton section) only to appear in independent formrecurs in relation
to one of Kierkegaards most purely aesthetic pieces, The Crisis and
a Crisis in the Life of an Actress (written in :8 and published in :88).
This is a tribute to Johane Luise Heiberg, wife of J. L. Heiberg and
one of Denmarks leading actresses of the period. It focusses on
her return in her mid thirties to the role of Juliet, the role in which
she had rst emerged as a teenage star twenty years previously.
Kierkegaard argues not only that the passage of time has not with-
ered her, but that her greater maturity has enabled her all the more
purely to represent the essential idea of Juliet, rather than simply
to give a display in her own person of the charms and attractions
of a beautiful girl. This, he says, is precisely what distinguishes
genuine artistry. Such accomplishment, we may say, clearly falls
short of exemplifying the presence of the eternal in the temporal
nevertheless, it shows how, even within the essentially time-bound
:
See Chapter :, above.
8 Kierkegaard, religion and culture
world of the aesthetic, there can be a distinction between cultural
expressions that are merely ephemeral and those in which a larger
and deeper human insight is present.
Kierkegaard himself was painfully aware that a piece such as
this could seem to be a mere distraction in relation to what was to
become his declared strategy of attempting to reawaken Christen-
dom to Christianity. His journal entries about whether to publish
it or not are extensive and amongst his most obsessive. The nal
outcome, as he was to present it, was, as we know, to publish the
work, but also to see in it a proof that he had not simply turned
to more serious, Christian themes as a result of the drying-up of
his aesthetic talent but because of a determined strategy. Whether
we choose to accept his explanation or not, the fact of his having
been so concerned about just this question (namely, the legitimacy
of a religious author publishing a piece such as this) illustrates the
seriousness for Kierkegaard himself of his own relation to the world
of the theatre, popular culture, and its feuilleton commentators.
If this was to be Kierkegaards last published piece of theatri-
cal criticism, he also completed but never published a review of
the actor J. L. Phister in the role of Captain Scipio, a chronically
drunk captain in the Papal Police, in the light comedy Ludovic by
J. H. V. de St-Georges.
:
In terms of substantial articles and quite apart from the in-
numerable passing references in pseudonymous and signed works
alike Kierkegaards presence in the world of popular journalism
and, specically, the world of the feuilleton literature (and therefore
by implication its presence within the horizon of his critical con-
cerns), is clearly a part of the record. It is, of course, nevertheless
obvious that Kierkegaard was a writer of a quite different stamp
from that of the typical feuilleton writer. But although his critical
sophistication and religious and philosophical passions put him in
another class fromCarstensen and Rosenhoff (for example), he did
share many of their cultural horizons if only to the extent of being
able to (or, rather, of needing to) engage with them.
Perhaps the most explicit and extensive testimony to this en-
gagement with the very concept of the feuilleton is in a series
:
For a fuller discussion of this see my article Sren Kierkegaard: A Theatre Critic of the
Heiberg School, British Journal of Aesthetics, Vol. ., No. :, Winter :q8.
Kierkegaard and the world of the feuilletons q
of sketches for an unnished work entitled Writing Sampler that
Kierkegaard worked on between :8 and :8, but never com-
pleted.
:6
Kierkegaard played with the experimental pseudonym
Lt Rosenpind or, alternatively, Rosenblad, possibly a satirical al-
lusion to Rosenhoff, whose review of Either/Or he had dismissed
with scorn (although the most nished version of the Writing Sampler
has as its author one A. B. C. D. E. F. Godthaab).
The Writing Sampler parodies the feuilleton literature in the
person of its author, a young man who wants to be a writer and, in
his despair over attaining this goal, is prepared to write about any-
thing at all if only he can get enough subscribers. Therefore create
me! he appeals to the public: Just a word from you, a promise to
purchase what I write, or, if it is possible [. . . ] a little advance pay-
ment and I am an author (P/WS, p. ). In the old days, he
adds, in a remark that corroborates what has been insisted on here
as the essential heterogeneity of feuilleton literature, one initially
wrote a work by which one sought to gain prominence, but now
the task is so manifold that competence in everything is required
(P/WS, p. 6). Consequently, he sets out to offer the public a writing
sampler, that is, a sampler setting out his facility in a succession
of writing styles and topics. He begins with a parody of a typical
feuilleton theatre review (of Shakespeares (sic!) School for Scandal
:
)
that offers nothing in the way of analysis or criticism but simply
enthuses over its excellence, the attendance of royalty, the names of
the cast, etc. The second piece relates to a recently published work
of literature, but all it tells us about this work concerns its luxurious
printing and binding; the third satirizes the reporting of election
results; the fourth reports an execution; the fth relays anecdotes
about an event at a dinner party and a barber who offers his cus-
tomers the opportunity to be tested with a stethoscope. The sixth
section gives a cursory review of the year :86, while the seventh
:6
Perhaps this failure to complete what, in its surviving fragments, contains some of
Kierkegaards most brilliant passages of purely aesthetic writing has to do with the nature
of the task itself. Precisely the ceaseless ow of heterogeneous material that constitutes
feuilleton literature makes it almost impossible to develop a denitive pastiche within the
format of a book for a book imposes a kind of closure that contradicts the essential
uidity and indeterminacy of the genre itself.
:
It is possible that this error is unintentional, but I share the view of the Hongs that this
is a deliberate error that serves Kierkegaards purpose of parody.
o Kierkegaard, religion and culture
reports the arrival of the Swedish Students in Copenhagen and the
eighth gives an account of the second annual ceremonial meeting
of a society of watchmen. Finally, the would-be author sets out his
plans for attracting subscribers by generous discounting arrange-
ments. It is, however, important to note that some of the plans for
the Writing Sampler not only include such obviously satirical pieces,
but also the rather more serious review of Mme Heiberg as Juliet,
as well as some notes on, for example, clouds and colours that
are amongst Kierkegaards most delicately romantic pieces of prose
writing. But this, as we have repeatedly seen, is once more charac-
teristic of the specic literary situation brought about by the preva-
lence of the feuilletons: that the most heterogeneous material is set
out in the cross-section of a single moment (Bakhtin): contiguous,
co-existing, but never, nally, brought into a single harmonious
unity.
In its own terms it is a brilliant satire, but the fact that Kier-
kegaard satirizes the feuilletonistes doesnt of itself differentiate him
from them. Even Tivolis newspaper satirized the Theatre Royals
celebration of Scandinavian brotherhood so what distinguishes
Kierkegaards satire of the feuilleton writers from their incessant
satirizing of each other? This difference, I suggest, is not so much in
what was seen (heard, etc.), but in how it was seen by Kierkegaard
and his contemporaries respectively.
But this is precisely the issue to which the analysis of Kier-
kegaards anxious sublimity in the previous chapter brought us.
For here, as there, the issue is one of judgement or of how to
judge between what is merely transitory and what can rightly be
recommended to the educated or cultured public; or, in terms
of the articles and reviews we have just been considering, how to
distinguish between a theatrical performance that is no more than
the transient brilliance of youthful charisma and the artistry of
the truly reective actress. Of course, in the one case (that of anx-
ious sublimity) the question is posed as a matter of howto nd or to
hold to the eternal in the midst of the everyday, whilst in the other
it is merely a matter of grading a never-ending succession of time-
boundcultural products (the latest opera, vaudeville, popular novel,
etc.) but both the paradoxical logic of the moment itself and
what we nd in Kierkegaards own authorship suggest that such a
Kierkegaard and the world of the feuilletons :
neat distinction scarcely works in practice. The actual unpicking of
eternitys crimson thread from out of the multifarious phenomena
of contemporary ephemera means that these ephemera themselves
get worked into the retrieval and representation of the eternal. We
have seen something of this in connection with the triangular rela-
tionship between Kierkegaard, Heiberg and Carstensen. We now
look in detail at another case in point that also involves each of
these gures and that nicely illustrates just how the eternal and the
ephemeral, the sublime and the bathetic become so tightly inter-
laced in Kierkegaards text as to be virtually indistinguishable.
I I I
Again (coincidentally?) there is a link to Henrik Hertz, the drama-
tist whose comment on Kierkegaards style rst alerted us to
Kierkegaards kinshipwiththe worldof the feuilletons. Inthe course
of his critique of the idea of the public in Two Ages, Kierkegaard
makes the following remark: a public is something that anyone
can pick up, even a drunken sailor exhibiting a peep-show, and
the drunken sailor has absolutely the same right to a public, if we
are to be dialectically consistent, as the most distinguished of men,
an absolute right to place all these many, many zeros in front of his
gure one (TA, p. q).
This is in fact (as the early drafts of the text show) an allusion to a
sketch, The Peep Show, by Hertz. The sketch portrayed an old sailor,
Ol e, who had been one of the heroic defenders of Copenhagen
against Britains Royal Navy in :8o but is now a burlesque drunk,
touting a peep show at the Deer Parks fairground (a local enter-
tainment also satirized by Heiberg in his vaudeville The Critic and
the Beast). The Peep Show was well received in the theatre but drew a
lot of hostility in the press, including Carstensens Figaro, because it
was perceived as being unpatriotic. In Kierkegaards eyes it became
an important parable about the nature of the modern public and
he was only sorry that Hertz, in defending it against his detractors,
had called it a mere bagatelle.
This phrase a mere bagatelle may seem like a further triviality,
but it has an interesting history in Kierkegaards writings. Hertzs
sketch, moreover, brings into focus some of the central issues in the
. Kierkegaard, religion and culture
debate concerning the nature and style of culture in early modern
Denmark. We shall return to this latter point, but rst the issue of
this mere bagatelle merits more immediate attention.
In Either/Or Kierkegaard wrote an extended review essay about
Augustin Eug` ene Scribes comedy The First Love, included in the
writings of the aesthete A that make up Part I of Either/Or. Scribe
is almost universally forgotten today, but in his own time he was
Europes most successful dramatist. Figaro noted that in one year
Scribe had earned more money than all other French drama-
tists put together. His plays were also an important ingredient in
J. L. Heibergs campaign to introduce a more Francophile tone into
Denmarks theatrical life: between :8. and :8q, one hundred
and one plays by Scribe were performed in .,q6 performances
at the Theatre Royal in Copenhagen. Indeed, Heiberg himself
translated a number of these, including The First Love.
Although Kierkegaard makes it clear that The First Love is little
more than a light comedy, playing upon the triviality of its charac-
ters emotional involvements, he insists that within the limits of its
genre it is a masterwork of irony and reection, making much ado
about what is in itself nothing, a comedy of pure error.
This appraisal of The First Love was, in turn, one of the features
of Either/Or that mildly irritated Heiberg when he came to review
it in his journal Intelligensblade. Heiberg wrote that the author of
Either/Or had made a masterpiece out of a pretty little bagatelle
and ascribes to it a tendency which is virtually the opposite of what
Scribe admits to.
:8
For his part, Kierkegaard was furious about
Heibergs review (although it was in fact far more positive than
anything in Kierkgaards response would suggest), and he lled
pages of his journals with sarcastic remarks about the man who
was regarded as the greatest authority in Danish letters, and from
whom Kierkegaard had expected a more insightful judgement.
Curiously, Intelligensblade also included a small piece by Hertz
relating to The Peep Show, in which he defends the play against some
of the charges levelled at it. In the case of such a purely entertaining
work, surely the positive response of the public is all the evidence
that is needed to speak for its success. Usually, he adds, Figaro itself
:8
In Litterr Vintersd, Intelligensblade ., : March :8, p. .qo.
Kierkegaard and the world of the feuilletons
is happy enough to say to the public, in its own words (which he
quotes), You are no longer under authority, though there are those
who would keep you so. You should have the right to enjoy yourself
without asking anyone for permission and when you are enjoying
yourself you should not be deprived of the right to express it.
:q
Let Figaro take his own advice, then, he suggests, and accept the
verdict of the public in this case. Hertzs article is almost certainly
the one to which Kierkegaard refers when he reproaches Hertz
for calling it a mere bagatelle. However, Hertz does not actually
use this expression, referring to The Peep Show as a small, light
piece
.o
but, as we have seen, the term did occur elsewhere in
Intelligensblade, in Heibergs review of Either/Or, and, by a strange
twist, Heiberg did, on another occasion, actually call The Peep Show
itself a bagatelle.
.:
Kierkegaards slip (several years after Heibergs
reviewof Either/Or) is indicative of howdeeply Heibergs words had
wounded him.
..
But why should these bagatelles be of concern to
us?
Hertzs own comments about the typical style of the feuilleton
writer, in words qualifying his previously quoted remark about
Kierkegaard, shed further light on what is going on in the text:
he takes his time, letting his pen run fast and loose, makes ies
into elephants and vice versa and lets his main emphasis fall on
the piquant presentation of the subject and often, even, on the
very bizarreness of the idea.
.
The debates about The First Love
and The Peep Show nicely illustrate the critical consequences of this,
since the key issues were precisely to do with proportion, with the
accusation ying backwards and forwards that one or other critic
had lost all sense of proportion, making a masterpiece out of a
bagatelle, an elephant out of a y and, to cut a long story short,
much ado about nothing. But this in turn highlights a further fea-
ture of critical writing in the zone of cultural life traversed both by
:q
In Kritiken over Perspektivkassen , Intelligensblade 8, : July :8., pp. :q.
.o
Ibid., p. :q:.
.:
In J. L. Heiberg, Prosaiske Skrifter, Copenhagen, :86:, Vol. IV, p. .q:.
..
The whole theme is also reworked in the famous journal reference where Kierkegaard
says After my death no one will nd in my papers the slightest information (this is my
consolation) about what has really lled my life . . . and that often turns into events of
prodigious importance to me that which the world would call bagatelles ( JP V: 6).
.
In Kirmmse, Sren Kierkegaard, p. .q8.
Kierkegaard, religion and culture
the feuilleton writers and by critics of a more reective kind a
feature perhaps not accidentally linked to the title of Hertzs little
piece (in Danish Perspektivkassen) that everything depends on per-
spective or point of view. The aim of the feuilleton writer is, above
all, to direct the readers gaze in the midst of the ever-changing
kaleidoscope of cultural life.
Now, the period in which Kierkegaard developed towards his
mature authorship was one that marked the emergence of what has
been called a newkind of observer. Newoptical technology, simul-
taneously exploited in the worlds of science and industry, medicine
and popular entertainment, gave a hitherto unprecedented im-
portance to the perceiving subject in determining how the world
looked, a development reected in the culture of spectatorship that
grewup in the nineteenth century, as evidenced by the rise of muse-
ums, arcades, zoos and pleasure parks, together with photography,
stereoscopy, dioramas and, at the end of the century, the cinema.
It is no coincidence in this context that Carstensen was, as pre-
viously stated, also the founder of Denmarks best-known pleasure
park, the mould-breaking Tivoli Gardens. Here the public could
experience for itself the kind of leisurely spectatorship that had pre-
viously been the preserve of English milords on the Grand Tour.
As well as its oriental theme park element and its fun rides and
pantomime theatre, Tivoli also popularized several of the new
visual entertainments. InTivolis virtual worldthe values of classical
aesthetics in which beauty is truth and truth beauty in everlasting
self-sameness and self-sufciency are discarded in favour of the sim-
ple enjoyment of an experience in which everything has become
ephemeral, volatile, innitely adaptable and manipulable. It is the
world of the fugitive and the transient, the popular and the relative,
a world in which triviality and bathos have as much claim upon
aesthetic validity as the good, the true and the beautiful.
The question that had already been raised in the debate between
Carstensen and Heiberg several years before the opening of Tivoli
(and as we shall see at greater length in the next chapter) is whether
the newurban culture is to be dened by the viewthat whatever the
public likes is what the public should get, or whether, as Heiberg
argued, culture had to be earned, and the public had to learn to live
up to the standards required by the appropriately qualied critic,
Kierkegaard and the world of the feuilletons
the one who alone knew how to distinguish between masterpieces
and bagatelles and between elephants and ies.
It was, however, precisely this pose of authority on the part of
Heiberg that seems most to have angered Kierkegaard himself.
Not that Kierkegaard would go with Carstensen against Heiberg
the few remarks relating both to Carstensen and to Tivoli scat-
tered through the writings are uniformly dismissive (although, as
we have seen, Carstensen himself had at one point imagined that
Kierkegaard might have been on his side). Kierkegaards prob-
lem is that the rationalistic taxonomies of Heibergian criticism
(taxonomies justied by appeal to Hegelian philosophy) and the
self-appointed nature of the great critic make it impossible for crit-
icism to relate to the lived quality of modernity. In a journal en-
try prompted by Heibergs comments on Either/Or in Intelligensblade
Kierkegaard likens Heibergs pose of authority to that of Xerxes,
who had taken with him the scribes who would record his victory
over Greece (but who instead saw for themselves the Persian
defeat): I, he commented, do not wish to be an authority, it must
be embarrassing (EO II, p. o.).
Against Heibergs faith in the view from above, Kierkegaard
himself is too much a child of his, later, generation. For
Kierkegaards world is precisely one in which there is a chronic
and radical phenomenal instability that makes the application of
taxonomic principles profoundly problematic. What it is like to live
in such a world is succinctly captured by Kierkegaard in a jotting
from his early journals: I would like to write a novel in which the
main character would be a man who had gotten a pair of glasses,
one lens of which reduced everything as powerfully as an oxyhy-
drogen microscope and the other magnied on the same scale, so
that he perceived everything very relatively ( JP V: .8:). A similar
experience underlies this ctional anecdote:
Situation: A man standing on a pontoon bridge detects through his eld
glasses that something is moving in the water; subsequently he sees that
it is the shadow cast on the bottom by a little animal lying on the surface
and about to drown. He rst tries to save it by throwing himself down
full length and using a pole, but the current makes this impossible. He
then takes off his clothes, wades out with the eld-glasses in one hand to
keep the creature in his sight, since the movement of the water disturbs a
6 Kierkegaard, religion and culture
steady view and nally rescues it. Meanwhile a number of people have
gathered to see what he is doing. A policeman comes along and arrests
him because he went in the water at a place where it is not allowed. He
then takes out his little animal, which is no bigger than a ladybug, shows
it, and explains that he ventured out in order to save it and the whole
crowd laughs at him, and the policeman nes him! The error does not lie
in their not being able to understand his compassion (there is no question
of this at all), but in their inability to perceive that a triing little thing,
through the power of a mans imagination, etc., can come to concern him
absolutely. ( JP II: :8.)
The story is typically Kierkegaardian in its absurd juxtaposition
of incommensurable elements: the telescope and the ladybird-like
creature, the rescue of an insect and the intervention of the
police, the divergence between the view of the individual and
the laughter of the crowd. One recent study has taken just this
situation as characterizing Kierkegaards essential modernity. Its
author, Bjarne Troelsen, sees the man on the pontoon bridge as
a symbol both of Kierkegaard himself and of each human indivi-
dual in the situation of modernity a situation in which the solid
(or supposedly solid) foundations of a traditional social, political and
religious order have been rendered unstable by the self-questioning
of an age of transition, leaving the individual to orientate himself
by media that, for all their technical sophistication (i.e., the superi-
ority of the telescope over natural vision), only serve to increase his
loss of a coherent and balanced vision.
.
In the gure of a grotesque
tale, this is the same vertiginous loss of balance that was analysed in
the preceding chapter under the rubric of anxious sublimity. If that
is our condition, or, at the very least, Kierkegaards experience of it,
then the Heibergian pose of the critic being in a position to apply
an objective standard to the ever-shifting phenomena of culture
is no more than a pose. The decision towards which Kierkegaard
sees culture being led, then, is of a far more radical nature than the
simple choice between what the public wants and high culture.
There is an issue here, and, within the limits of that debate,
Kierkegaard is clearly with Heiberg. Ultimately, however, the world
of high culture is itself too fragile, too articial, too much of a self-
conscious pose, really to be able to resist the destabilizing forces
.
See Bjarne Troelsen, Manden p a Flydebroen, Copenhagen, Anis, :qq.
Kierkegaard and the world of the feuilletons
of modernity. For it is not simply a matter of being superior to
Carstensen or of taking a stand in matters of literary criticism, for
all these debates and all the participants in them are circumscribed
by the actuality of the city itself in its dramatic and continuous
self-transformation, the city for whose cultural identity they are
ghting.
That Kierkegaards nal Attack onChristendom shouldhave
been launched in a popular newspaper, The Fatherland, is then no
surprise, for it is precisely inthis attack that Kierkegaardnally tears
up the tourist guide and points to the vertiginous innity opening
up beneath the feet of the passing crowd: behind the fa cade of
a world shaped by railway lines and caf es is an earlier sublime
creation of yawning chasms and untamed badlands, a world that
is itself, for the urbane Sren Kierkegaard and for us his equally
urbane readers, the metaphor for the fateful confrontation with
our own mortality and with the eternal that is the true measure of
human life in time.
These comments on Kierkegaards links to the world of the feuil-
letons and his involvement in the debate concerning the identity
of his contemporary urban culture have implications for the philo-
sophical reading of Kierkegaard.
It is customary to argue for Kierkegaards place in the history of
ideas in terms of his afliation to what might, following Leavis, be
called the Great Tradition, or, perhaps, the canon of philosophical
classics: Plato, Aristotle, Augustine, Descartes, Kant, Hegel, etc.
or in terms of his inuence upon the further development of that
tradition(or, shouldwe say, Tradition?) inNietzsche, Heidegger and
twentieth-century existentialist philosophy. Even if the attempt to
contextualize his work in these terms culminates in the judgement
that he is, at best, a marginal contributor to the Great Tradition
(or even the joker in the pack), the comparison itself serves to give
the interpretation of his work a certain philosophical dignity.
This approach is not without merit. Clearly Kierkegaard did
engage with the Great Tradition at a variety of levels, bringing his
own insights and formulations to the continuing debate about a
number of fundamental questions in philosophy. But, importantly,
the material of his own philosophizing was not restricted to what
was bequeathedto himby these classical philosophical texts. No less
8 Kierkegaard, religion and culture
frequently he took his material from the ephemeral world of pop-
ular culture, the world reected in the pages of the feuilleton lit-
erature. In this respect Kierkegaard was a man of the modern
urban world, inhabiting the intensely populated social space of its
daily actuality, in a way that more academic thinkers such as Hegel
(or Feuerbach, Strauss and even Nietzsche in his Alpine retreat
thinkers whose ideal was determined by the academy even when
they no longer belonged to it) could ever be.
This, of course, raises an immediate problem for interpreting
Kierkegaard. Many of the manifold connections between his au-
thorship and the world of the feuilleton writers have, in the nature
of the case, vanished into obscurity. A critical discussion of Hegels
category of transition, conducted with the help of Aristotle and
Trendelenburg, will intrinsically have a perennial quality that a de-
bate about whether a one-act comedy sketch (not even included
in standard editions of its authors selected works) is or is not
a bagatelle can ever hope to attain. We (or the philosophers
amongst us) still have a context in which to understand the former,
whereas the latter will be accessible only to a cultural archaeologist
of extremely narrowinterests. Of what interest tothe history of ideas
are squabbles over an impresarios hair-style? What is ephemeral
vanishes with the passing of its day, and the day of the popular
culture of the :8os has well and truly passed.
This introduces a far-reaching distortion into our reading of
Kierkegaard. Only a small minority of Kierkegaard readers (even
of Danish-reading Kierkegaard readers) will be committed to the
labour of reconstructing the interactions between his writing and
the world of the then popular culture. But it is important, very
important, for all philosophically interested readers of Kierkegaard
to recognize that those connections are there. For Kierkegaards
critique of the Great Tradition is not merely internal. It is a cri-
tique of the whole academic style. As his most esteemed role
model, Socrates, sought to philosophize in the market-place,
so Kierkegaard himself sought to practise both philosophy and
Christian testimony in the midst of the contemporary equivalent
of the forum, namely, the public domain addressed by popular
journalism. This is not simply the manifestation of a personal pref-
erence for the popular over the scholarly approach to philosophy.
Kierkegaard and the world of the feuilletons q
Rather, it is rooted in a sense that the tradition itself has entered into
a critical and potentially terminal phase in the situation of moder-
nity, a situation of which the rise of popular culture, an essential
and paradigmatic phenomenon of modern urbanity, is a power-
fully expressive symptom. But and it is a big but Kierkegaards
tactic is not simply to turn his back on that culture (as, for example,
a Heidegger or an Adorno would do) but to redescribe it in such
a way as to force from it, however tortuously, a testimony to the
questions of God, death, time and goodness.
If we wish to promote philosophy ` a la Kierkegaard, then, we
should be wary of attempting to justify his work by elevating him
into the ranks of the Classics. Kierkegaard is not just a debating
partner for Hegel &Co. He is also one of the rst to have alerted us
to the fact that it is the representations of value in popular culture
that have the most immediate impact on our perception of what
makes for a worthwhile life, and that such perceptions shape even
the prejudices of philosophers, for philosophers too participate in
this culture, since it is the all-pervading medium of modern life.
Carstensens hair-style and Heibergs advocacy of Hegelian logic
are seemingly incommensurable qualities, but within the world
represented by the feuilletons such heterogeneity is submerged in
the indiscriminate cultural market. Culture itself gives no decisive
privilege to one or the other, but relativizes the essential differ-
ences between them. This is the situation that a renewed search
for values and for religious orientation must accept as its starting-
point. The rst task, then, is to extend the task of the feuilleton
writer himself: the critical task of distinguishing between what is
a mere bagatelle and what offers genuine insight and, within the
ever-shifting horizons of the ephemeral, daring to experiment with
perspective and point of viewin order to retrieve fromthe constant
process of volatilization and transformation the sense of self that
the very prevalence of the popular puts at risk. Some of the ways
in which Kierkegaard attempted to do just this will be the burden
of the major part of this book.
CHAPTER
The present age: the age of the city
I
At several points I have touched on Kierkegaards study A Literary
Review: Two Ages, in which he pays tribute to the life-view of the
popular novelist Mme Gyllembourg, especially as represented in
the novel Two Ages. Here, as in his d ebut work From the Papers of One
Still Living, Kierkegaard sees in Mme Gyllembourg a telling coun-
terweight to the insidious undermining of everything good, true
and beautiful by the spirit of reection as that is manifested in the
literary, philosophical and political left. I have also alluded to the
fact that the two works in which Mme Gyllembourg is discussed
at length effectively frame the early aesthetic authorship, a point
that is all the more signicant in that it is precisely her qualities
of dependability and consistency over the years that are central to
Kierkegaards admiration for her in contrast to the utter absorp-
tion of the cultural innovators in the moment and in what the age
requires: a slogan in which time itself in its most empty, ephemeral
ux is made the sole unruly and chaotic measureless measure of
life. It is therefore far from coincidental that Kierkegaard uses the
discussion of Mme Gyllembourg and of a novel that contrasts the
present age of the :8os with the revolutionary period of the :qos
to offer his most sustained critique of the present age, Nutiden: the
time-that-now-is-in-the-moment-of-its-passing, time itself.
Surprisingly, very little attention has been paid in the secondary
literature to Mme Gyllembourgs novel itself. Whilst I do not
wish to argue that this omission is fatal to our understanding of
Kierkegaards own appraisal of the present age, the novel does
help us to enlarge and to rm up our picture of just what it is
o
The present age: the age of the city :
Kierkegaard is reacting to, and how his critique of the age be-
longs within an existing debate in Denmark itself. Historians of
ideas often seem to credit Kierkegaard with virtually inventing the
critical analysis that makes up the closing sections of A Literary
Review, but although he undoubtedly radicalized the application
of that analysis in the light of his own Christian understanding of
life, his contribution is best seen as the extension of a debate that
was already underway. As we shall see, key players in this debate
include names with which we are already familiar: J. L. Heiberg
and George Carstensen the latter not as the owner of Figaro or
Ny Portefeuille but as the entrepreneurial impresario responsible for
the establishment of Tivoli Gardens, the pleasure park that, with
nicely ironic synchronicity, opened in the same year that saw the
publication of Either/Or and, therewith, the start of Kierkegaards
mature authorship. But how do these connections emerge from
Two Ages itself ?
The novel opens in the summer of :8, when Charles Lusard is
returning after many years to Copenhagen in order to nd one he
calls a person after my own heart,
:
whom he can make his heir.
A lot has changed since he last saw the capital, in the far-off days
when he was a student, and his rst impression is of a city that has
increased extraordinarily in liveliness and pleasantness. The popular life
that had newly awoken and that manifested itself on the avenues and
streets, the swarm of people which he encountered as he was entering
the city itself, streaming out of its western gate, the resonating music
and shining lights of Tivolis illuminated alleyways and gondolas that
greeted him, put him in the gayest of moods and lled his heart with
joyful expectation. (TT, p. :o)
Tivoli is thus introduced in the opening lines of the novel as epit-
omizing the changes that are transforming Copenhagen from a
provincial, almost feudal market-town into a modern, cosmopoli-
tan city. In order fully to grasp the possible implications of this for
our reading of the novel and of the critical response to the Age that
Kierkegaard reads out of it, let us reect further on the connections
:
Forfatteren til En Hverdags-Historie [T. Gyllembourg-Ehrensv ard], To Tidsaldre, in (ed.),
J. L. Heiberg Skrifter, Vol. XI, Copenhagen, Reitzel, :8:, p. :o. Further references are
given to TT in the text.
. Kierkegaard, religion and culture
between the spirit of modernity and the phenomenon of the mod-
ern city itself.
Modernity, I suggest, is not just a term we use to denote a cer-
tainperiodof history, a segment of the time-scale onwhichwe locate
ourselves. It also invokes a whole complex of ideas, cultural values
and forms of social organization that constitute a social and cul-
tural space. And not in any merely metaphorical sense. For what
holds the disparate elements of modernity together is precisely the
spatial construction known to us as the city. Modernity and
urbanity are so fundamentally interconnected that we might
almost think of themas interchangeable terms and if it is objected
that modernity also contains the Romantic reaction against the
city, a reaction manifested in the many-aspected invocation of
nature or the country as a repository of values lost (to their
disadvantage) by city-dwellers, this too has the character it has
precisely as the citys other, the reality neglected, despised and
actively excluded by the city (as when Marx an urban man if ever
there was one spoke of the idiocy of rural life). It was in the great
cities of London and Paris (and later Berlin, Vienna and New York
and, from another angle, Manchester) that the distinctive culture
of modernity took shape. And if we are now entering an age of
postmodernity, perhaps this needs to be understood in connection
with the way in which the contemporary city is overrunning
the limits of the modern city just as the modern city (and its
accompanying culture of modernity) came to birth by overrunning
the enclosing walls of the (more or less) well-governed cities of the
Middle Ages and early Renaissance. The polis that became the
metropolis now becomes megalopolis, a global network of vast
conglomerations, whose cultural style knows no limits, invading
and stamping itself upon even the most remote rural settlements.
If we consider that even in :qoo there were only four cities in
the world with populations of : million or more London, Paris,
Berlin and New York it is easy to grasp the rapidity and scale of
the change that has happened since.
Does the advent of megalopolis, the postmodern city, mean that
the modern city, its history, culture and interpretation have become
purely a matter of antiquarian curiosity? Or do the dynamics that
are revealed in the advent of the modern city continue to be of
The present age: the age of the city
signicance for our experience and understanding of contempo-
rary modernity? We cannot hope to answer such global questions
in the context of a literary reviewof a minor popular novel in which
the only city that features is Copenhagen, one of modern Europes
smaller capital cities, and, as Kierkegaard and many of his contem-
poraries said, a somewhat provincial capital, a mere market-town,
whose so-called culture was but a pale imitation of foreign models.
Nevertheless, I believe that the changes that were taking place in
the Copenhagen of Kierkegaards lifetime and that are reected
both in Mme Gyllembourgs novel and in Kierkegaards review
reveal in miniature something of the larger picture. This gener-
ates a twofold possibility for enriching our interpretation of this
text. Firstly, it means that the dynamics of modern urbanity pro-
vide a context in which to bring to the fore previously unremarked
depths, resonances and allusions in Kierkegaards review. Secondly,
it creates the potential for applying the interpretation of the text
to larger questions of urban life and understanding. Such global
applications, however, lie beyond the limits of what can be done
here, where the issue is the more immediate one of seeing how
the thematization of urbanity can extend and deepen our reading
of Kierkegaards own text. I shall start by following up the lead
provided by the opening lines of Two Ages itself and look further
at the role of Tivoli in shaping the experience of urban culture in
Copenhagen in the :8os. It will become apparent that Tivoli is
used in the novel as a kind of litmus test by which to disclose some
of the protagonists social and moral attitudes. We shall also see
that Mme Gyllembourgs own view seems to be that phenomena
such as Tivoli are morally neutral: they are neither good nor bad
in themselves; everything depends on how they are used. Although
Kierkegaard himself does not discuss Tivoli in A Literary Review,
much of his analysis of the present age is in accordance with the
negative aspect of the age that is highlighted by the abuse of Tivoli
by characters such as Mrs Waller. The fact that Kierkegaard places
an exclusive emphasis on this negative aspect reveals the difference
between his own position and the life-view of the novel. Where
Mme Gyllembourg sees the occasionfor moral choice, Kierkegaard
sees only the irresistible encroachment of moral sclerosis. A sim-
ilar difference comes to view when we glance, as we shall very
Kierkegaard, religion and culture
briey, at the role of the relationship between city and country in
the novel and the disappearance of this theme in Kierkegaards
review, a disappearance that once more illustrates how the realm
of moral choices in which the novel moves has, for Kierkegaard,
been engulfed by the totalizing power of modern urbanity.
Thereafter I shall leave the novel and turn to one of the decisive
concepts of A Literary Review, the public. In order to see how our
understanding of Kierkegaards sense of the public is enriched
by considering it as a characteristically urban phenomenon I shall
look at how Kierkegaards usage is anticipated by J. L. Heiberg,
whom, of course, Kierkegaard knew to be closely associated with
the author of the novel. Indeed, as at so many other points in
Kierkegaards authorship, Kierkegaards highly ambivalent rela-
tionship with Heiberg provides an important literary-biographical
and conceptual context for our reading of A Literary Review. The
difference between Heiberg and Kierkegaard at this point will be
seen closely to parallel the difference between Mme Gyllembourg
and Kierkegaard already discussed, for whilst Heiberg, no less than
Kierkegaard, deprecates the advent of the modernpublic, he never-
theless believes that there is a kind of cunning of reason at work in
the rise of the public and that the spiritual aristocracy will be able
to reassert its authority, even in an age of publicity. The negative
will be held in place by the superior power of the positive.
I shall, as already hinted, seek throughout to examine more
closely the difference between Kierkegaard, on the one hand, and
Heiberg m`ere et ls, on the other, since it is precisely this differ-
ence that best enables us to identify what is most characteristic of
Kierkegaards singular intellectual and spiritual orientation.
I I
Bearing these remarks in mind, let us return to the summer of
:8, and to Charles Lusards arrival in Copenhagen. It is by no
means insignicant that the very rst thing that strikes him as he
arrives in the city is the sights and sounds of Tivoli. Tivolis rst
summer season had been held in the previous year, but because of
construction delays it had not opened until the middle of August,
and :8 was in fact the rst full season. Since the population of
The present age: the age of the city
Copenhagen at that time was of the order of :oo,ooo, the visitor
numbers for Tivoli virtually speak for themselves in terms of their
impact on the citys social life. On the rst Sunday of the season it
welcomed :o,ooo people, and over the season as a whole .,.,
about a third of the population of the whole country. Copenhagen
may have been little more than a market-town, but Tivoli made
it possible for the citizens of Copenhagen to experience rst-hand
the modern urban crowd.
What was it that drew such multitudes? After all, Copenhagen
already had a summer amusement fair out at the Deer Park, and
the road out fromVesterport to Frederiksberg Gardens also boasted
a number of entertainment venues. The style and, to use anachro-
nistic terminology, the corporate professionalism of Tivoli were,
however, altogether different from anything previously known. An
article in Tivoli-Avisen (Tivolis house paper) for :q July :8 entitled
An Evening in the Deer Park drew attention to these differences,
emphasizing the discomfort of the journey out to the Deer Park and
the general dullness of the entertainments on offer once one had
got there. The following year Tivoli-Avisen had a virtual campaign
of satirical articles and poems mocking what was clearly seen as a
potential rival.
.
In comparison with Tivoli, however, the Deer Park
was easily portrayed as old-fashioned and somewhat coarse, lack-
ing in sophistication, style and tone. As a character in an :8: play
by Henrik Hertz put it, Here you only get gallery types, no nobili,
no grands seigneurs.

Tivoli, on the other hand, struck a thor-

oughly contemporary note, with its steam roundabout (one of the
earliest commercial applications of steamtechnology in Denmark),
its daguerreotype studio (again, one of the earliest in Denmark), its
rollercoaster, pantomime theatre, moving wax gures, panorama,
diorama, dissolving views (a novelty fromLondon that anticipated
moving pictures), oriental buildings and bazaar, illuminations, re-
works and J. H. Lumbyes music. Nor should we forget the restau-
rants, where, for perhaps the rst time, families were encouraged to
eat out together, dining out having previously been a largely male
preserve. The blueprints for Tivoli, which was advertised in its early
.
See Tivoli-Avisen, July, :6 July and :o August :8.

H. Hertz, Et Eventyr i Dyrehaven eller Cassanders opdagede Trdskhed, Maske-Comoedier i een Act,
Copenhagen, Reitzel, :8:, p. :.:.
6 Kierkegaard, religion and culture
days as Tivoli-Vauxhall, were taken fromLondon and Paris. Tivoli,
then, introduced something of London and Paris to Copenhagen.
The panorama on display in :8 showed the Tivoli located in
Hamburg, leading one contemporary publication to comment that
Copenhagen had clearly surpassed that city in taste and art. The
urbanity of its style was pointedly (if polemically) highlighted by a
contemporary satire that depicted a peasant who visited Tivoli and
imagined himself to be in hell.

The list of Tivoli entertainments shows that we are underesti-

mating its importance if we think of it merely in terms of providing
Sunday afternoon entertainments for the Copenhageners of the
:8os. Of course it did do that, but, more fundamentally, it opened
up a new style of urban living. Its orientalism and its consistent
exploitation of new optical technology exemplify the way in which
it contributed to a culture of spectatorship, in which the unyield-
ing objectivities of geography, distance and spatial location dissolve
into a shifting network of points of view. The image of the Parisian
aneur of a generation later and our own technology of virtual re-
ality (not to mention Disneyworld) are possibilities already latent
within the kind of development seen in early Tivoli.
The physical location of Tivoli is also signicant. In this period
Copenhagen was still a walled city, the defensive function of its ram-
parts being still a factor in living memory after two separate assaults
by Britains Royal Navy during the Napoleonic Wars (although
those assaults, particularly the second, showed that the walls were
no longer of military importance in an era of long-range gunnery
and incendiary rockets). During the reign of Frederick VI the gates
of the city were locked every night and the keys were handed in
to the monarch, a custom that symbolized not only his role as
the paternal guardian of his people, but also the whole hierarchi-
cal structuring of city life, where industry, commerce and private
conduct were governed and protected in a variety of ways.
The site of Tivoli was immediately outside the walls, its present
lake a residual remnant of the defensive waterworks in the lee of the
ramparts. The land was owned by the military and in its early sea-
sons was leased fromthe army on a temporary basis. Perhaps there

P. R. Jrgensen, Bonden i Tivoli, published by the author, Copenhagen, :8.

The present age: the age of the city
could be no clearer sign of the changing character of Copenhagen
than this shift from military use to leisure. For the rst time the
area beyond the walls was being colonized in a sustained and di-
rected manner by the citizens. Innovatively, the money for Tivoli
was raised by means of joint venture capital, once more one of the
earliest examples of this type of commercial operation. Inverting
the Marxist model, we might say that Tivoli seems not so much to
reect the new urban order as to bring that order itself into exis-
tence. Its role is not merely passive and reactive, but creative and
generative.
Change of this kind was not, of course, uncontroversial. Tivoli
had a number of contemporary critics who saw it as contributing
to the destruction of family life, the undermining of the work ethic
and the erosion of the boundaries between social classes. The neg-
ative viewwas represented by one J. Christensens privately printed
Tivoli Scenes and Fairy-Tale or Tivoli as it is, and drinks, makes noise, gets
up to tomfoolery and produces devastation. Christensens Introduction
(Forerindring) follows in the tone struck by his sub-title:
That every Tivoli is ruinous for many of the towns tradesmen . . . is a truth
which, unfortunately, can also be experienced in Copenhagen, occasion-
ing the publisher to have these simple pages put in print. Naturally he
respects the integrity of the Copenhagen Tivolis chief entrepreneur, and
he has nothing in particular against the many who have contributed to its
establishment in the hope of prot; but it nevertheless is and will be always
a question as to whether this manner of making a prot, i.e., by ruining
ones fellow citizens, can truly be called an act of good citizenship.

Christensen puts forward the case that as well as taking away

business fromothers, Tivoli encouraged excessive drinking, impru-
dent spending, and sexual impropriety, not to mention the sight of
demonstrations of strength by nearly naked men, a sight that is
loathsome and harmful to decency.
6
In a passage that nicely em-
phasizes Tivolis urban nature, one of his characters objects that,
whilst it is true that the people need something to cheer them up
in the present needy times,

J. Christensen, Tivoli-Scener- og Eventyr, published by the author, Copenhagen, :8, p. .

6
Ibid., p. 6.
8 Kierkegaard, religion and culture
[W]e are not without public places of entertainment where one can take
pleasure in the creators works in the midst of the freedom and glories
of nature and cheer ones spirit much better than in the dusty, conned
grounds of Tivoli, where, if one can afford the entrance charge, one is
forced to see these tedious helter-skelters and steam merry-go-rounds
that are good neither for the body nor for the soul.

Similar criticisms are also to be found in the pages of Two Ages itself,
although, as we shall see, Mme Gyllembourg typically puts both
sides of the issue, recognizing in Tivoli positive and liberating social
possibilities, as well as the solvent effects highlightedby Christensen.
After arriving in Copenhagen, Lusard makes himself known to
his relative, Commercial Counsellor Christian Waller, who pre-
sides over a business and a family that have both seen better days.
After being widowed, Waller has remarried, having one daugh-
ter, Mariane, by his rst marriage and three by his second, the
eighteen-year-old Colette and two younger girls. Here is how he
himself describes his wife and children to Lusard:
My wife is still young, she is only thirty-four years of age, and is generally
held to be attractive; she is educated and talented, an exceptional pianist,
very accomplished in society and courted by gentlemen. My oldest daugh-
ter is a good little girl, who looks after the domestic side of things and also
reads to her younger sisters when my wife doesnt have time. (TT, p. :)
Lusard replies that this sounds all very charming, but we, the
readers, have been given more than a hint that things are not
so idyllic. We know that Mrs Waller is courted by gentlemen, al-
though her husband seems to accept this situation with equanimity.
We know also that she doesnt attend to her own daughters educa-
tion as she ought, and that her poor stepdaughter has been made
into something of a Cinderella. Our worst fears are soon realized.
When Lusard expresses a wish to meet Mrs Waller, Waller offers to
take him to meet her forthwith. However, on reaching her rooms
he is rebuffed by a servant who informs himthat she is not at home.
When he points out that he can hear her playing the piano, the
servant acknowledges that she is indeed having her piano lesson,
and therefore is not at home. When Waller tries to insist that the
servant announce him in order that Mrs Waller should meet one

Ibid.
The present age: the age of the city q
of his relatives, the servant returns with the message that she will
see him in three-quarters of an hour when her lesson is over.
Lusard leaves, and misses the row that follows when Mrs Waller
nds his visiting card: God protect us! What a splendid name:
Mr Lusard de Montalbert. Is he French? Noble? A gentleman?
(TT, p. :) In the light of this new information Mrs Waller re-
proaches her husband for not having introduced her. When he
points out that he had tried to do just that, she will have none of it.
How could I have known that it was such a gentleman? You knew
that I had brought him, and therefore that I wanted him to be received
in a welcoming manner. The people you bring are not usually of his
calibre. When your husband brings people to meet you, they should
not be welcomed by being told that they have to wait three-quarters of
an hour before they can speak to the lady of the house. Should I have
dismissed my piano teacher and have wasted a dollar on the hour lost?
You could have let Mariane take advantage of the hour. No. Maren has
her business and her place in the kitchen in the mornings. The girl is
called Mariane. I will not hear the name Maren. Youll have to get used
to hearing it. I call her Maren. Its a very suitable name for a domestic
person. (TT, p. :)
We see how things are in the Waller household and are not
surprised to discover that whilst Mariane is patient virtue incarnate
Mrs Wallers own daughters are cheeky and impertinent. Nor is it
long before we are initiated further into Mrs Wallers social whirl
of coquetry and affectation. When she is persuaded by one of her
young male acquaintances to go out for a little soir ee where she is
assured of the attentions of a certain Hofjunker, the two youngest
girls begin to wail.
What is it? . . . What are you crying for, my little ones? Natalia, the eldest,
answered, sobbing, Now you are going out, and yesterday you promised
that you would take us to Tivoli this evening if the weather was ne. Id
completely forgotten. But we poor things, we havent forgotten, burst
out little Ida. Weve been looking forward to it all day. Now stop that
howling. You can still go. She rang. The chamber-maid came in and
took instructions to get ready at once to go with the children to Tivoli.
(TT, p. :.)
Some time afterwards Lusard returns, expecting to meet Mrs
Waller. Christian Waller is also surprised to discover that she has
6o Kierkegaard, religion and culture
gone out. Lusard, however, is delighted to meet Mariane, and the
eighteen-year-old Colette, the older sister of Natalia and Ida. Once
again, Mrs Waller arrives home after Lusard has left.
Both Mrs Waller and the Commercial Counsellor were annoyed: she, be-
cause her husband had received a stranger in her absence; he, because she
had gone out into society without his knowledge, and he also reproached
her on account of the two little girls who had only just come home from a
night-time entertainment that was very unsuitable for them. (TT, p. :q)
By the end of the book, however, we learn that it has become
usual for the two older girls to be at home in the evenings, while
the younger ones are out at Tivoli with the maid (TT, p. :8).
When Lusard is nally received properly, the conversation turns
to the nature of modern society, and, once again, Tivoli is an un-
avoidable point of comment. Lusard speaks:
Thirty years is a long time for an individual man, but for the human race it
is but short, and one cannot but marvel when one thinks of the discoveries
in science, the inventions that make life easier and more agreeable in this
period. Who in past times dreamt of steamships, of railways, that seem to
compensate man for his lack of wings? And these new undertakings, this
industry on every side, what an opportunity to help the working-classes,
how much more tasteful and pleasant domestic life seems to be! I have
been delighted recently to witness the popular life that is stirring here.
I have wandered around the area and taken especial pleasure in visiting
the improved places of entertainment that seem to have sprung from the
earth. Tivoli, for example, pleases me enormously. It is attractive to see
and to think of so many people of different classes who gather there and
are united in a common goal, namely, to enjoy themselves in an innocent
and proper manner. (TT, pp. :6)
The opposite view is put by another visitor:
The craving for entertainment that, like an epidemic, is ever more rife
among us, is destroying the integrity of the family, the common life of the
home, and therefore of morality. I know families who, in their domestic
lives, live with what I could go so far as to call an improper frugality,
who let their children and servants go without the necessities of life, in
order to satisfy their craving for entertainment and their vanity. The weak
have too much to tempt them. The door to abuse is too wide open.
(TT, p. :)
Lusard does not agree.
The present age: the age of the city 6:
I cannot refuse to call it a good thing that those who have worked all
day can nd a place where, for a couple of hours, they can be en-
livened in a proper and tasteful manner, and lose themselves in the crowd.
(TT, p. :)
A further point of view is offered by Dalund, an elderly gentle-
man who had appeared in the rst part of the novel and thus repre-
sents a voice from the age of revolution (and of whom Kierkegaard
writes approvingly in his review).
Indeed, Dalund burst out, lose themselves in the crowd. Youre quite
right to put it like that. The person who wants to do that can generally
nd distraction and relaxation in Tivoli and the Deer Park and other such
places. The quiet bourgeois family, who have been busy by day or through
the week, and who go out of an evening or a Sunday in their modest
attire, to walk, to drive or to sail for recreational purposes everyone can
gladly respect that. But what I condemn in this, as in other tendencies,
is the dreadful vanity that causes so many, especially women and young
men, to go out, not in order to enjoy themselves but to be seen. When,
as continually happens, I meet these women and girls from the most
ordinary bourgeois classes got up in all their nery which reveals rather
than conceals the fact that they are not ladies then I am not far from the
opinion that the great opportunity to show oneself abroad, to seek ones
pleasure outside the home, feeds the prevailing passion for display, which
is certainly laughable and demoralising. (TT, pp. :8)
Dalunds words here echo the critique of contemporary trends
made some years previously by the authors son, J. L. Heiberg, inan
essay On our National Amusements, part of his Contribution to
an Aesthetic Morality, where he lambasts visitors to the Deer Park
for going all the way fromCopenhagen merely to see and be seen,
something they could perfectly well do inthe city itself. Heiberg also
draws a strong distinction between critical looking and the kind of
gawping, mindless spectatorship that he sees as typical of the mod-
ern public. In this respect, at least, Heiberg shares a common cause
with Carstensen and with the Tivoli-Avisens campaign against the
Deer Park: the issue between them concerns the kind of pleasures,
the kind of renement, that should be cultivated by the new urban
populace as it distances itself from its coarse, provincial, rural past.
Tivoli, then, had become for Kierkegaards contemporaries,
such as the characters of Two Ages, the epitome of contemporary
6. Kierkegaard, religion and culture
urban culture and a sign of the transformation taking place in
family and public life and in the manner of establishing proper
relations between classes. Tivoli made possible the experience of
the modern metropolitan crowd, with all the opportunities that
provided for distraction and display and, with the aid of the lat-
est optical technology, promoting a culture of spectatorship, in a
never-ending round of kaleidoscopic variations.
The negative view of the cultural tendencies revealed in Tivoli
is, in Two Ages, mirrored in the character of Mrs Waller. Certainly it
is Kierkegaards view that she, more than anyone, is the moral rep-
resentative of the present age. In words that indicate an important
link to the kind of moral analysis developed in some of his directly
religious writings, Kierkegaard says of her that her ostentatious
virtuosity culminates and turns back into itself in the smug conceit
that she is what a woman of the world ought to be, which accounts
for her proudly and calmly daring to do anything, trusting in her
reputation. And yet in a profound sense her nature is ambivalent,
for as the apostle James more or less puts it: purity of heart is to will
one thing (TA, p. ). Speaking of her lack of character in the mo-
mentary mirror of reection (TA, p. ), he reverses a quotation of
Pliny and applies it to her everything for ostentation, nothing for
consciences sake (TA, p. ). In the novel itself, however, it is clear
that Mrs Waller represents only one aspect of the present age. Her
thoughtless indulgence of her childrens craving for the novelties
of Tivoli is an abuse of something that, if we follow Lusard, could
have a good and wholesome use. It is her moral character and not
the character of the age that makes Tivoli into a symbol of moral
corruption. If Kierkegaards interpretation is true to one strand of
the novel, it tells only half the story. As opposed to the balanced
view of Mme Gyllembourg, Kierkegaard regards the dynamics of
modernity as inherently totalizing, embracing and engulng the
whole manner of life of his contemporaries, without exception.
What in his most characteristic formulation he calls levelling is, as
he sees it, irresistible.
If the discussion of Tivoli provides one of the means by which
Mme Gyllembourg manages to show both sides of the coin, some
of the assumptions behind this tolerant approach come to the fore
in the relationship between town and country in the novel. It is the
The present age: the age of the city 6
elder Lusards acquisition of a country estate that makes it possi-
ble for him and Claudine to live happily ever after. It is this same
estate that comes to provide a solution for Mariane and her lover
in the second half of the novel, so she is able to escape the cir-
cumstances of the Waller household, to marry Ferdinand Bergland
and go with Charles Lusard to the country as his heir. This re-
moval is both a means of positing an ideological other to the city
and also, of course, an invocation of aristocratic values and possi-
bilities. Both these factors colour the closing conversation in the
splendid garden of the beautiful manor house in which Charles
Lusard, Mariane and her husband afrm an optimistic view of
social progress.
The absence of anaristocratic, rural perspective inKierkegaards
interpretation of Two Ages is reected in the greater pessimism of
his view. For him there is no actual other to the city and the
world of the public. In addition to providing a contrast to Mme
Gyllembourg, this also distinguishes Kierkegaards world-view
more generally from that of the men of :8o, the optimistic
Romantic writers such as F. C. Sibbern, P. M. Mller and Adam
Oehlenschl ager, for whom nature provided a positive context for
the reading of contemporary human possibilities.
It may be objected that Kierkegaards later writing marks a
change from this position in the light of his extensive use of the
lilies and the birds of the Sermon on the Mount as symbols for
Christian existence. Repeatedly, he appeals to the way things are
out there with the lilies and the birds as a model for Christian
living. However, I suggest that these are only indirectly drawn from
nature; as ciphers of transcendence they are essentially literary g-
ures, taken by Kierkegaard from the text of scripture. They are
symbols of an other that does not and, in the present age, cannot
exist on the plane of human geography. There is no other that can
survive the irresistible spread of urban culture, and the disappear-
ance of this other is one element in his refusal of what could be
called the complacency of Mme Gyllembourgs life-view. I shall of-
fer a further comment on this refusal at the close of this chapter, and
shall only emphasize now that by consistently opting for one side
of the picture of the present age offered by Two Ages, Kierkegaard
does not necessarily add anything to the social analysis contained
6 Kierkegaard, religion and culture
in the novel. The difference is not a difference of conceptualization
but a matter of judgement.
I I I
One of the phenomena of modernity that Tivoli brought into view
in the Copenhagen of the :8os was the urban crowd. Here, as
we have seen, the inhabitants of this provincial market-town were
able to experience and to participate in the life of the metropolitan
crowd, to lose themselves in it, whether as spectators or as making
themselves into the objects of others stares, seeing and being seen
in the mode of the urban spectacle.
The concept of the crowd importantly intersects with that of one
of the crucial categories of Kierkegaards Literary Review, the public.
The public, as Kierkegaarddescribes it inour text, is anabstraction,
a phantom (TA, p. qo), whose existence is interdependent with
that of the press. But whilst the press, in speaking on behalf of the
public, claims to speak for society as a whole for the people
the public is actually a manifestation of social disintegration and
of the individualizing fragmentation of life typical of the present
age. The unity gured in the public is the illusory unity that is all
that levelling is able to produce. Those who understand themselves
as members of the public, for example, never act in any decisive
sense. Precisely by identifying themselves with the public they turn
themselves into mere spectators of their own social existence. This
is not the loyal citizen who does homage to his king and now is
embittered by his tyranny, not at all to be a citizen has come to
mean something else, it means to be an outsider. The citizen does
not relate himself in the relation but is a spectator computing the
problem: the relation of a subject to his king (TA, pp. 8q). In
the collectivity of the public, participants have become spectators
(TA, p. ).
It is striking how far Kierkegaards account of the public resem-
bles that of Heiberg, but whereas the Kierkegaardian text we are
examining was to become one of the twentieth centurys seminal
texts, Heibergs words fell into oblivion within a generation, even
in Denmark. Although there is much that is relevant to be found
throughout his work for example, in the early essay On our
The present age: the age of the city 6
National Amusements previously alluded to and in his vaudeville
Christmas Fun and New Year Frolics (in which the public is personi-
ed as a many-armed monster) the most concentrated and most
directly relevant essays are those on People and Public and
Authority, which appeared in numbers 6 and of his journal
Intelligensblade. In these articles Heiberg was to provide virtually all
of the conceptual armoury with which Kierkegaard was to analyse
Two Ages and the present age represented in it. Also interesting is
the way in which Heiberg links the rise of the public in the the-
atrical world (which was, of course, his main sphere of professional
practice) with the crisis of authority in the political sphere. Heiberg
himself explicitly acknowledges the connection: Generally speak-
ing, the political tendencies cannot be separated from the literary,
religious, etc. [tendencies of the age], since the same forces are at
work in each of the various currents of the age.
8
He goes on to speak of
the peoples dissolution into a public, and that of the organism to a mass
[the context suggests that he means the political organism of the state],
or with particular regard to literature and art that of the public itself
being transformed from an organic, representative body to an atomized
crowd that represents nothing.
q
Heiberg describes the whole process as a form of disorganiza-
tion, and elsewhere comments that it is authority itself that is the
chief target of this subjectivizing tendency.
:o
Heibergs assimilation of the aesthetic and the political prepares
the way for the kind of transfer of aesthetic categories into social
and political categories that we nd again in Kierkegaard, both
in the Literary Review and, for example, in The Point of View. It is
perhaps in A Literary Review that we see the decisive moment in
a process whereby the critical analysis of the aesthetic developed
in the early journals and in published works such as Either/Or and
Stages on Lifes Way is applied to the description and the analysis
of politics and society. It is no longer a matter of a secret society
of marginal gures, Seducers and Symparanekromenoi (a ctional
8
J. L. Heiberg, Folk og Publicum, Intelligensblade 6, : June :8., pp. :6.
q
Ibid., p. :.
:o
J. L. Heiberg,Theatret, Intelligensblade , : May :8., p. :o.
66 Kierkegaard, religion and culture
fraternity of aesthetes portrayed in Part : of Either/Or), who are to
be exposed to the light of ethical and religious cross-examination: it
is society or, rather, the public as a whole. Whereas the aesthetes
of the early pseudonymous works can be seen as deviants, they now
start to look like the avant-garde, the forerunners of the bourgeois
public. Where the aneur leads, the family follows.
To return to our main thread. The public, as understood by
both Heiberg and Kierkegaard, is a historically conditioned phe-
nomenon and, as such, belongs to a specic epoch of recent and
contemporary history. Heiberg, in the course of making a strong
distinction between people (Folk) and public, put it like this:
Indeed, we need only go back a few years in time in our own country in
order to come to a period when one had not thought of the distinction
[between people and public], because [the public] had not made itself into
a power able to inuence the real state of things. It was usual in those days,
in the world of literature, art and the theatre (for a political public still did
not exist), to regard the public as identical with the people; at least, one
regarded it as representative of the people . . . [H]ow usual it was in the
occasional poetry of those days to call the few hundred people assembled
in the theatre in Copenhagen the Danish people. And, quite naively,
one could think that by pleasing such a small number of people in a very
restricted space and for a period of not more than a couple of hours, one
had pleased the nation . . . Certainly, it is true in those moments of time
when literature and art were still young that the public was representative
of the people, because then it was the most intelligent, those who really
had a right to it, who spoke out.
::
Of course, now that the public no longer represents the people,
none of this can be the case.
In what sense can we describe the rise of the public as a phe-
nomenon of urbanity? At its simplest, it is because the numerical
increase in population and the correlative complexication of the
urban mass provides the necessary social context for the rise of the
public in this period. Heibergs comments in particular point to
this quantitative dimension, although they also suggest that even
in the era he somewhat nostalgically recalls it was not really true
::
Heiberg, Folk og Publicum, pp. :.
The present age: the age of the city 6
that the people could be identied with the theatre-going public
of Copenhagen it just seemed like it. But clearly the larger the
numerical imbalance between the populace as a whole and those
who make up its cultural elite, the more problematic such repre-
sentation becomes. The kind of homogeneity that Heiberg depicts
is only possible in communities of a certain kind. It is not possible
in the large-scale differentiated world of the modern city. A similar
point is made by Kierkegaard:
The public is a concept that simply could not have appeared in antiquity,
because the people were obliged to come forward en masse in corpore in the
situation of action . . . [and] the individual was obliged to be present in
person as the one specically involved . . . The public is a corps, outnum-
bering all the people together, but this corps can never be called up for
inspection; indeed it cannot even have so much as a single representative,
because it is itself an abstraction. (TA, p. q:)
These words recall Aristotles stipulation that one of the condi-
tions of true democracy is the possibility of convening the people as
a single gathering, where the commonwill of the body politic canbe
collectively afrmed by all citizens. Even in the ancient world, this
ideal can only have been fully realizable in the very earliest forms
of the polis, and had ceased to be even remotely practicable long
before the rise of modern democracy. It was not in the nineteenth
century that the modern city rst outgrew the possibility of bring-
ing all its citizens together in one place. In the condition of modern
urbanity, however, the public comes to exist as the substitute
(in Kierkegaards view the grossly inadequate and false substitute)
for this lost immediacy of corporate presence. The point is, per-
haps, nicely illustrated by a comment of Samuel Taylor Coleridge
to the effect that the recently current term the public refers to
what, in the past, was called the town. But how is this public to
understand and to express itself ? Precisely, in Kierkegaards view,
by means of the press: press and public are, on his analysis, inter-
dependent: the abstraction the press (for a newspaper, a peri-
odical, is not a political concretion and is an individual only in an
abstract sense) gives rise to the abstractions phantom, the public
(TA, p. q).
68 Kierkegaard, religion and culture
The relationship between public and press is also central to
Heibergs concerns and as we have seen, he launched a series
of periodicals, from Copenhagens Flying Post to Perseus: A Journal for
the Speculative Idea. These were conceived by Heiberg as playing a
very specic role in the confrontation with the public. For although
Heiberg frequently sounds as if he is almost resigned to the triumph
of the public, and although he regards it as being in its true nature
a mere mass and therefore an object to be regarded with con-
tempt by honourable persons,
:.
although it becomes ever harder
to distinguish between the justiable authority of the people (Folk)
and the merely ephemeral authority of the public, since the people
themselves are becoming a mere public
:
for all this a hope of ref-
ormation remains. Thus Heiberg declares in the opening editorial
of Intelligensblade that its publication is aimed at leading the public
back fromthe byways upon which it enters when it is left to its own
devices,
:
and Heibergs whole project hinges upon the possibil-
ity of reversing the negative trends of the time, or, rather, assisting
the process whereby it will come to be seen that these apparently
negative trends are subordinate to a cunning of reason that will
in due course lead to a due recognition of legitimate authority.
I V
Between them, Mme Gyllembourg and her son respectively
provided the cultural description and critical apparatus that
Kierkegaard combines in A Literary Review. However, whereas each
of them sees the negative aspect of the age as merely representing
one side of the picture, Kierkegaard privileges this negativity to the
point of totalizing it. The present age is not merely one in which
there are negative tendencies that need to be balanced, restrained,
or brought back onto the highways from which they have strayed:
it is one in which the negative dynamics of levelling have broken
loose from all possibilities of control.
What is uniquely Kierkegaardian, then, is not the basic view of
society found in A Literary Review, or even the conceptual apparatus
:.
Heiberg, Theatret, p. ::.
:
J. L. Heiberg, Autoritet, Intelligensblade , : June :8., pp. :q8o.
:
J. L. Heiberg, Intelligensblade :, : March :8., p. ..
The present age: the age of the city 6q
with which he explores the processes whereby society has come to
be as it is. Where Kierkegaard differs fromMme Gyllembourg and
Heiberg is simply in the quality of the judgement he passes on the
present age. But can we say anything about what it is that moves
him to make this negative judgement?
In attempting to answer this question we would do well to con-
sider one of the few points in which Kierkegaard goes beyond
Heiberg. Having reached the view that levelling cannot in fact be
reversed by the assertion of authority, Kierkegaard proposes that
the only possibility of salvation is in the hands of the unrecogniz-
able ones who witness to the falsity of levelling by the suffering they
endure at the hands of the servants of levelling. Here we glimpse a
vision of the dark side of the city that is both more clearly dened
and more disturbing than a simply sublime indeterminacy oppos-
ing itself to the quantitative complexity of modern urbanity. In this
proposal, moreover, Kierkegaard is interpreting the cultural vision
of the Heiberg circle in the light of a set of archetypal images that
long predate the advent of modernity: images of the suffering of
the Christian martyrs of the apostolic and sub-apostolic age, the
representatives of what he was increasingly to call the Christianity
of the New Testament.
For Kierkegaards vision of the martyr is inextricably tied up
with a reading of the nature of the city that is itself ultimately
rooted in scripture. Drawing on long traditions of Christian ha-
giography that reach back into the Bible, Kierkegaard envisages
the suffering of the martyr as the ultimate revelation of the true
nature of the urban culture of Rome. Rome, for Kierkegaard, is
a stage (a container for spectacles, as Lewis Mumford put it), a
city that has given itself over to thoroughgoing aestheticization, and
the ultimate tendency of such aestheticization is cruelty. For what
better fulls the aesthetic reduction of spirit to appearance than the
public spectacle of the martyr, a show in which the tyrant believes
that he is able to demonstrate by means of the public destruction of
the bodily matrix of spiritual life the falsity of spirits claim to exist
as a world-constituting power? In the immolation of the victim the
tyrant shows that life is indeed nothing but appearance (or so he
hopes). It is by no means accidental that Kierkegaard uses both
Nero and Caligula as epitomizing the aesthetic attitude. If what
o Kierkegaard, religion and culture
the public wants is an interesting spectacle, it will sooner or later
be satised by nothing less than the spectacle of death and destruc-
tion. In seeing this as the outcome of the dynamics of urbanity,
Kierkegaard is, of course, not only thinking of rst-century Rome.
Behind Rome stands Jerusalem, the city that did not knowthe hour
of its visitation, and behind Jerusalem stands Babylon, the city of
the captivity, and behind Babylon stands the rst city, founded not
coincidentally by Cain, the rst murderer. Kierkegaards judge-
ment on the present age as an aesthetic age that identies itself in
and as the public is, I suggest, directed by a typological reading
of urban culture that derives from the Judaeo-Christian tradition.
We may seem to have wandered far from the kind of issues of cul-
tural identity reected in the :8os debate over Tivoli, but it is
not so. For this whole analysis is, of course, reinscribed into the
contemporary reality of Copenhagen, so that Kierkegaards mis-
treatment by The Corsair becomes both his martyrdom of laughter
and a comic drama that he allowed Copenhagen to stage. Its
mindless absorption in the empty aestheticism of pleasure is what
makes it possible for the modern public to regard the destruction
of its most talented writers reputation as a mere bagatelle and an
entertaining distraction.
:
It would seem, then, that neither Kierkegaards conceptualiza-
tion of the present age nor the basis of his judgement upon it is
original. Doubtless he would not be troubled by such a comment,
as he does not seek to advocate his point of viewonthe grounds of its
novelty. His originality is in the judgement itself, inwhichthe typology of
Christian theology is applied to the material of contemporary cul-
tural analysis. Such an application inevitably raises familiar prob-
lems about authority and heteronomy and, as Kierkegaard already
realized, it was too late for any simplistic solution of re-establishing
some kind of authoritarian ecclesiastical control over public life.
In addressing the crisis that he saw gathering momentum around
him, Kierkegaard himself had no recourse but to operate on the
plane of his contemporary cultural discourse. If his reworking of
:
The argument I have summarized here is dealt with at greater length in my Poor
Paris! .
The present age: the age of the city :
the Judaeo-Christian typology of the city does not automatically
deliver answers to the problems of modern urbanity, it does help
to draw attention to the interconnections between urbanity, the
culture of spectatorship and the fascination of violence, a complex
of issues to which we shall return at greater length in the closing
chapters of this study.
CHAPTER
Cosmopolitan faces
I
As the culture of modernity took shape, it generated a number
of characteristic tensions and oppositions that have become famil-
iar across the whole range of cultural life and analysis. Driving
many of these was a deep anxiety about cultural identity itself, ex-
pressed in the recurrent complaint about the fragmentation of life,
the rupture of ancient traditions, and the loss of a vanished age
of individual and social harmony and cohesion. Such anxiety is
expressed not only in Kierkegaards account of levelling, the pub-
lic and the press, but in the less pessimistic critique of the Age
offered by Heiberg. Naturally there were also those for whom this
was not so much a problem as an opportunity the opportunity,
in this instance, to escape from what was perceived as Denmarks
narrow provincial past and to transform it into a modern, open,
democratic and urban society. What this actually meant could, of
course, vary enormously from Heibergs programme of cultural
reformation through to Carstensens inauguration of Tivoli as a
thoroughly modern, stylish and urbane alternative to the tradi-
tional country-fair entertainments on offer at the Deer Park. For
those who felt the advent of the new Age or the unsettling condi-
tions of what Heiberg called an age of transition as threatening, it
was appealing to contrast the old sense of national, communitar-
ian identity with the loss of identity in the internationalized culture
of novelty, a culture that invited the label cosmopolitan, often
with derogatory connotations.
:
When the situation was conceived
:
V. Dahlerup et al., Ordbog over det Danske Sprog, .8 vols., Copenhagen, Gyldendal, :q:86,
gives :: as the rst usage, but, as the OED suggests was the case in English, the word
.
Cosmopolitan faces
in this way, it took only one further small step to mark out a
particular people as the bearers and agents of cosmopolitanism,
namely, that people which had no geographically dened national
homeland, but which, while preserving a sense of common iden-
tity amongst its members, was dispersed throughout Europe: the
Jews. By this route, then, cosmopolitan and cosmopolitanism be-
came key code words inthe vocabulary of Europeananti-Semitism,
words that marked out the Jew as the principal enemy of national
historical identity and the harbinger of the new rootlessness. J. G.
Hamann, whom Kierkegaard studied intensively in his formative
years, had already identied Judaismwiththe spirit of free-thinking
enlightenment in his Golgotha and Scheblimini.
.
Kierkegaard, as we have been seeing, occupied a characteristi-
cally ambivalent place with regard to the Age. On the one hand,
he lived in the new world as one of its own, a aneur-like gure who
wrote for the feuilletons and, with his spectacles, cigars and um-
brella, struck the pose of a man-about-town. On the other hand,
his appreciation of the glitteringly ephemeral dazzle of contem-
porary urbanity did not constitute a ringing endorsement. On the
contrary, beneath the surface allure of the age, he discerned the
ancient sublime drama of the exclusion and martyrdom of those
who declined to join the festivities. The ultimate spectacle of the
modern as of the ancient city was, he feared, the theatre of cru-
elty and, in his experience, it was to prove no less cruel in taking
the form of a martyrdom of laughter than of actual execution.
The liberation offered by the new was, he sensed, liable to be no
more than the liberation of the violent and egotistical desires that
the ancien regime, for all its faults, had held in check.
It is this conservative Kierkegaard who seems to speak in the
opening pages of his rst published work, From the Papers of One
Still Living, a review of the novel Only a Fiddler by Hans Christian
Andersen. Here he describes what he calls the main trend of the
age in the political sphere (EPW, p. 6) as a refusal to accept the
seems rst to have become common in the second quarter of the nineteenth century. The
possibilities of a negative sense are epitomized in Carlyles (:8.8) comment that A certain
attenuated cosmopolitanism had taken the place of the old home feeling.
.
See J. G. Hamann, Golgotha und Scheblimini: Von einem Prediger in der W usten, in Schriften, 8 vols.,
Berlin, :8.:, Vol. VII, pp. :o.
Kierkegaard, religion and culture
legacy of history, and to forget the actual (EPW, p. 6). He gures
this stance as a re-enactment of the uprooting of the primeval
forests by the plough of culture at the dawn of enlightenment, in
order that on the cleared plains there cannot now be the slightest
poetic shelter (EPW, p. 6). And, he adds forebodingly, even the
few pure examples of normal people can, without being exposed
to the least profane touch or falling for anything brindled, spotted,
or striped, sire, with an appalling monotony, a whole brood of se-
lect abstract Cosmopolit-Gesichter [cosmopolitan faces] (EPW, p. 6).
Clearly Kierkegaard entirely excludes the issue of racial corrup-
tion through what used to be called miscegenation (even the pure
people can produce cosmopolitan offspring), but his strongly neg-
ative way of invoking the motif of cosmopolitanism as emblem-
atic of modernity must, in the light of our subsequent historical
experience, give us pause to examine his underlying ideological
motivations more closely. We might also, in this pause, notice a
puzzling feature of Kierkegaards intellectual development. In his
early journals and papers, Kierkegaard spends considerable time
researching what he calls the three great representative gures of
life outside Christianity: Don Juan, Faust and the Wandering Jew,
the last being described as the archetypal representative of the
present age. Yet whilst both Don Juan and Faust appear in vari-
ous contexts in the published works, the Wandering Jew seems to
have vanished fromKierkegaards eld of interest. Why should that
be? Or is he perhaps present after all, masked by the cosmopoli-
tan face of contemporary nihilism? At which point we might also
recall that the gure of the Wandering Jew (in Danish and in
German, literally, the Eternal Jew) was also to become central
to the rhetoric of European and especially National Socialist
anti-Semitism. It would seem, then, that all the materials are in
place that would assign Kierkegaard, however marginally, to a
major current of modern European anti-Semitism but perhaps
we are moving too fast if we assume that Kierkegaard himself used
these materials in the manner of the anti-Semite.
As we shall see, these issues go the heart of the Andersen
review, which, in turn, throws light both upon the fate of the
Wandering Jew in Kierkegaards published authorship and upon
how, despite his proximity to what were to become dominant tropes
Cosmopolitan faces
of anti-Semitism, Kierkegaard made a very different use of the
anti-Semites materials. This, in turn, both enlarges and claries
our picture of the scope and thrust of Kierkegaards own critique
of the Age. We begin by examining Kierkegaards treatment of
the Wandering Jew in the early journals and the place of this motif
in his early thought, before proceeding to review the legend it-
self and its signicance for Kierkegaards time. We shall then see
how this complex of ideas relates both to Andersens novel and to
Kierkegaards review of it, before drawing some general conclu-
sions regarding Kierkegaards Zeitkritik.
I I
In the early journals the gure of the Wandering Jewoccurs chiey
in association with the complementary gures of Don Juan and of
Faust, a trio dened by Kierkegaard as three great ideas repre-
senting life in its three tendencies, as it were, outside of religion
( JP I: q). These are discussed chiey in the light of their role
as subjects for artistic representation or as they are represented in
works of art by Mozart, Goethe and Lenau.

At the same time they

are seen to be connected by a historical dialectic in such a way that
they represent more and more intensely conscious manifestations
of the separation of the subject from the religious substance of a
homogeneous social and cosmic order ( JP II: ::8; JP I: ).

Of the three gures the Jew is dealt with least extensively. Al-
though there is a total of fourteen entries in which he is mentioned,

most of these are somewhat cursory. Yet it is clear that Kierkegaard

took pains to inform himself about primary sources of the legend
as well as reading what he could of its more recent literary rework-
ings. His own understanding of the Jews signicance is well illus-
trated by some critical remarks made in one of the lengthiest entries

See, for example, JP II: ::, ::8, ::q, ::8o, ::8, ::8; JP IV: q; JP V: oq..

For a fuller justication of this reading see my Kierkegaard: The Aesthetic and the Religious,
pp. 8q.

JP I: ; JP II: ::q, ..o6; JP V: o8, :oq, ::o, :::, ::., :q, :q, :q, :q6, :q.
Also, in the Danish edition, I C 6 ( a quotation from E. T. A. Hoffmann which describes
the Jewas wandering durch das bunteste Gew uhl der Welt, ohne Freude, ohne Hoffnung,
ohne Schmerz, in dumpfer Gleichg ultigkeit, die das caput mortuum der Verzweifelung
ist, wie durch eine unwirthbare trostlose Ein ode).
6 Kierkegaard, religion and culture
dealing with the subject, an entry relating to a late-eighteenth-
century German treatment of the legend. This source seems to
have concentrated on what might be called the curiosity value of
the Jew, who is depicted in conversation with representatives of four
different nations at the Leipzig Easter Fair. Kierkegaard comments:
he is here conceived, as in most adaptations, more as the temporal Jew
than as the eternal Jew, that is, completely atomized time is presented
in its multiple, variegated forms, but on the whole, instead of the more
inwardly turned eye, signifying the deepest, most silent despair, there
is the perception of external objects in and for themselves, and he is
endowed with a good bit of garrulousness (lazonea), characteristic of
an adventurer. ( JP V: :q6)
The denition of the Jew that Kierkegaard himself offers here
as the representative of the more inwardly turned eye, signifying
the deepest, most silent despair is, however, only one side of the
picture. By way of contrast Kierkegaard elsewhere comments that:
The present age is the age of despair, the age of the Wandering Jew
(many reforming Jews) ( JP I: ). From the juxtaposition of these
texts (dating from :8 and :86 respectively) we may establish a
correlationbetweenthe gure of the Jewand the concept of despair
in a form specic to the condition of modernity. This correlation
is especially marked in relation to the political (and by implication
the literary) left, the reformist tendency, represented in Denmark
by those with whom Kierkegaard crossed swords in his polemical
articles attacking the liberal newspaper Fdrelandet and in his :8
address to the Student Association. It is this political manifestation
of modernity (the whole newer development (EPW, p. 6o)) that, as
we have seen, Kierkegaard targets with particular ferocity in From
the Papers of One Still Living, an attack focussed on the whole brood of
select abstract Cosmopolit-Gesichter [cosmopolitan faces]. In addition
to his Danish opponents we must also (and importantly) count the
left-wing literary movement known as Young Germany amongst
these cosmopolitan faces (see EPW, p. qn.).
To summarize: the Wandering Jew symbolizes for Kierkegaard
the despair of the present age, a despair rootedinits separationfrom
the substantial ground of religion and manifesting itself in both
political reformmovements and philosophical nihilism. Also, as we
Cosmopolitan faces
shall see, this despair is central to the problematic of contemporary
literature, a problematic that might be dened in the form of a
question: how can good literature be written in a cultural situation
of fragmentation and the decay of tradition? That is to say: how
can good literature be produced outside of religion?
To explore these questions further we turn now to the gure of
Poul Martin Mller with a view to examining his signicance both
for Kierkegaards understanding of the Wandering Jew(as reected
in the early journals) and for the question of literature and the
philosophy of the life-viewas that is raised in the early journals and
papers.
Mller, Professor of Philosophy at Copenhagen University and
a celebrated poet, was clearly a teacher to whom Kierkegaard had
both intellectual and personal ties. Mller died in :88, but the
extent of Kierkegaards sense of indebtedness shines through the
dedication of The Concept of Anxiety to him, and in the references
to Mllers essay on immortality in Concluding Unscientic Postscript.
Central to Mllers philosophy was the concept of the life- or
world-view, a concept also central to Kierkegaards critique of
Andersen. For Mller, as later for Kierkegaard, this concept per-
formed a synthesizing role in bringing together a whole range of
concerns: philosophical, moral, cultural and aesthetic.
6
Although idealistically grounded, Mllers thought was charac-
terizedby a degree of empiricismanda strong sense of the inviolable
integrity of the personality that made him an early critic of Hegel
in Denmark. For Mller, as for contemporaries like the evangel-
ical poet B. S. Ingemann and, mutatis mutandis, Kierkegaard, the
issue crystallized around the question of immortality. In Mllers
view there can be no absolute or presuppositionless beginning to
philosophy (as the Hegelians claimed), because the human subject
is always already immersed in and shaped by a given social and
empirical reality.
6
For the relationship between Kierkegaard and Mller, see, for example, W. Glyn Jones,
S oren Kierkegaard and Poul Martin Mller, Modern Language Review 6o, :q6, pp. 8.;
Gregor Malantschuk, Sren Kierkegaard og Poul M. Mller, Kierkegaardiana , :qq, pp.
.o; G. Pattison, Nihilism and the Novel: Kierkegaards Literary Reviews, in British
Journal of Aesthetics, Vol. .6, No. ., :q86, pp. :6::; Pattison, Kierkegaard: The Aesthetic and
the Religious, pp. .8. See also the references in A. Hannay, Kierkegaard: A Biography,
Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, .oo:.
8 Kierkegaard, religion and culture
Purely on his own, as a single individual, no one would come to con-
sciousness of religious concepts: he who believes that he has put aside
external authority and solely by free self-activity of thought has gained
a new result, which is his purely personal possession, has neverthe-
less . . . always received a signicant impetus from the tradition, without
which his thought would have lost itself in subjective, fruitless fancy.

The empirical and social bases of an authentic world-view are

rmly indicated in the following passage:
The Christiantradition, empirical experience, as well as the higher experi-
ence in which the supersensuous encounters us in a real format particular
times and places give the discrete points which must have their place in
a proper world-view, and the systematic, philosophic exposition only ex-
presses with formal perfection that knowledge which is rst present in an
immediate way and in an inarticulate form.
8
The literary scholar Uffe Andreasen has shown that Mller was
preoccupied with the phenomenon of nihilism over many years.
He saw manifestations of nihilism in aspects of Romanticism and,
philosophically, in Schopenhauer,
q
and he was dubious as to the
extent to which a proper world-view could be attained by those
living in the present age. The repudiation of tradition by the left
specically removes one of the main buttresses of the world-view.
Anticipating Kierkegaards critique of the Romantic appropriation
of Fichtean irony, Mller wrote, irony is a consequent develop-
ment of the fruitless struggle to construct a self-enclosed ethical
system from the standpoint of the individual. This method must
necessarily end with the loss of all content, with moral nihilism.
:o
Once such irony has been unleashed on the world it is hard to
see where it will stop:
I nurture a doubt as to whether the basic view, for whose defence these
pages give a provisional contribution, can, by any amount of effort, be
vindicated in the present time. It is very possible that [the spirit of ] nega-
tion has still not reached the point which must be reached, so that it can
be made apparent that the desolation it brings with it is not the sphere in
which the human spirit is at home.
::

Poul Martin Mller, Om Uddeligheden, in Efterladte Skrifter, rd edn, 6 vols., Copen-

hagen, Reitzel, :86, Vol. V, p. 6.
8
Ibid., pp. 6qo.
q
See Uffe Andreasen, Poul Mller og Romantismen, Copenhagen, Gyldendal, :q.
:o
Mller, Om Begrebet Ironie, in Efterladte Skrifter, Vol. III, p. :..
::
Om Uddeligheden, p. :.
Cosmopolitan faces q
This nihilism has, for Mller, clear political implications. In one
of his poems he says of the child of nineteenth-century rational
man that he is an old man who never jokes,/His music the ring-
ing chimes of rebellion;/He is pale with wrath,/And murder is his
game.
:.
The life-view, or lack of it, is, moreover, crucial to the situation
of the artist. Mller summarized his position on this point by his
statement that he, who feels himself in discord with himself and
with existence, cannot possibly be a genuine poet.
:
In all these dimensions of the philosophy of the life-view, Mller
provided the philosophical framework that Kierkegaard was to put
to use in the Andersen review. Kierkegaards denition of the life-
view as the transubstantiation of experience . . . an unshakeable
certainty in oneself won from all experience (EPW, p. 6) and his
subsequent lambasting of Andersen for lack of such a starting-point
echo the spirit of Mllers personalistic philosophy.
Yet there is far more to the KierkegaardMller axis than that. It
is not the case that Kierkegaard simply lifted his interpretation of
nihilism from Mller. It is more accurate to see both Kierkegaard
andMller recognizing the political, intellectual andcultural power
of contemporary nihilism and spelling out the problems that the
situation of nihilism raises for those whose instincts are more con-
servative and traditionalist. If Kierkegaard criticizes the disinte-
gration of the elements of the life-view as that disintegration is
manifested in Andersens novel, it is clear that this is not merely
an individual failing on Andersens part. It is rather that Andersen
represents one point at which the general destiny of the age be-
comes manifest. This destiny we might say doom lay upon the
age as a whole. Kierkegaards own early journals are replete with
aphorisms that can be read as expressive of the nihilistic mood, as
can the aesthetic stance described in Either/Or Part :.
Kierkegaards identication of the Wandering Jewas a symbolic
representative of the despair of the present age also links him to
Mller. Between :86 and :8 (a time when Kierkegaard was
closely associated with the older philosopher), Mller too wrote a
series of fragments, entitled Ahasverus, which took the Jew as a rep-
resentative of moral nihilism. Frithiof Brandt suggested that these
:.
Mller, Kunstneren mellem Oprrerne, in Efterladte Skrifter, Vol. I, p. :.
:
Mller, Recension af Extremerne, in Efterladte Skrifter, Vol. VI, pp. 68.
8o Kierkegaard, religion and culture
aphorisms constitute an intellectual portrait of Kierkegaard him-
self during his own nihilistic phase, but whatever truth there may
be in such a speculation, the intellectual proximity of these apho-
risms to, for example, the Diapsalmata of Either/Or is striking.
:
Your ignorant half-philosophers believe that every philosophical system
which comes out is new; but I have experienced in many circles that
philosophy has run through its natural stages many times and I have
heard the same squabbles about the same problems. To me the whole
thing is only a cycle of pieces in a barrel-organ.
Your ignorant priests believe that there is an absolute difference between
good and evil, but they do not observe that I stand precisely at the zero-
point on lifes thermometer.
Amongst a shower of merry bachelors I began by playing the part of a
good-humoured old fellow who was young with the young; but as I saw
the mood of the gathering pass through every gradation fromsmarminess
through to self-satised uprightness and from loving embraces through to
disharmony then my face took on an expression of utter weariness with
the whole of existence, and I let out, with an unspeakable grimace: Bah!
Everyone dropped their glasses, and it became as still as the grave. It was
a Medusas head I had showed them. . .
Ahasverus wills nothing. He regards himself as innitely higher than those
who will anything.
Ahasverus has such complete consciousness of all his movements and of
what is characteristic of his utterances, that there is no longer anything
spontaneous about him; but it follows fromthat that he is essentially always
playing a role, for he must plan out what should occur spontaneously.
:
The whole collection is little more than a series of such sketches.
But we cansee init important anticipations of Kierkegaards depic-
tion of contemporary nihilism: the drawing of cynical conclusions
affecting both morals and knowledge froma relativistic philosophy,
the problem of boredom as symptomatic of a rootless society, the
displacement of natural immediacy by contrivance and deception.
If Mllers Ahasverus lacks the political dimension touched on in
some of his other writings (and strongly hinted at by Kierkegaard
in the Andersen review as well as in his polemical articles), it
:
See Walter Lowrie, Kierkegaard, London and New York, Oxford University Press, :q8,
p. :.
:
Mller, Ahasverus, in Efterladte Skrifter, Vol. III, pp. :q6..
Cosmopolitan faces 8:
none the less sets out the basic premisses which underlie what
both men regarded as the political and cultural malaise of their
time. Ahasverus is the doom hanging over an age which is no
longer capable of the healthy and health-giving life-view. In mak-
ing this judgement, neither Mller nor Kierkegaard was operating
in a vacuum, and in order to see how their evaluation of the image
of the Wandering Jew belonged within the cultural discourse of
their time, let us now turn to survey the history of the legend itself,
and its transmutation in and beyond the Romantic era.
I I I
The legend of the Wandering Jew seems to have originated in the
period of the crusades.
:6
A number of thirteenth-century sources,
notably Roger of Wendover, Matthieu Paris and Philip of Navarre,
refer to a Jew, variously named as Malchus (the High Priests
servant whose ear was cut off by Peter), Cartaphilus and Jean
Boutedieu, who, though a contemporary of the Christ, was be-
lieved to be still alive. He is variously said to have been baptized
by Ananias, to have supernatural knowledge, to be able to cure
illnesses and to nd hidden treasures; despite his appearance as a
poor pilgrimhe is really wealthy, and he cannot succumb to torture
or even execution, but is condemned never to remain more than
three days in one place.
The sixteenth century saw a signicant development and popu-
larization of the legend (as was also the case with Faust). Matthieu
Pariss account, translated into German in :86, became the
basis for the virtually denitive account published in :6o. under
the title Kurtze Beschreibung und Erzehlung von einem Juden mith Namen
Ahasverus welcher bey der Creutzigung Christi selber Pers onlich gewesen auch
das Crucige uber Christum habe helfen schreyen (A Short Description and
Narration of a Jew called Ahasverus who was Personally Present at the Cru-
cixion of Christ and who also Helped to Call Down the Crucify Him on
Christ). This text relates the claim of one Paul de Eitzen, Doctor
:6
For the material in this section I amparticularly indebted to Edgar Knecht, Le mythe du Juif
errant: essai de mythologie litteraire et de sociologie religieuse, Grenoble, Presses Universitaires, :q.
See also G. K. Anderson, The Legend of the Wandering Jew, Providence: Brown University
Press, :q6.
8. Kierkegaard, religion and culture
of Theology and Bishop of Schleswig, to have met and spoken
with the Jew in Hamburg in :.. Other sightings were common
in Spain, Vienna, Poland, Paris and Silesia as well as in northern
Germany. From this period texts begin to multiply in some cases
taking on an anti-Semitic avour (in Spain the spread of the legend
can be connected with the expulsion of the Jews).
The most frequent form of the story narrates how Ahasverus, a
cobbler in Jerusalem who had been part of the crowd that called
for Christs crucixion, is standing by his front door on the road
up to Golgotha when Christ arrives carrying his cross. Christ asks
if he can sit down and rest, but Ahasverus rebuffs him, to which
Christ responds by prophesying that it is he, Ahasverus, who must
now keep on walking until the end of the world.
Apart from performing the function in an age of nascent his-
toricism of having been an eye-witness to the saving events of the
Christian religion, Ahasverus became the focus of many legendary
accretions. Some of these, as already indicated, had an anti-Semitic
bias, using the legend (in Girards sense) as a text of persecution.
Thus, Ahasverus is blamed for the perpetual covering of snow on
the Alps, whilst his presence is sometimes said to bring sterility.
Yet he is also celebrated as having instituted apple-growing in one
region of France, and protects against serpents as well as bringing
good harvests. Some legends have him at work amassing faggots
with which to burn the earth on the Last Day.
He is characteristically an artisan gure, sometimes said to have
been a mason who worked on the Temple. In this respect, as with
regard to his suffering, he is often portrayed sympathetically, one
whose complaint is narrated with compassion, whilst remaining a
warning to the impenitent.
In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the legend under-
goes a number of permutations. In the age of the Enlightenment
his travels and historical knowledge make of him a mouthpiece
for enlightened values of universal curiosity, tolerance and the cri-
tique of religious and social institutions that claim a premature
absolutism. In the words of Edgar Knecht the story is transformed
from a history to memoirs and from myth to fable.
:
:
See Knecht, Le mythe du Juif errant, pp. and 8:.
Cosmopolitan faces 8
With the Romantic movement further dramatic transformations
are set in motion. A major text is Der Ewige Jude, a poem by
C. F. D. Schubart, whose imprisonment for ten years by the then
Duke of W urttemberg in the late eighteenth century helped estab-
lish the poets credentials as a Romantic hero and role model.
The theme of longing for death is recurrent in Schubarts work.
It is often treated in the language and in the tone of pietistic de-
votion, but in Der Ewige Jude it is powerfully dramatized in
Ahasverus passionate complaint.
:8
Ahasverus is discovered in a
cave on Mount Carmel, angrily throwing down the skulls of his
father, his wives and his children all of whom have been able
to die, whilst he is denied Deaths sweet comfort, the comfort of
the graves peace. Having vainly sought death in battle or as the
prey of wild beasts he challenges the Almighty: Fearful wrathful
One in Heaven/ Have you in your armoury/ Any more fearful
punishment [than not to be able to die]? In this way Ahasverus
becomes the voice of protest against heavenly (and, by implication,
earthly) despotism, though, at the end of the poem, he is promised
release by an angel, who says, Now sleep . . . Ahasverus,/ sleep a
sweet sleep; God is not angry for ever!/ When you awake, He will
be there/ Whose blood you saw ow at Golgotha;/ And He will
forgive even you. (It is an indication of Schubarts sensitivity to
the theological implications of a hard reading of the legend that
the initial doom on Ahasverus is not spoken by Christ but by the
angel of death: the poet wishes to draw a clear line between the
(Christian) God of love and the ideological image of God as an
arbitrary despot.)
The image of the Wandering Jew continued to haunt German
Romanticism. Schiller (in Der Geisterseher), A.W. Schlegel (in Die
Warnung), Nicholas Lenau and Achim von Arnim (Halle und
Jerusalem) were amongst those who took up the theme, using the
gure of the Jew to explore the anguished problem of human im-
potence in the face of destiny
:q
and to give expression to the mal du
si`ecle. Sinclair Lewis in The Monk and Charles Maturin in Melmoth the
Wanderer incorporated the Jew into the genre of the Gothic novel.
:8
In Gesammelte Schriften und Schicksale, Hildesheim and New York, Olms, :q., Vol. IV,
pp. 6ff.
:q
Knecht, Le mythe du Juif errant, pp. :6.
8 Kierkegaard, religion and culture
In Britain, Schubarts poem, in a dirty and torn copy, was
picked up by Shelley from a bookstall in Lincolns Inn Fields and
inspired him to use Ahasverus as a prototypical Promethean gure
inQueenMab, giving the Jewthe task of declaiming a massive and
relentless indictment of divine injustice. Here Ahasverus answers
the question Is there a God? with the response:
ay, an almighty God,
And vengeful as almighty!
In contrast to Schubarts poem, even Christ is implicated by
Shelley in the terrible wrath of Gods tyrannous omnipotence:
humbly he came,
Veiling his horrible Godhead in the shape
Of man, scorned by the world, His name unheard,
Save by the rabble of His native town,
Even as a parish demagogue. He led
The crowd; he taught them justice, truth, and peace,
In semblance; but he lit within their souls
The quenchless ames of zeal, and blessed the sword
He brought on earth to satiate with the blood
Of truth and freedom His malignant soul.
At length his mortal frame was led to death.
I stood beside Him: on the torturing cross
No pain assailed his unterrestrial sense;
And yet he groaned. Indignantly I summed
The massacres and miseries which His name
Had sanctioned in my country, and I cried,
Go! Go! in mockery.
A smile of godlike malice reillumined
His fading lineaments. I go, He cried,
But thou shalt wander oer the unquiet earth
Eternally. The dampness of the grave
Bathed my imperishable front. I fell,
And long lay tranced upon the charm` ed soil.
When I awoke Hell burned within my brain . . .
But my soul
From sight and sense of the polluting woe
Of tyranny, had long learned to prefer
Hells freedom to the servitude of heaven.
.o
.o
From Percy Bysshe Shelley, Queen Mab, in The Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley. Vol. I.
Lyrics and Shorter Poems, London, Toronto and New York, J. M. Dent, :qo, pp. q8:oo.
Cosmopolitan faces 8
This is the quintessential expression of the Romantic Ahasverus:
the voice of anguished protest against a human condition which
is experienced as both politically and metaphysically unjust, a
voice pleading for liberation and for the advent of a new era of
freedom.
ADanish Ahasverus appeared fromthe hand of B. S. Ingemann,
whose Leaves from the Pocket Book of Jerusalems Shoemaker appeared in
:8 and was noted by Kierkegaard.
.:
Ingemanns pious work,
which consists of a sequence of short poems, has little of Shelleys
tone of rebellion. His Ahasverus is more an Everyman who is
confronted with the riddle of a temporal existence in a nite world
that none the less has intimations of immortality. In the poem
Thoughts of Death he laments that: My eye looks beyond clouds
and stars/ For the way, by which Enoch ascended above./ I search
for Jacobs ladder:/ Is there a bridge to heaven from the realm of
death? The poem concludes: Immortal, [yet burdened] with the
dark thought of death,/ My soul hovers between heaven and the
abyss. In this situation of questioning doubt, The veil of eternity
is nowhere torn in such a way that we might catch glimpses of the
other side. Yet and as opposed to other Romantic Wandering
Jews this Ahasverus nds some comfort in the continuity and
companionship of nature. In My Mothers House Ahasverus pro-
claims Abandoned no longer, no more do I go alone:/ Here stirs
a spirit which understands me./ I talk to the ower of the eld, to
wood and lake,/And a thousand voices answering bring comfort
to my soul. Nor is he without nal hope. The concluding poem,
Redemptions Word, looks to the day when Ahasverus, with all
of Israel, shall hear Gods voice calling him to share the life of the
kingdom.
In this period Ahasverus also journeyed to France, from where
the most remarkable of all the Romantic reworkings of the legend
was to come: Edgar Quinets poetic drama Ahasverus (:8), written
in the form of a mystery play. Best remembered as a precursor of
Flauberts The Temptation of Saint Anthony, it inaugurated in its own
time a ood of Wandering Jew literature, comprising plays and
even an opera in France in the :8os and :8os. The genre included
.:
B. S. Ingemann, Blade af Jerusalems Skomagers Lommebog, Copenhagen, Andreas Seidelin,
:8. See JP V: :q.
86 Kierkegaard, religion and culture
Eug` ene Sues enormously successful novel of :8 in which the Jew
becomes the spokesman for anti-clericalist and socialist forces. In
this novel, as in other contemporary French works (for example,
A.-L. Constants Trois harmonies of :8) the Jew champions the
values of the common man and of the masses the people
..
a
tendency that, ultimately, facilitated the appropriation of the Jewby
those who sawthe perceived triumph of such values as symptomatic
of the levelling forces of cosmopolitanism.
Quinets chef duvre remains one of the supreme examples of
this literature and is representative of the cultural prole of the
Wandering Jew in the period when Kierkegaard began to take an
interest in the topic. Although there is no evidence of Kierkegaard
having read this work, the life and literature of Paris were, as we
have seen, much discussed in the contemporary Danish press and,
in this case as in many others, Paris (even in the market-town
of Copenhagen) served as the capital of the nineteenth century,
that is, as embodying the whole newer development with which
Kierkegaard is at this time taking issue.
.
The signicance of Paris
in this respect is, as we shall see, alluded to by Kierkegaard in
the course of From the Papers of One Still Living, and Quinets drama
may fairly be taken as epitomizing the intellectual and cultural
tendencies that Kierkegaard discerns in the Wandering Jew and
that The Papers sets out to address.
Quinets work is, in effect, nothing less than a mythological
retelling of the history of the world, from the dawn of creation
to Judgement Day and beyond. It is, God says in the Prologue,
Along story by which even I amoppressed.
.
It is divided into four
Days, with Prologue and Epilogue. Day One, Creation, begins in
the Orient, and narrates the rise and fall of the ancient empires of
the East: India, Iran and Egypt. The cities of the ancient world are
shown discoursing among themselves until Jerusalem announces
the advent of a new God. In the personages of the three Kings the
eastern cities pay their tribute to this new arrival. They present a
..
The same chord has been struck more recently in Stefan Heym, The Wandering Jew, New
York, Holt, Rinehart & Winston, :q8 (German title: Ahasver, :q8).
.
Many of the authors, such as Scribe, St-Georges and Sue, who dealt with this theme were
certainly familiar to Kierkegaard in other connections.
.
Edgar Quinet, Ahasverus in Oeuvres compl`etes, :o vols., Paris, :88, Vol. VII, p. 6. Further
references are to act and scene numbers.
Cosmopolitan faces 8
chalice lled with tears from which each of them has drunk and a
crown with studs of gold, which Mary sees as drops of blood and
spines of Judaean wood. The gifts are, as yet, too heavy for the in-
fant to bear. Returning, the Kings ndtheir former realms devalued
and worthless.
Day Two deals with the passion and depicts the decisive en-
counter between Christ and Ahasverus. This is considerably
embroidered and lengthened. Thus, Christ asks for water and
Ahasverus replies that the well is dry; Christ asks for helpincarrying
the cross andAhasverus refuses; Christ asks tosit downonthe bench
by Ahasverus door but is told No room; Christ asks if he might
sit on the threshold No; again, Christ asks if he might have a
stool No.
A: Be on your way.
Christ: I wished to save you.
A: Prophet, get out of my shadow. Your way lies in front of you. Walk,
walk.
Christ: Why did you say that, Ahasverus? It is you who will go on walking
until Judgement Day . . . in my place you will carry the burden which I will
lay down on the cross. To quench your thirst you will drink what I have left
in the bottom of my chalice . . . You will inherit my eternal sorrow. . . You
will be the man who never dies.
Via the Sack of Rome, Ahasverus arrives for Day Three, Death,
in a medieval Rhineland town. Here we are introduced to Rachel,
an erstwhile angel who, because she shed a tear for Ahasverus,
has been sent down to earth to assist Mob, the witch-like gure of
Death. Although not initially recognizing each other, Rachel and
Ahasverus fall in love and he begins to wonder whether his long
torment will soon be over. Mob, however, ridicules the power of
love Nature is made up of atoms, and thats all there is, she says
(Day : :o). The sphere of the worlds is a great zero which traces its
emptiness in empty space (: :.). In a later scene, showing herself in
her true skeletal form, she lists her own names: Void, abyss, desert,
ruination, nothingness [neant], dust, /And, nally, in every case,
I am NOTHING [le RI EN] (: :). Rejected by the Church, by society,
by everything, and with only their love, Rachel and Ahasverus set
out to wander the earth until the Last Day, when Christs cup of
sorrows will nally have been drained.
88 Kierkegaard, religion and culture
Day Four takes us many centuries further to that Last Day. The
world is desert-like. God is dead, says the mythological voice of
Ocean; let us perform his funeral rites. The last night, the im-
mense night, will come, sighs Ahasverus. Yet even when the world
is ended, he fears, sorrow will still remain: Sorrow without name,
sorrow without voice, sorrow without form. . . There still remains
in his glass a taste of bitterness . . . a word called despair. Yet, fol-
lowing scenes of cataclysmic judgement that offer a recapitulation
of world-history, there is a nal reconciliation between Ahasverus
and Christ.
Christ: have you drunk all that remains of the worlds sorrow?
A: Rachel has drunk it with me.
Christ: Do you want to return to your home in the Orient?
A: No. I ask for life, not rest. Instead of the steps of my house on Calvary,
I would like without pausing to mount the steps of the universe. Without
taking breath, I would like to whiten my soles on the dust of the stars,
to climb, always to climb, from world to world, from heaven to heaven,
without ever re-descending, in order to see the source from which you
have made to issue the centuries and the years . . . Bless me, and I will
leave this evening towards these future worlds which you already inhabit.
Christ: Who will follow you?
The Universe: No we dont want to go forward.
Rachel : I will.
The Universe: A woman caused my loss, a woman has saved me.
Christ: Yes, this voice has saved you, Ahasverus. I bless you, the pilgrim
of the worlds to come and the second Adam. (: :)
Mob ( Death) cannot now follow Ahasverus and Rachel, for
Ahasverus is, as The Father Eternal condes to Christ, the ever-
lasting man. Yet this is not the last word. The Epilogue nds Christ
alone. Since Ahasverus has returned the chalice, his wounds have
reopened and his tears fall into the abyss. Why, he asks himself, has
the universe collapsed about him?
Ah! How the sky is empty; how I am alone in the rmament. One after
the other the angels have folded their wings . . . Mary my mother is dead;
And my Father, Jehovah, said to me on his death-bed: Christ, my time
has come . . . Go! Your father is dead. The Universe has shaken its God
from off its branch [as] a g-tree [shakes off ] its leaves.
Christ now doubts himself.
Cosmopolitan faces 8q
Who have I been? Who am I? Who will I be tomorrow? Word without
life? or Life without Word? World without God? or God without World?
Equally nothing. (Epilogue)
Eternity calls on him to accept a new death, a new sepulchre,
fromthe dust of which a newheaven and a newAdammight be cre-
ated. Christ thereupon dying, Eternity buries both Father and Son
in a frozen star without fellow or light. Eternity and Nothingness
are left to exchange the closing words of the Mystery.
Nothingness: At least, me, you will keep me. I take up little room.
Eternity: But you make too much noise. Neither Being nor Nothingness;
I want nothing but myself.
Nothingness: Who then will keep you in your desert?
Eternity: I!
Nothingness: And, if not I, who will put in place your crown?
Eternity: I! (Epilogue)
The love of Ahasverus and Rachel, it seems, may in some sense
transcend the power of death and the material extension of the
visible universe but there is a nal absolute, eternal but with-
out quality, thought or feeling in the face of which even love
and even the personal divinity of Christian theology come to an
end.
If Quinets excessive and often heavy-handed symbolism of
which we have glimpsed only the merest tip of the iceberg seems
far removed from the simplicity of the original medieval legend,
it is clear that he uses that legend to explore fundamental issues
in the understanding of religion and modernity. The new universe
uncovered by science, the historical relativity of the worlds various
religions, empires, and philosophies, the problemof time and issues
of cosmic justice are all explored in the light of radical humanism
and nihilism. Half a century before Nietzsche the death of God is
placed rmly on the modern agenda. That the story of Ahasverus
could be used in this way to bring so many of the decisive themes of
the contemporary critique of religion into focus is highly signicant
for what we have seen of Kierkegaards exploration of the Jew,
as also for his reading of Andersens novel. It is to this that we
now turn.
qo Kierkegaard, religion and culture
IV
If it is accepted that the gure of Ahasverus belongs somewhere in
the young Kierkegaards intellectual background, there may still
be some question as to how directly relevant he is to the specic
case of Andersen as novelist, and more particularly, of Andersen
as author of Only a Fiddler. Andersen himself appears in the re-
view as a very different gure from the Jew. For if Ahasverus is
identied in texts from Shelley to Quinet and Mller (not to men-
tion Kierkegaards own early journals) as representing the dynamic
forces of contemporary relativism and nihilism, Andersen is repre-
sented by Kierkegaard as a victim rather than as an agent of this
tendency. To be sure, by producing literature devoid of a prop-
erly synthesized life-view, Andersen also participates in the further
propagation of the ages essential sickness but, even so, he is a
symptom rather than a source of the problem. Ahasverus, on the
other hand, is in himself representative of the essence of nihilism.
What, then, is the specic justication for relating Ahasverus to this
review in particular, other than in the light thrown by the theme
on Kierkegaards general concerns at this point in his authorship?
To answer this question we must pay closer attention than most
commentators have done to Andersens novel itself.
The novel opens in the little Fyn town of Svendborg, home to
Christian, the novels hero and the eponymous ddler. Chris-
tians father (Christian is only a little child at this point) and an old
soldier friend are observing the storks nesting on a neighbouring
roof. Their reections on the birds migrations lead them to speak
of their own travels and a strong contrast is drawn between the
world of little Denmark, a cosy world of familial intimacy, and the
magical, mysterious world beyond, a world promising novelty and
adventure.
But the stork is not the only symbol of this wider world. It is
no accident that the neighbour on whose roof the storks are seen
nesting is an old and wealthy Jewish money-lender. With him lives
his granddaughter Naomi, and one day Christian, whose father
is only a poor tailor, breaks through the dividing wall into the
Jews garden, where he meets Naomi. Everything about her and
about the garden has an overwhelming effect on him. It is as if
Cosmopolitan faces q:
a new and exotic world has opened up. He stood in a land of
dreams, losing himself in the sight.
.
Naomis gazelle-eyes evoke
her Asiatic race. The owers, the scents, the garden-house and
the game invented by Naomi (money-lending!) transport Christian
into a newhesperidean world, which seemed far removed fromhis
usual home . . . Never had he played so happily before.
The next day, however, the hole in the wall has been blocked up
and the magical world is closed to him. But Christian and Naomi
are soon brought together again, when her grandfathers house
catches re and is burnt to the ground. The old man himself dies
and Christians parents take Naomi in. The old mans remains are
taken away by boat to be buried in a Jewish cemetery in Fredericia.
In Christians imagination the journey is one to a far, far-off land
of fantasy, perhaps not far distant from Jerusalem, the Jews royal
city.
.6
Maria, Christians mother, comments, The poor people.
They dont even nd rest in death. They must travel to be put in
the earth. Shortly afterwards, a grandly appointed coach arrives
and an elderly, noble lady descends to take Naomi off to a new
life. This, however, is only the rst of many wanderings for her,
wanderings which include Vienna, Italy and Paris (portrayed as
the city of atheism par excellence (EPW, p. qn)) and an escapade
with a band of gypsy circus-riders.
From the very beginning Naomi, the Jewess, stands for the ex-
otic, for all that lies beyond the frontiers intellectual, moral and
geographical of little Denmark. The novel ends with Christians
humble funeral procession, comprising a handful of local peasant-
folk, who are forced to step off the road to make way for a coach
and four occupied by Naomi and her husband, a French marquis
(although we knowthat despite its external splendour, the marriage
is unhappy, Naomi being blackmailed by her husband into putting
up with his adultery). As we can learn from Kierkegaards review
(EPW, p. qn), Naomi is also and importantly for our argument
linked to the intellectual movement known as Young Germany,
that is, the literary and intellectual movement most closely
.
Hans Christian Andersen, Kun En Spillemand, Borgen, Det danske Sprog- og Litteratursel-
skab, :q88, p. :8.
.6
Ibid., p. ..
q. Kierkegaard, religion and culture
identied with what Kierkegaard and Mller regarded as nihilism.
The fact that Young Germany itself was shortly to be outstripped
in political radicalism by the Vorm arz movement of the :8os would
scarcely have surprised these Danish critics, who (as the opening
pages of The Papers make clear) regarded them as only the van-
guard, only harbingers, of worse to come. The relationship is very
much like that between the older and the younger Verkhovensky in
Dostoevskys novel The Possessed, in which the idealistic liberalism
(Schillerism) of one generation literally fathers the materialistic
and revolutionary radicalism of the next. The pure idealist begets
a progeny of cosmopolitan faces.
Andersens novel, then, puts into play a sequence of clearly struc-
tured dualities between the safe world of homely Danish traditions
and peasant life that dene Christian, on the one hand, and newer,
wider possibilities represented in Naomi, on the other. It is in the
context of this sequence that the signicance of Christians failure
to achieve a life-view is best appreciated.
As we reect on this, we can see that many of the themes thrown
up by The Papers are not as arbitrary or as unconnected as they
might at rst seem. The philosophical and political polemics of
the opening pages, the celebration of the philosophy of the life-
view as exemplied by Madame Gyllembourg and the critique of
Andersens understanding of selfhood all reect the situation of a
society suddenly caught up into a process of rapid transition and
modernization, a situation reected equally in other early polem-
ical writings dealing with issues of feminism and censorship. Over
this whole situation hangs the doom of absolute nihilism and
that, for Kierkegaard, is the doom of Ahasverus, the doom of the
uprooted, stateless, relativistic wanderer across the face of the earth
and through time, the living exponent of the bad innity, of expe-
rience and of history without goal, purpose or end. If, as has been
suggested, Andersen is a reactive rather than an active gure in this
process, he matters to Kierkegaard precisely in this respect: that in
his novel we begin to see the consequences of nihilism, of the doom
of Ahasverus working itself out on contemporary Danish culture.
The argument is in this way not merely about what it is to be a
person. It is an argument about Danish society and about Danish
values in a world in which a new, levelling universalism is poised to
Cosmopolitan faces q
sweep away the institutions that had given that society and those
values their distinctive cast. Ahasverus is the supreme symbol, the
avant-garde, as it were, of that newworldof cosmopolitanfaces. As
we have seen, Kierkegaard had from early on linked Jews with po-
litical and cultural reforming tendencies and with the consequent
despair of the present age ( JP I: ). In :8., many years later,
writing in the journals about the public and we have seen some-
thing of how the public was seen by him both as the expression
and as the instrument of nihilism Kierkegaard writes:
the Jews are especially suited to be publicists, as our times indicate and
which Poul Mller was well aware of without explaining it, however. The
Jewgenerally lacks imaginationandsensibility, but abstract understanding
he does have and number is his element.
For the publicist the battle of opinions in public life is neither more
nor less than the business of a stock exchange. Just as with the quotations
on stocks and bonds, he is concerned only with the opinion having the
highest percentage. He believes that numbers are ideas which is the very
extremity of idea-emptiness. ( JP III: .q8)
The reference back to Mller indicates that Kierkegaardis think-
ing of his and Mllers interest in the gure of Ahasverus as a sym-
bol of modern nihilism and, although the passage cited does not
make the connection absolutely explicit, the association of the Jew
as publicist with the mechanisms of the stock exchange suggests
another familiar dimension of the image of the Jew in modern
Europe. We should, however, note that this kind of complex of
ideas is not reected in any of Kierkegaards published works and
is only a very occasional element in the journals.
However, the catastrophic history of modern anti-Semitism
means that we cannot avoid facing a difcult question raised for
the contemporary interpretation of Kierkegaard by his readiness
to make these kinds of connections. For, as we have noted, the
gure of The Eternal Jew, precisely understood as a symbol of
left-wing politics and cosmopolitanism, was to be a characteristic
feature of anti-Semitic propaganda later in the nineteenth and on
into the twentieth century, becoming especially prominent in the
Third Reich. The Eternal Jewwas indeed the title of the most notori-
ous of all Nazi propaganda lms, whilst cosmopolitanism became
a key term in Soviet anti-Jewish ideology. It is at the very least
q Kierkegaard, religion and culture
embarrassing that Kierkegaard seems to have espoused a complex
of political and cultural perceptions that were to play such a large
role in the ideological preparation for what was arguably the most
horric of all the twentiethcenturys horric crimes against human-
ity. When, in his inuential biography Kierkegaard, Walter Lowrie
remarks that In [Kierkegaards] day the Jews (men without politi-
cal attachments) were prominent as instigators of liberal reform in
Denmark, as they were also in other lands, and as they are today
[:q8!],
.
we cannot but feel uncomfortable. The comment was,
to put it mildly, untimely. But although we should not be blind
to the fact that later reactionary ideology in Europe was both to
appropriate aspects of Kierkegaards thought and also to put to
sinister use the kind of image of the Wandering Jew developed by,
but not unique to, Kierkegaard, it is essential for us not only to
have a sense of historical perspective and to take into account the
differences between Denmark in the :8os and :8os and the age
of European totalitarianism, but also to be quite clear as to exactly
how Kierkegaard himself uses the Wandering Jew.
The key point is this: Kierkegaards concern with the Wandering
Jew is not directed towards delineating and thereby facilitating the
exclusion of the other, the one-who-we-are-not, but aims at artic-
ulating a condition that belongs to the inner destiny of all who in-
habit the condition of modernity. Indeed, Kierkegaards critique of
Andersen implies that it is precisely by depicting the Jew (Naomi)
as the other and projecting onto this other the responsibility for
Christians decline and fall that Andersen obscures the issue
as to where responsibility for contemporary nihilism really lies.
If Christian is a victim of nihilism, he himself, according to
Kierkegaard, is the only one who can be held responsible for
having become so.
.8
Inthe last resort, corruptioncannot come from
.
Lowrie, Kierkegaard, p. q:.
.8
On the evidence of Only a Fiddler one might judge that it was Andersen rather than
Kierkegaard who is closest to promoting anti-Jewish attitudes. For all the bitter-sweet
fascination Naomi holds for Christian, she ultimately represents the forces that make it
impossible for himto full his destiny. However, there is also a sense of pity for her and for
the poor Jews who have no abiding city on this earth. Andersen returned to the topic in
his story The Jewish Maid. Accepting her mothers dying plea never to receive baptism,
Sara, the Jewish maid of the title, declares her faith in Christ on her own death-bed. After
her burial in the Jewish section of the graveyard, the words of the gospel that promise
a baptism in the Spirit can be heard resounding over her grave. In eternity, in heaven,
Andersen is saying, the confessional divisions of the earth have no place.
Cosmopolitan faces q
without, but only fromwithin. As an ideal type the Wandering Jew
is an existential possibility for Jews and non-Jews alike just as
a modern Don Juan or a modern Faust need not be Spanish or
German.
.q
The fate of the Wandering Jew, condemned to a life
without end or purpose, has to be seen as the fate of all who bear
within themselves the condition of modernity. The responsible ac-
ceptance of this fate a recognition that each of us is, in a sense,
Ahasverus (understood in the spirit of Kierkegaards own later for-
mulation that the single most efcacious because most radical rem-
edy for despair is: despair) may even be a necessary rst step in
the rebirth of religious faith beyond the wasteland.
.q
For a fuller discussion of the question of anti-Semitism in relation to Kierkegaards por-
trayal of the Wandering Jew, see H akon Harket, Kierkegaards evige jde, in J. Garff,
H. Harket, P. E. Tjner and E. Tjnneland, Innvelse i Kierkegaard: re Essays, Oslo,
Cappelen, :qq6. Harket also concludes that the charge of anti-Semitism is misplaced.
Strangely, the rst issue of Kierkegaardiana included an article addressing the question as
to whether Kierkegaard was anti-Jewish, specically in connection with a rather bizarre
and possibly apocryphal biographical anecdote. See K. Bruun Andersen, Kierkegaard
og jderne, Kierkegaardiana I, :q, pp. 8.
CHAPTER
Food for thought
I
After From the Papers of One Still Living Kierkegaards next published
work was his magisters dissertation of :8:, On the Concept of Irony.
Despite being advertised, along with Philipsens other stock, in the
pages of Figaro, the thesis would, as a piece of academic writing,
seem to belong to a very different order of literature from anything
we have been considering so far. In his account of Socrates, the
dissertations centrepiece, Kierkgaard certainly goes a long way to-
wards playing the academic game, citing and debating the contrast-
ing interpretations of such leading contemporary scholarly gures
as Hegel, Schleiermacher, F. C. Baur and F. W. Ast. Yet the kind of
concerns and intuitions, as well as the kind of stylistic and substan-
tive juxtapositions of apparently heterogeneous material, that we
have encountered as characteristic of Kierkegaards feuilletonistic
style show themselves in the thesis to a surprising degree. It was
still unusual Kierkegaards was only the third case for a thesis
to be presented in Danish rather than Latin, and Kierkegaard was
obligedto petitionthe King inorder to get permissionfor this. Strik-
ingly the principal reason offered by him is that the subject-matter
of the thesis belongs pre-eminently to modernity, and despite much
of the thesis being concerned with ancient philosophy this is only
insofar as the modern age has its beginning therein (SKS I, p. ::).
Over and above this, however, Kierkegaards style was sufciently
radical to cause concern bordering on consternation amongst his
examiners. F. C. Petersen, Professor of Greek, wrote of various
stylistic excesses in the direction of sarcasm and raillery that are
unsuitable in an academic work (SKS I, p. :6). P. O. Brndsted,
q6
Food for thought q
another Classics Professor, agreed, noting particular passages in
which certain excrescences show that the writer was not capable
of withstanding the inward temptation to leap over the fence that
separates both a right sort of irony and a reasonable kind of satire
from the unrefreshing domain of vulgar excess (SKS I, p. :). It
is not clear, however, whether Kierkegaard responded at all to de-
mands of this nature. Certainly the text as it stands often shows a
remarkable freedom of analogy, metaphor, comment and applica-
tion. So much so as to occasion considerable debate as to whether it
is to be taken seriously as an academic work at all. Are we to read it
as the registration-piece of an aspiring young right-wing Hegelian,
taking up the Masters commission to go forth and crack the whip
over the nihilistic swarm of political subversives, emancipators of
the esh and proponents of suicide who were to be regarded as the
contemporary heirs of romantic irony?
:
Or is the dissertation itself
deeply ironic, so ironic, in fact, that its demonstration of the nec-
essarily self-ironizing character of any and every attempt to master
irony escaped the notice of all Kierkegaards own contemporaries?
When Kierkegaard subsequently referred to himself with an al-
lusion back to the degree for which the dissertation was offered as
The Master of Irony, was this the expression of a deep satisfaction
with a job well done or an ironic recognition of the impossibility of
the task?
The opening paragraph of the Introduction to the First Part of
the thesis (and every reader of Kierkegaard knows how important
introductions and forewords were to him) strikes a tone that borders
onthe bavardage of a feuilletonwriter. Addressing the Hegelianclaim
that philosophy is nowable to grasp its phenomenon, Kierkegaard
suggests that, even if this is so, it would be better not to hear too
much of the jingling of the philosopher-knights spurs or the raising
of his masculine masters voice as he seeks to seize and hold on
to the phenomenon which, he remarks is always foeminini generis
:
A view that might still hold even if it were also to be acknowledged that by the time of the
dissertation (or shortly thereafter) Kierkegaard had come to see that Hegel himself was
without the authority needed to bring the left into line, since Hegel himself was, deep down,
gripped by the same spirit of scepticism that motivated the ironists and their successors.
Kierkegaards turn to a more personalistic, Christianly orthodox theology would then
belong to an attempt to establish a basis for the critique of irony that would be immune
from ironic subversion.
q8 Kierkegaard, religion and culture
(CI, p. q). The concept (i.e., grasping or mastery), he insists, is not
to be imposed on the phenomenon from without but must accom-
pany the phenomenons own coming to appearance: to elicit its
true formthe philosopher should play the role of an eroticist rather
than of a master. Hegel could, in principle, have agreed but not
only does the tone of the paragraph suggest a certain distance from
the Hegelian project (whose key etymologically derived metaphor
of the concept as an act of grasping its object is being ridiculed),
but the outcome, that the concept must be developed fromthe phe-
nomenon itself, becomes something of a riddle when the concept
itself is a negative concept such as irony that, Kierkegaard states,
resists phenomenalization. But how can one master a concept that
does not show itself ?
The question as to mastery over irony returns in the closing
section of the dissertation, Irony as Controlled Moment: The
Truth of Irony. Following a historical and philosophical appraisal
of Socratic irony, Kierkegaard has turned to irony as an issue
in the contemporary world. Broadly within the paradigm of the
Hegelian critique of Romantic irony, a critique also espoused by
his own mentor Poul Martin Mller, Kierkegaard takes such ex-
ponents of Romantic irony as Friedrich Schlegel, Ludwig Tieck
and K. W. F. Solger to task, attacking Schlegel with particular
ferocity. Here, Kierkegaard has moved from philosophy in a nar-
row sense to the effect of philosophy on literature, pointing out
the malign consequences for literature itself that followed from an
inappropriate use of Fichtean idealism. The same literary empha-
sis is carried through into the closing section, as the question is
posed in terms of the mastery of irony in dramatic writing, with
reference to Shakespeare, Goethe and J. L. Heiberg, and the les-
son learned from the playwrights is then transferred to life in its
practical and theoretical domains. The last three or four pages
in which Kierkegaard makes this application are characterized
by a rapid-re succession of programmatic assertions that beg
just about all the difcult philosophical questions. A prominent
theme is the need to subject irony to the discipline of actuality
but there are precious few clues as to what this might actually
mean! Finally, Kierkegaard comes to the question of ironys eternal
Food for thought qq
validity, i.e., the question as to whether there is a legitimate place
for irony in the religious life. His suggestion is that there is at least
an analogue to irony here, namely, humour, but that whereas irony
relates only to nitude, humour relates to sin, and does so, more-
over, on the grounds of a deeper positivity that has to do with
its theanthropological presuppositions, i.e., its concern with hu-
manitys destiny of future transformation into the God-man. The
style continues to be tersely programmatic and, in any case, as
Kierkegaard nally confesses, all this lies beyond the scope of this
study. However, he also adds one nal recommendation: that if
anyone should want food for further thought Stof til Eftertanke
he would recommend him to read Professor Martensens review
of Heibergs new poems (CI, p. .q). If this remark was suf-
ciently dry not to be numbered amongst those exhibiting a vulgar
excess, it allows of a deeply ironic (perhaps even a simply sarcastic)
reading.
To most Anglophone readers, and probably to most present-
day Danish readers, the reference is almost entirely opaque.
Kierkegaards own contemporaries, however, and certainly those
who attended his defence of the dissertation (including Heiberg
himself ), would have been aware in at least a general sense of
the relevance of the review, and of the poems themselves, to
Kierkegaards topic. From this point of view alone it is worth while
reconstructing the background of the reference. Given the central-
ity of both Martensen and Heiberg to the Hegelian tendency in
Danish thought, such a reconstruction may well also throw light
on the more philosophically proper issue of Kierkegaards rela-
tion to Hegelianism at the time of the thesis, and thereby illustrate
once more the characteristically Kierkegaardian interweaving of
diverse discourses within the space of a single text. At the same
time we shouldnot lose sight of Kierkegaards ownintimationto the
King that his concern in the thesis was with a concept essentially
expressive of the culture of modernity. Let us then seek to employ
Kierkegaards simultaneously magnifying and diminishing binoc-
ulars, and to see how these three words food for thought
can reveal something of the larger critical strategy underlying the
dissertation as a whole.
:oo Kierkegaard, religion and culture
I I
As a playwright, theatrical director and literary and cultural
critic, Heiberg had, as we have seen, considerable importance for
Kierkegaard. As a philosopher, however, Heiberg was also the apos-
tle of Hegelianism in Denmark, being the author of a Hegelian-
inuenced course in logic as well as of a number of popularizing
treatises aimed at promoting the new philosophy. Heiberg applied
the principles of Hegelianismto his own practice as a literary critic,
developing a complex hierarchy of genres involving the subordi-
nation of the merely immediate Romantic school to the more
reective, contemporary comedy that Heiberg himself cultivated.
But how high could even the highest forms of art go? Were there
any limits to the capacities of art? Wasnt Heiberg in danger of do-
ing just what Hegel had criticized the early Romantic acolytes of
Sas for by elevating art to what was properly the place of religion
and giving to art, not religion, the task of shaping the visions of the
innite that offered humanity the ultimate goal of all its striving?
Hegel himself, in the Introduction to his lectures on aesthetics,
had seemed to place a clear limit on what art might reasonably be
expected to achieve in the modern world. There he had asserted
that art, considered in its highest vocation, is and remains for us
a thing of the past . . . the philosophy of art is therefore a greater
need in our day than it was in the days when art by itself as art
yielded full satisfaction. Art invites us to intellectual consideration,
and that not for the purpose of creating art again, but for know-
ing philosophically what art is.
.
This limitation of art in relation
to philosophy and, indeed, within the larger compass of Hegels
system in relation also to religion does not register to anything
like the same degree in Heibergs writings. As a man of the theatre,
Heiberg was not about subordinating art to philosophy, but sub-
ordinating a less adequate form and understanding of art that
of Romanticism to his own more intellectualistic practice and
understanding. For Heiberg, as opposed to Hegel, the distinction
between art and philosophy is narrowed to the point of collapse
so that, as Paul Rubow wrote of Heiberg, poetry is in its highest
.
G. W. F. Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, Oxford, Oxford University Press, :q,
p. ::.
Food for thought :o:
development speculative.

In keeping with this principle, Heiberg

himself attempted to create genuinely speculative poetic works, an
ambition reected principally in the play Fata Morgana and in the
New Poems, the centrepiece of which was the dramatic poem A Soul
after Death.

Before Heiberg had got round to putting his own theory into
poetic practice, however, the question of speculative poetry had
been broached by an ambitious and extremely able young theolo-
gian, Hans Lassen Martensen. In :8 Heiberg published an article
by Martensen in his journal Perseus: A Journal for the Speculative Idea.
The article in question was a review of the dramatic poem Faust
by Nicholaus Lenau. The publication of this coincided with the
period of Kierkegaards own intense preoccupation with the three
representative gures, including Faust, and his journal entry noting
the appearance of Martensens article bears an unmistakable tone
of irritation at having been pre-empted in the eld by someone he
was already regarding as a rival. But what did the article say?
Noting that trying to write a Faust after Goethe is rather like try-
ing to write an Iliad after Homer, Martensen suggests that whether
such a thing is possible at all will depend on the Faust-idea itself
and therefore we shall only be able to say if Goethes treatment has
exhausted the subject once we understand what that idea really
is. What, then, is it? At its simplest it is the idea of the opposition
between good and evil in the theoretical sphere. Now, although the
legend of Faust originated in the Middle Ages, the medieval world
could not do justice to it, since its consciousness was bound to and
constrained by externality (a view of the Middle Ages we also nd
in Kierkegaards early journals of this period). Consciousness only
developed a level of inwardness commensurate with the idea of a

Paul Rubow, Heiberg og hans Skole i Kritiken, Copenhagen, Gyldendal, :q, p. .. This should
not be understood as simple naivety on Heibergs part, but in connection with his whole
programme of improving Danish life and bringing it to the intellectual and cultural level
of the European mainstream. If art took on a philosophical role, this was also because art,
as institutionalized in Heibergs own Royal Theatre, was an instrument of the public realm
and thus had a political, moral and intellectual role in the life of the nation as a whole.
Art was to reect, but also to instruct and to elevate the public in the understanding of
life that most truthfully reected the actual level of contemporary social and intellectual
development, i.e., Hegelianism itself.

Although dramatic in form it was not intended to be staged, although this did occur
(for the rst time in :8q:) after Heibergs death.
:o. Kierkegaard, religion and culture
purely theoretical treatment of the opposition between good and
evil (as opposed, for example, to good knights slaying evil dragons,
or goodChristians slaying evil heathens) inthe Reformation, so that
the Faust-idea could only nd its adequate expression within the
world of Protestantism. Speculative poetry knows no higher tragic
object, for the content is here self-conscious freedom, the thinking
Spirit; the scene . . . is not the tumultuous stage of events inthe outer
world, but the quiet realm of thought.

In this quiet realm Faust

represents the striving of the human race to establish a Kingdom
of the Intellect without God.
6
Poetically, Faust belongs within a type of speculative poetry that
Martensen categorizes as apocalyptic, of which, after the Book
of Revelation and Dantes Commedia it is the third great example.
These works are all linked by a historically determined level of ever-
increasing inwardness. Thus, the Book of Revelation poetically
(sic!) portrays Christianitys triumph over Judaism and Paganism,
whereas Dantes poem is situated in a world that has already been
Christianized and is consequently able to focus more closely on
the details of individual life the abstract-symbolic standpoint
is left behind, and the representation becomes more individual,
more visible, more painterly.

Nevertheless, as an expression of
the medieval consciousness, the Commedia is still constrained by the
external, and its depiction of the journey of the individual soul is
staged in terms of the spatially conceived spheres of hell, purgatory
and paradise.
The imagination presupposes these spheres as given, it regards them as
established in their own right, and seeks only to apprehend their con-
tent; but their own presupposition, their common mid-point, which is
the ground and possibility of such regions, remains concealed from its
gaze. This mid-point in fact is nothing other than freedom itself; for hell,
purgatory and paradise are themselves only the revelation of the great,
universal kingdom of freedom and self-conscious thought.
8
This is the ground on which the drama of Faust is acted out, for
Faust is the expression of thinking self-consciousness, which turns

H. L. Martensen, Betragtninger over Ideen af Faust, Perseus, Journal for den Speculative Idee,
June :8, p. q6.
6
Ibid., p. q.

Ibid., p. :o..
8
Ibid., p. :o.
Food for thought :o
from faith to doubt, and through doubt which has become the
principle of thinking is brought to despair.
q
The moment of doubt, then, is crucial. Doubt, says Martensen,
is thus the mediumthrough which the believing intellect must pass
in order to give foundation to its freedom
:o
; it is the moment of
periculum vitae [mortal danger], for here life and freedom are
themselves at stake.
::
The trial of freedom that occurs in doubt
is, Martensen reminds us, a distinctively Protestant phenomenon,
such that Faust is a historically specic counter-image to Luther.
Faust resists the rst two temptations of the wilderness, to turn
stones into bread (one-sided materialism) and to cast himself down
from the Temple (one-sided idealism), but he succumbs to the
third, for he does not acknowledge the commandment to serve
and to worship God alone. Faustian intellectuality, then, is an in-
tellectuality free from gross externality and materialism, but un-
able to recognize or to accept the ultimate limitation of its own
creatureliness.
Martensen concludes that this idea has not yet been adequately
grasped by any of the poets who have attempted to deal with it.
Finally, then,
The real poetic portrayal of the Christian myth of Faust . . . must therefore
still be awaited. This will rst be able to be produced when the impetus
to this higher union of religion and art emerges more clearly in the con-
sciousness of the age; when the Protestant poet, whose gaze does not
merely turn outward towards nature and history but spontaneously turns
towards the intellectual world itself, completely grasps this attrait of his
genius, when, with clear self-consciousness, he feels his prophetic call, his
arts universality.
:.
Six months later, in January :88, on the occasion of the Kings
birthday a fact entirely relevant to Heibergs belief inthe necessar-
ily public ofce of art and inthe artists duty to give expressionto the
objective consciousness of the age as embodied in the State and so
in the person of the monarch Heiberg staged his own speculative
comedy, Fata Morgana. His reply, perhaps, to Martensens challenge
to the poet of Protestantism?
q
Ibid., p. :o8.
:o
Ibid., p. :oq.
::
Ibid., p. :::.
:.
Ibid., pp. :6.
:o Kierkegaard, religion and culture
The story concerns a prince, Clotaldo, brought up as a hum-
ble shermans son, who falls in love with Margarita, daughter of
Dionision, Duke of Palermo, in whose lands the sher-folks village
lies. When a mirage of Palermo appears in the sky, the villagers are
alarmed, ascribing it to the wicked fairy Fata Morgana, mistress of
illusions. Clotaldo, who feels himself called to the life of poetry, is
stirred, however. Is there no such thing as a beautiful deception?
he asks himself,
And is not Beauty itself a deception? And is a beautiful deception not
worth more than that which the world foolishly calls truth? Oh! He who
grasps only at actuality he is deceived by a false appearance. The Eternal
is the beautiful image which has neither esh, nor blood, neither marrow,
nor bone, but is the light thought of the heavy world, dark actualitys clear
vision in the sky. (I,:)
:
Clotaldo, in short, is a dreamer, and the story of the play is, in
a sense, his conversion from Romanticism to Hegelianism. Fata
Morgana, however, is eager to keep him in thrall to illusion, and
gives him a magical pearl in which every person sees his deep-
est wish. Clotaldo sees a vision of Margarita. But whereas Fata
Morganas plan was for this vision to bind him yet faster to his fan-
tasy world, the plan backres when Margarita herself appears and
Clotaldo realizes that the vision of the pearl is as nothing compared
with the reality of her beauty: whosoever possesses the true object
praises the image no more, even if it is represented as accurately as
it is here . . . my dreaming nature was chained to the image in the
pearl . . . I feel myself set free in Spirit, as I offer illusions phantasms
in exchange for the true appearance (III, .). Naturally, Margarita
feels the same about him, although, at this point, he seems to be
nothing but a shermans son.
By way of a diversion, Heiberg introduces two burlesque charac-
ters, Harlequin and Pierrot, who represent, respectively, a kind of
poetic idealism that despises actuality and a kind of coarsely realist
version of empiricism. Heiberg uses them to lampoon the sterile
antitheses of life before speculation.
:
Citations from Fata Morgana are given by act and scene numbers. I have followed the text
of Volume II of J. L. Heiberg, Poetiske Skrifter, Copenhagen, :86..
Food for thought :o
Harlequin: There is no third position. We two are everything. That is to
say, we would be if one were to put us together.
Pierrot: What a noble thought! We two are everything. Let me embrace
you.
Harlequin: Withpleasure! Let ideality kiss reality. Nowwe are the absolute.
Pierrot: One moment, Signor Harlequin! Do not let your fantasy over-
shoot your understanding! The absolute can never be realized by nite,
earthly beings; one can only approach it by an eternally maintained
progress towards the unobtainable perfection. Consider that, however
tightly we hold on to each other, we shall for all that never fuse into one
being. We shall never become a single grey gure, despite the fact that
you are black and I am white. (III, )
But, for Hegelianism and for Heiberg, there is such a position,
philosophys grey in grey, speculation.
Clotaldo is subsequently knighted, and, grasping the sword of
his knighthood (but, we hope, without too much jingling of spurs!),
declares that with it he will remind himself of the struggle to be
carried forward on behalf of actuality; and the poet [for he is still,
withal, a poet] shall not be himself ensnared in his realm of images
but shall struggle for the actual truth (III, ). The real poets task,
that is to say, is through irony to master the poetic impulse and
reduce it to rational order. However, as the plot thickens, Clotaldo
is imprisoned, and, awaiting execution (in the charge of Harlequin
and Pierrot, the gures of false philosophical oppositions), thinks
again of Margarita:
to possess you, I would have fought for and won you, you pearl of pearls,
you impress of the soul, phenomenon of truth, you image of the Spirit,
whose radiance is not false, not a play of the dark forces of nature, as is
this false image, this pearl, which has only earthly value and yet manages
to awaken hatred and discord. (IV, )
Seizing his sword, Clotaldo destroys the pearl, in place of which
appears a rose, an image of a truth whose beauty is not external,
but, like its scent, invisible. A sylph appears out of the rose bush,
who tells Clotaldo of his true ancestry. So, Clotaldo now knows
who he is, having broken through all errors and half-truths. Borne
aloft to Fata Morganas palace in the clouds (where Margarita is
imprisoned) by Troche, Iamb and Molossos, the personied spirits
of poetic technique (the ironic command of poetic formnecessarily
:o6 Kierkegaard, religion and culture
supplementing his Romantic inspiration), he nally confronts the
evil fairy with a few home truths.
[Y]our understanding does not understand that over against the false
there stands the true, the divine appearance. Your visions borrow their
truth from earthly nature, from the transient being which lies behind the
wall of actuality; mine take their truth from Spirit, which has impressed
its image in the clay in order to lead it back to the light in which it was.
Love is no delusion, though it goes in robe of clay; poetry consists of truth,
even if it [also] consists of images. (V, )
The palace of illusion vanishes and we return to earth, to actu-
ality, where love conquers all.
It is easy to see that many of the crucial themes of The Concept
of Irony are adumbrated in Heibergs play, especially the role of
formal mastery in relation to the conict between an idealistic but
fantastic poetic longing, on the one hand, and a merely earthly
realism, on the other. Actuality is precisely to see to spectate
the one appearing in the other, the ideal in the real, the truth in
the image, the true appearance.
Martensen, at least, sawit that way. Reviewing the play he wrote
that
Speculative poetry, like philosophy, is of an idealistic nature; it idealizes
actuality; it continually leads reality back to ideality, and the poetic con-
sciousness is the higher truth of the consciousness that belongs to and that
has as its subject-matter actuality itself. But precisely because poetry, like
philosophy, is the transguration of actuality into ideality, precisely be-
cause it always stands one degree higher than the consciousness of actual-
ity, it always has the actual consciousness for its basis and presupposition.
:
Poetry, in other words, must correspond to the inner reality or
actuality of its age. Since, as Martensen goes on to argue, the
present age is the period of systems
:
(not only in philosophy
but also in religion, industry and trade) poetry itself must become
systematic:
the world whose thought the cultured person now seeks to grasp, is itself
a world of conicting ideas, which have established their validity and are
recognised as such, and the idea which is sought is therefore the central
:
H. L. Martensen, Fata Morgana af J. L. Heiberg, Maanedskrift for Literatur :q, :88,
p. 6..
:
Ibid., p. 6.
Food for thought :o
idea in all the others, i.e., the speculative idea. To make this visible to
us insofar as this is at all possible for art is poetrys highest task. Only
speculative poetry can be the poetry in which we would be able to nd a
total and not merely a partial satisfaction, because it is not only a mirror
which reects the diverse ideal strivings and expressions of the human
race, as all poetry is, but it also reects the Ideas and ideals that govern
life . . . In contradiction to peripheral poetry, which only yields a glimpse
of the Idea, speculative poetry is truly illuminating, it kindles an innity
of bright points in the soul, which form themselves into one harmonious
transparent image and transgure the darkness of life.
:6
Speculative poetry of this kind is not merely allegorical but sym-
bolic, for a symbol, in the fullest sense of the word, is image and
actuality at one and the same time.
:
Bearing in mind the earlier
discussion of the Faust-idea, we can see that Martensen is consistent
in emphasizing that contemporary speculative poetry will not draw
its material from mythology, from the external, but from freedom,
from the depths of Spirit itself. This world of appearances is . . . the
eternal essence which actuality conceals within its shell.
:8
For the
same reason, such speculative poetry will also be comic rather than
tragic, for tragedy is tied to the external distinction between good
and evil, whereas comedy plays on the differences between essence
and phenomenon, reality and appearance: Comedy rests on the
contrast between the true and the inverted world, which latter in
all seriousness believes in its own reality, but which, when held
up against the light of the Idea, is dissolved and evaporates as
phenomenon.
:q
I I I
Heiberg did not attempt to repeat the venture of a speculative
comedy on stage, but in :8: he published a collection of poetical
works entitled New Poems, comprising Divine Service: A Spring-
time Fantasy, ASoul After Death: An Apocalyptic Comedy, The
Newly-Weds: A Romance-Cycle and Protestantism in Nature: A
Mystery. This is the collection to which Kierkegaard refers in the
nal line of the thesis. A Soul After Death proved to be the most
successful part of New Poems. As an apocalyptic comedy it also
throws further light on the issues raised by the idea of speculative
:6
Ibid., pp. 68.
:
Ibid., p. ..
:8
Ibid., p. .
:q
Ibid., p. 8:.
:o8 Kierkegaard, religion and culture
comedy and, in these terms, was very much the focus of discus-
sion in Martensens review, also referred to by Kierkegaard in this
connection. It is therefore worth looking at in further detail.
The soul of the title is a citizen of Copenhagen who has just
died and who duly makes his way to heavens gates. He is met
there by St Peter, who, since the soul has not been much of a
churchgoer, demands that he undertakes a purgatorial pilgrimage,
visiting all the sites named in the gospel narrative. The soul regards
this as excessive, and says that if he has to go anywhere hed prefer
America and, anyway, he cant remember all the places concerned.
Surely, he says, the important thing is not such external details but
the Spirit of scripture. St Peter asks him to explain what that Spirit
is exactly. The soul demurs, for, he says, the Spirit does not let
itself be grasped in words. To which Peter replies And yet the
Word was God. This, however, the soul tells him is allegorical,
for the Spirit can be felt but not uttered, since the Spirit and the
letter are in ceaseless conict. Peter, however, says that whilst that
is so on earth it is not so in paradise, in the presence of the Lord.
The clearer the Spirit is, so much the less does it economize on the
Word. He who cannot express his thought in words does not enter
heaven. When the soul insists that he did not seek knowledge of
God in his earthly life because the one thing we know about God
is that He is incomprehensible, St Peter asks him why, then, he is
so keen to get into heaven, Gods abode.
.o
After this unsatisfactory start the soul is despatched to Elysium.
However, his lack of classical learning does not stand him in good
stead, and so he comes, without knowing it, to the gates of hell.
Here he is met by Mephistopheles, who assures him that there
are no conditions for entry: everyone is welcome. No knowledge
is necessary and, indeed, Mephistopheles congratulates him on
possessing no knowledge other than that of the most recent and
trivial events in local life. For, he says, here there is surface but
no depth . . . no distinction between coal and chalk, here freedom
and conformity are ready-made, here everything is as new and
nothing, no matter how it hurries along, ever gets away from the
beginning, because the brief, single moment . . . severs itself from
.o
J. L. Heiberg, Nye Digte, Copenhagen, Gyldendal, :q6, pp. :.
Food for thought :oq
the preceding moment . . . and begins its eternal A from which no
B ever proceeds.
.:
That, indeed, is why no one can ever leave once
they have entered, because hell is pure, eternal Beginning, with
no before or after: nothing ever goes forward and nothing ever
returns or turns back. Hell has no history. It is pure immediacy,
without reection or development. It would be easy to explain,
Mephistopheles says, if the soul knew any philosophy, for hell is
simply the realm of the immediate. But, he adds, you dont need
to delve into all this. It is something no one can understand.
..
No.
There is nothing to understand.
Nevertheless, the soul is curious to know more if not in terms
of the philosophical denition of hell, then in terms of what actu-
ally goes on there. Can one go about ones business in the stock
exchange, go to ones club, play cards, and read newspapers? Are
there any notable sights to see? And what about the theatre? Of
course, Mephistopheles responds cordially, one lives here just as
on earth. One can get ones glass of wine and smoking tobacco,
and all the newspapers one wants and Heiberg lists the titles of
some of the contemporary Copenhagen newspapers to be found in
hell: The Copenhagen Post, Adresseavis, The Day and The Open Enquirer,
papers that, in Heibergs judgement, reected and reinforced the
low standard of Danish public life. In fact, these have an addi-
tional advantage over their equivalents on earth: the aim of such
ephemeral publications being to get the news out as quickly as pos-
sible, hells newspapers anticipate the latest news and one gets to
read about it even before the manuscript is ready or the ink dry
that is to say, one reads nothing at all, because what one reads in
such publications is, in its utter vacuity, essentially nothing.
As for theatre, theres that too but purely for entertainment,
only dancers and horses and a ea circus. The nearest there is to
serious drama is H. C. Andersens The Mulatto and the Moorish Maid
an inclusion that demonstrates Heibergs damning verdict on the
artistic merit of Andersens dramatic work! Others singled out for
comment include the philosopher F. C. Sibbern (who, apart from
being chairman of the examining board for On the Concept of Irony,
had been amongst the rst critics of Hegelianism in Denmark) and
.:
Ibid., p. :.
..
Ibid., p. .
::o Kierkegaard, religion and culture
the journalist Claud Rosenhoff, who, as we have seen, was also to
be the butt of Kierkegaards scorn and satire.
A further glimpse into the meaning of hell is opened up by one
of its residents, a poet, who enters declaiming on hopeless longing
as a necessary condition of poetic production.
Up to this point the actual name of the place at which the soul
has arrived has not been mentioned. When the soul asks about this,
it is Mephistopheles turn to demur. Dont ask about such things, he
advises; its only a name anyway, just a sound without a meaning, as
the language of immediacy such as that of Romantic lyricism
necessarily is. Forced to give voice to this meaningless sound,
Mephistopheles quickly recovers lost ground by assuring the soul
that actually this is where he has spent his whole life only people are
not accustomed to call [ by its true name] that abby phlegmatic
earthly existence which puts all its trust in reality and doesnt get the
slightest glimmering of . . . an Idea.
.
In any case, Mephistopheles
promises the soul, there is every probability that his wife will soon
be able to join him.
Of the other parts of New Poems, Divine Service and Protes-
tantism in Nature also raise issues that will prove relevant to
the future philosophical confrontation between Kierkegaard and
Heiberg, a confrontation largely conned to Kierkegaards jour-
nals and his angry response to Heibergs critical comments about
Repetition (:8). There, Heiberg was to say, Kierkegaard had con-
fused repetition as a phenomenon of the natural world (as in the
cycle of seasonal change) withthe movement properly characteristic
of freedom. Kierkegaard correctly saw this comment as a com-
plete failure to attend to what was in the text, since Repetition is pre-
cisely about the way inwhichfreedomcannot be brought under any
natural law involving predictable recurrence. Both Kierkegaard
and Heiberg are, in fact, wrestling with the legacy of Romantic
idealism, and the vision of nature as animated by the same spiri-
tual reality that comes to articulate and self-conscious expression
in human language and thought. Both want to establish a clearer
line of demarcation between the natural and the human world
than, they believed, the Romantics had done. Within this common
.
Ibid., p. :.
Food for thought :::
problematic, however, Heiberg shows that he wants to retrieve the
unitive vision of Romantic thought, but in a more differentiated
way, whilst Kierkegaard opens the way to a more radically tran-
scendent view of freedom. The Spirit that is in nature, Heiberg
asserts, will only reveal itself to one who nds its law in the world
of thought: Turn your gaze within!/ What was subject to tran-
sience in your world,/ you will nd [again] in thought./ In that
inner world everything that has passed away/ Will nd life and
existence.
.
It is thought not, as Kierkegaard would argue, a di-
vine thunderstorm that will liberate temporal existence from its
subjection to times sheer transience.
.
These, however, were to be
issues for another day. Let us remain, for now, in :8:.
Martensen was favourably impressed by New Poems. In the re-
viewto which Kierkegaard refers at the end of The Concept of Irony he
declares that It is in fact the Spirit of the new age under whose guid-
ance these poems are composed . . . what philosophy has long since
whispered in the ears of its disciples, poetry now begins to preach
from the roof-tops.
.6
The poems, especially A Soul After Death
(which Martensen sees as the centrepiece of the collection), are, as
truly speculative, rooted in Spirit itself. In them, this world and the
next become transparent to each other. Just as Dante discovered
large chunks of Florence in hell and Swedenborg wrote of nding
London and Paris in the other world, so Heiberg has translated
contemporary Copenhagen into the apocalyptic realm. This is of
the essence of a genuinely speculative approach, for True science
and poetry, like faith, see all objects in a double perspective, they see
them at one and the same time in the form of eternity and in the
form of temporality. Heiberg is even compared favourably with
Dante, whose hell was described in moral and religious but not in
metaphysical categories. Dante, as a man of the Catholic Middle
Ages, therefore failed to penetrate the relationship between essence
and appearance, truth and falsehood, in which comedy is at home.
.
Ibid., p. :.
.
For Kierkegaards response to Heibergs remarks about Repetition see FT/R, pp. .8:o.
.6
This and following references are to H. L. Martensen, Nye Digte af J. L. Heiberg,
in The Fatherland, :o January :8:. Although The Fatherland represented a liberal political
tendency opposed by Heiberg, he respected its intellectual integrity, and even has the soul
expressing the wish that he wont nd The Fatherland amongst the newspapers stocked
in hell.
::. Kierkegaard, religion and culture
Characteristically his heaven lacks the truly Christian humour. In
a humorous heaven the blessed spirits will play with the phenom-
ena of their temporal consciousness which, in all the detail of its
empirical reality, in all its inrmity and transience, they will have
with them in heaven, because it must serve them as poetic mate-
rial . . . Their temporal, child-like concerns will now play the part
of accidentalities in the substance of blessedness. In other words,
the souls in paradise not only have God; they also have the world
again. This is comic in the technical sense that whereas tragedy
culminates in judgement and the destruction of earthly happiness,
comedy goes on to afrm the good ending, that God can be all
in all. Martensen thus predicts that the dialectic of comedy and
tragedy will come to rest in the concept of the humorous,
which is not only negatively but positively comic, [ because it is] the spec-
ulative comedy, which relates itself to irony as profundity is related to
sharp-mindedness. The humorous which belongs exclusively to Chris-
tianity includes not only the whole of irony, the poetic nemesis on the
fallen world, but also the fullness of love and reconciliation. It comprises
the pain of the whole world, but overcome in a rich depth of joy.
We can see fromthis the extent to which Kierkegaards concerns
in The Concept of Irony are extraordinarily topical, embracing issues
in literature and aesthetics that were being discussed in journalis-
tic literature in the year that saw the dissertation itself presented
and defended (:8:) and that marked the high point of Heibergs
ambition to create a new paradigm of cultural Protestantism. The
project of speculative comedy that culminated in the New Poems and
Martensens review broached issues of essence and phenomenon,
truth and appearance, Romanticism and speculation, art and phi-
losophy, irony and humour that also run through Kierkegaards
dissertation and that are therefore appropriately concentrated in
its closing section and, indeed, in its closing line. At the same time,
Heibergs project was not set up simply in philosophical or theoret-
ical terms, but as an extension of his long-termambition of creating
an aesthetic morality, a reformation of Danish life and manners
that was as much the business of the public debate about culture as
of the academy. Kierkegaards allusion to New Poems suggests that
from the beginning and even in his most academic work he too
Food for thought ::
shared Heibergs concern for such questions although his idea
as to the shape and goal of such a reformation proved to differ
toto caelo from that of the Hegelians.
At rst glance, and just as Heibergs apocalyptic comedy itself
would have contained much that would appeal to Kierkegaards
own satirical view of his contemporaries, Martensens comments
on Christianity and humour might look as if they had come from
Kierkegaards own early journals, where there are many remarks
about the distinction between irony and humour and the Christian
nature of the latter (especially in entries for :88 and thus three
or more years before the dissertation). However, there is also a
single but decisive point of difference that cannot be overlooked.
Although, as for Martensen, there is something essentially posi-
tive about humour it is indissociable from joy this positivity
is itself marked by a thorough-going negativity in relation to the
world. Although there is continuity in that Humor is irony car-
ried through to its maximum oscillations ( JP II: :6qq), humour
is not the outcome of a dialectical development but depends on
Christian revelation and the conviction that here All is made new
( JP II: :::; cf. JP II: :6qo). Presupposing the utter separation
of Spirit and world, the standpoint of the humorist is essentially
solitary, like that of a beast of prey ( JP II: ::q) or like Robinson
Crusoe evenwheninthe midst of life ( JP II: :6qq). The humorists
laughter is a sonof pain, his smile like the dead mans grinwhichis
explained as the muscle twitch of rigor mortis, the eternally humor-
ous smile over human wretchedness ( JP II: :o6). The Christian
humorist is like a plant whose roots alone are visible on earth, but
whose ower unfolds for a higher, invisible sun ( JP II: :6qo). Insofar
as it is poetic at all it is profound poetry, beyond form, and there-
fore crystallizes in baroque forms ( JP II: :6qo). The humorous na-
ture of Christianity is testied by its proclamation of a truth which
is hidden in mystery not a truth that is mysterious or a mystery
(in the manner of, for example, Freemasonry) but that is revealed
as mystery, as hidden in mystery ( JP II: :68.). Correspondingly, a
person who takes his stand on the principle of humour will have, at
best, an ambiguous attitude towards writing, having come alive to
the incommensurable which the philosopher can never gure out
and therefore must despise [. . .] The systematizer believes that he
:: Kierkegaard, religion and culture
can say everything, and that whatever cannot be said is erroneous
and secondary ( JP II: :o.).
None of these or any of the other entries relating tohumour inthe
journals predating The Concept of Irony is perhaps decisive, and they
could be interpreted in a sense compatible with that of Martensen
and Heiberg, but there is, nevertheless, a distinct difference in
tone. It is, moreover, highly revealing in this connection that the
epitome of the humorist is, in Kierkegaards eyes, J. G. Hamann,
whose idiosyncratic, exaggerated and polemical style and ten-
dency were an affront to Hegelian ideals of lucidity in thought and
exposition.
If, then, precisely at the point where Kierkegaard seems clos-
est to his Danish Hegelian contemporaries, we can also see the
chasm separating him from them, it becomes hard to take the
food for thought of the closing line of The Concept of Irony other
than ironically. But what are the implications of that for the nal
position arrived at in the dissertation? The question seems espe-
cially pertinent with regard to the implications of the discussion
of Shakespeare, Goethe and Heiberg as masters of irony within
the narrow boundaries of aesthetic production. This seems to be
taken by Kierkegaard as a model that can be applied relatively
unproblematically to life or actuality After all, what holds for the
poet-existence holds also in some measure for every single individ-
uals life (CI, pp. .6). But is aesthetic irony really transferable
in that way? Unfortunately these closing pages are fearfully con-
densed and, it has to be said, under-argued. One thing does seem
clear in the light of this interpretation of the food for thought,
though: the claim that we might attain to an adequate theorization
of such mastery by means of the concept of humour, a claim that is
crucial to Martensens and Heibergs concept of speculative com-
edy, is ironically punctured. Strikingly, the journals say of humour
itself (with specic reference, once more, to Hamann) that it is not
an aesthetic concept but life, not a hero in a controlled drama
( JP II: :6qq), and this is precisely the problem. The issue is not
whether Kierkegaard is or isnt sincere in commending Heibergs
technical irony qua dramatic poet. Nor is it the correctness of the
concept of humour. The question, however, is whether this really
helps us at all in face of the actual, living questions that confront
Food for thought ::
people in their religious existence. Mastery over irony may be pos-
sible within the strictly localized sphere of aesthetic production,
but mastery over irony in life is a problem of a different order of
magnitude. Mastery over life living masterfully is likewise another
matter. And, as some of the entries dealing with humour suggest,
the way beyond irony is not that of mastery at all, but suffering
(cf. JP II: :o6), not knighthood in the manner of the masterful
Hegelian knight invoked at the very beginning of the dissertation,
but cross-bearing. The route chosen by Heiberg and Martensen,
the route of aesthetic portrayal and philosophical exposition, is
misdirected. Kierkegaards ironic hint may, then, amount to an
About Turn! away from irony and away from mastery, a call to
unburden oneself of the impossible ambition of control over ones
self and accepting, instead, ones utter dependence on Gods cre-
ating and saving grace. But what that actually means is scarcely
delivered in the programmatic assertions of the dissertation itself,
since, as Kierkegaard himself says in this same closing sentence, an
adequate exposition of everything that belongs to such dependence
lies outside the scope of the study of irony. That is the work of the
authorship, pseudonymous and signed, in its exploration and ex-
position of the way of religious suffering. And that, of course, is a
task for life. The consequences of this ironic refusal of Heibergs
programme of aesthetic morality, it will emerge, include not only
the theoretical rejection of Hegelianism, but also the nal damn-
ing verdict on Danish cultural Protestantism that Kierkegaard will
make in his Attack upon Christendom.
CHAPTER 6
A literary scandal
I
In :qq a small book called Lucinde was published in Berlin. Written
by the brilliant young literary critic Friedrich Schlegel, it celebrated
his (adulterous) affair with Dorothea Veit, daughter of the eminent
Jewish philosopher Moses Mendelssohn. Though not widely read
and still less widely understood the book provoked a considerable,
and largely hostile, reaction among the reading public. It became to
its generation what Lady Chatterleys Lover was to a more recent age:
the quintessential embodiment of an obscene book. The authors
mother gave utterance to the popular consensus when she wrote
that through his novel Fritz has shown himself to me as one who
has no religion and no good principles.
:
This literary scandal was, perhaps strangely, to become an im-
portant topic in the relationship between Romantic literature and
religion because of the response it provoked from two of the lead-
ing religious thinkers of the nineteenth century, Friedrich Schleier-
macher and Sren Kierkegaard, and, once again, Kierkegaards
interest in this shows something of the extraordinary internal
heterogeneity of his work, its simultaneous projection along a spec-
trum of cultural concerns, and his engagement with the debate as
to the shape and texture of contemporary cultural life.
Few commentators have sought to commend Lucinde simply as a
work of literature. Even its initial impact was due not so much to
its intrinsic worth as to the fact that it functioned as an almost pro-
grammatic assertion of the unconventional life-style of that circle
:
Quoted in Ludwig Marcuse, Obscene: The History of an Indignation, London, McGibbon and
Kee, :q6, p. 6..
::6
A literary scandal ::
of Fr uhromantik writers and thinkers of which Schlegel was a leading
gure. A key element of this life-style was a relaxed attitude to con-
ventional standards of sexual morality. Above all this was true of
the women of the group, who, as George Brandes claimed, were in
many ways more revolutionary gures than the men, even if they
left fewer literary traces behind them. It was because women like
Dorothea Veit were bold enough to break with established custom
that a book such as Lucinde could be written at all.
.
It was doubtless
an important element in the angry response which Lucinde pro-
voked that it forced its readers to think about the sort of thing that
was actually going on in the private lives of some of Germanys
most gifted young intellectuals. Here were women who refused to
submit to the authority of fathers, husbands, priests, but sought
their own secular salvation in their own freely chosen way.
The book itself is difcult to summarize, not least because it
deliberately eschews the narrative formthat is popularly associated
with the novel. There are some narrative sections which enable us,
more or less, to reconstruct the history of Julius (Schlegels persona
in the novel), but these should not necessarily be considered the key
to the novel as a whole. As it stands the text is an apparent chaos of
narrative, letters, dialogue, myth and fantasy. Julius speaks proudly
of his unquestionable right to cause confusion,

and it is a right
which unquestionable or not he certainly chooses to indulge.
To make sense of this kaleidoscopic work it is essential to realize
that Schlegel is not trying to present us with a facet, a segment, or
even a reection, of life as it is lived in the ordinary world of social
existence. He is trying to give us an ideal view, a glimpse into a
realm of meanings behind or beyond this external world, the way
the world (he thinks) should be, rather than the way it is. The variety
of literary genres which he employs is thus intended to illuminate
this ideal reality from a number of different perspectives, whilst
preventing us from confusing it with any of the forms in which and
through which it is mediated.
.
Caroline Schlegel would be another striking example.

Friedrich Schlegel, Lucinde, Stuttgart, Reclam, :q6, p. :o. An English translation

of Lucinde is available: Friedrich Schlegels Lucinde and the Fragments, ed. P. Firchow,
Minneapolis,University of Minnesota Press, :q:. This includes fragments from the
Romantic journal the Athenaeum, including some by Schleiermacher. Firchows introduc-
tory essay is also excellent.
::8 Kierkegaard, religion and culture
What, then, is this ideal reality? It is, prosaically stated, the idea
that human fullment is achieved through the passionate love of
manand woman. This is Schlegels answer to the dilemma posed by
Kant: given the division of human reality into the radically distinct
spheres of spirit and sense, noumena and phenomena, how can
we nd a standpoint (Kierkegaard was to call it the Archimedean
point) from which existence can be grasped and understood as a
whole? According to Schlegel, man and woman respectively em-
body these polarities and in true love they are fused together so
that the one complete being which both have now become can
revel in the immediate consciousness of the coinherence of the
one, unchanging, innite Being with the forms of this transitory,
nite life.
We can best see how Schlegel went about proving his case by
looking at two sections of Lucinde itself. These are in fact among the
passages which most shocked the books rst readers, hard as it is
for us to see why. The rst of these passages is entitled Dithyrambic
Fantasy on the Most Beautiful Situation, or, we might translate it,
Position. But this is no lurid description of sexual gymnastics. For
although the climax of the passage comes with the assertion that the
most beautiful situation is that in which the lovers exchange roles
so that the woman becomes the active, seducing, mastering partner
and the man the passive, seduced, mastered object of her passion,
there is no graphic account of what this might involve. Schlegel
simply speaks of the way in which we exchange roles and compete
with childish pleasure as to who can most deceivingly imitate the
other, whether you succeed more in putting on the protective ar-
dour of the man or I in acquiring the attractive submissiveness of
the woman.

What Schlegel is concerned with is not the exigen-

cies of love-making in the narrow sense but rather the signicance
of the total erotic relationship. The language of the Dithyrambic
Fantasy verges constantly on the edges of metaphysics, Plato rather
than Henry Miller. The point of the inversion of roles is that it is
a wonderfully wittily signicant allegory of the perfection of male
and female into complete humanity.

Schlegel indulges himself in

musing on both the mystical and poetical possibilities of this idea:

Lucinde, pp. ::.

Ibid., p. :.
A literary scandal ::q
I can no longer say my love or your love; both are the same and com-
pletely one, as much love as the reciprocating of love. It is love, eternal
unity and blending of our spirits, not only for what we call (our life in)
this world, but for (our life in) the one, true, indivisible, nameless, innite
world, for our whole eternal life and being . . . There will be a time when
we shall both, united in one spirit, perceive that we are owers of the one
plant, or petals of one ower, and with smiles we shall then know that
what we now call hope was essentially recollection.
6
In his account of this union of male and female Schlegel seeks
to give full rights to the feminine pole: passivity, sensuousness and
immediacy. Indeed, much of Lucinde can be read as a deliberate
inversion of the masculine qualities of Enlightenment culture (and,
many would argue, of modern technological society): reason, orga-
nization, work and goal-directed activity. Instead of these Schlegel
praises sensuousness, anarchy and idleness. This inversion of val-
ues is prominently featured in the second of our two passages, the
Characterization of Little Wilhelmine. In this passage Schlegel
asserts that two-year-old Wilhelmine is the most spirited person of
her time or her age. He describes how this little girl nds unspeak-
able delight in lying on her back and waving her legs in the air
without a thought as to what the world might say. He then applies
this lesson to himself If Wilhelmine acts thus what may I not do
since, by God! I am a man and need be no more delicate than the
most delicate feminine creature and to Lucinde Oh, enviable
freedom from prejudice! You too, dear friend, cast it from you, the
remainder of this false shame, in the same way that I have so of-
ten torn the fatal clothes from you and scattered them around the
bedroom in a beautiful anarchy.

As Ludwig Marcuse argues, it

is this enjoyment of anarchy, spontaneity and disorder that proved
to be as shocking as the purely sexual element in the passage. It
was not just the talk about the bedrooms but the talk about untidy
bedrooms, not just the talk about sex but the talk about sex with-
out shame, which most shocked Lucindes readers.
8
Convention can
accept all manner of revelation as long as it is uttered in a guilty
or self-consciously pornographic tone but Schlegel did not want
to titillate in that way: he wanted to liberate the sensual element
in love, and, by using little Wilhelmine as an example, to show
6
Lucinde, pp. ::.

Ibid., p. :8.
8
Obscene, p. .
:.o Kierkegaard, religion and culture
that this sensual element is as innocent and as harmless as a childs
frolics.
It has already beensuggestedthat, at one level, this was Schlegels
answer to Kants dilemma regarding the polarities of human per-
sonhood. This was not, of course, merely a philosophical dilemma
in a narrow, technical sense. It was, ultimately, a moral and a re-
ligious question arising out of the critical self-consciousness of the
Enlightenment. Schlegels answer to the question thus acquires
a moral and even a religious aura. This shows itself in the use
Schlegel makes of overtly religious language and imagery:
It is the oldest, the most childish, the simplest religion to which I have
returned . . . Dedicate me as a priest . . . It is not without anointing that
I write and dream. . . or without vocation. What may he not be capable
of to whom Wit himself spoke with a voice from the opened heavens,
You are my beloved son, in whom I am well-pleased.
q
In such expressions Schlegel is making plain his intention of ex-
alting passionate love above social and religious conventions and
signals his break with the traditional ecclesiastical conception of
marriage as a curb on the regrettable and scarcely restrainable lusts
of the esh. It is a new age, a new religion he wishes to proclaim
The time has come, the inner Being of the Godhead can be re-
vealed and represented, all mysteries can be disclosed and fear shall
end.
:o
The way to the primal garden is once again open and the
way is simply the freedom of sensuous innocence and delight.
I I
One of the few people to come to Schlegels defence was, at
rst sight perhaps astonishingly, a young theologian Friedrich
Schleiermacher. On closer examination, however, it was not so
surprising. The two men were, at least for a time, close friends.
Schlegel had moved in to join Schleiermacher in his apartment
at Christmas :q and the level of their intimacy can be gauged
froma comment Schleiermacher made in a letter to his sister: Our
friends amuse themselves by describing our life together as a mar-
riage, and they all agree that I must be the wife, and the jokes
q
Lucinde, pp. .qo.
:o
Ibid., p. ..
A literary scandal :.:
and more serious comments made about this are quite sufcient.
::
Schlegel encouragedhis theologianfriendto developthe more liter-
ary and philosophical sides of his genius, most notably with regard
to the translation of Plato. The two moved in the same Romantic
circle in Berlin, which, of course, included Dorothea, Lucinde
herself. Schleiermacher contributed to the Romantics journal the
Athenaeum and is credited with a new edition of the ten command-
ments, specially compiled for emancipated women. The seventh of
these new commandments read Thou shalt not contract a mar-
riage which must (later) have to be broken.
:.
This is the Romantic
concept of love in a nutshell it is the quality, not the legality, of
the relationship that counts.
Schleiermacher also had more personal reasons for sympathiz-
ing with the theme of Lucinde. Like his friend, although probably
without his friends degree of sensual fervour, he had fallen in love
with a married woman, Eleonore Grunow, the wife of another
Berlin clergyman. Schleiermacher tried to persuade her to seek a
divorce from her husband, but though she reciprocated his love
she hesitated and, in the end (in :8o), resolved to submit to her
situation and remain with her husband.
Schleiermachers contribution to the Lucinde debate was twofold.
On the one hand he published a short, formal review defending
Lucinde against its critics; on the other, he produced a much more
ambitious work, Condential Letters on Friedrich Schlegels Lucinde. This
takes the form of a series of ctional letters circulated among a
group of friends, the moving spirit of which is one Friedrich whose
lover just happens to be Eleonore. Included in these letters is a
more or less independent essay, the Essay on Modesty.
Schleiermacher appears in both these works to be seeking to
vindicate both the epochal signicance of Lucinde and the main
thrust of the moral and religious claims which Schlegel makes in
it. In the Introduction to the Letters he refers to it as a work which
stands before us like an apparition from some God knows how still
far-off world.
:
In the review he claims that
::
Friedrich Wilhelm Kantzenbach, Schleiermacher, Reinbek bei Hamburg, Rowohlt, :q6,
p. . I am indebted to this book for other biographical data about Schleiermacher.
:.
Ibid., p. .
:
Friedrich Schleiermacher, Vertraute Briefe uber Friedrich Schlegels Lucinde, in S amtliche Werke,
Vol. III/i, Berlin, :86, p. ..
:.. Kierkegaard, religion and culture
through love the work is not only made poetical but also religious and
moral. Religious, because love is everywhere referred to the standpoint
fromwhich it can look over life to the Innite; moral, in that love develops
out of itself from the loved one to the whole world and demands freedom
from all improper limitations and prejudices for all men as for itself. We
assert that the relation of poetry to morality has rarely been found so pure
as here.
:
InLucinde Schleiermacher nds corroborationfor a point he himself
makes in the Speeches on Religion (also published in :qq), where he
applies the myth of Genesis to the role of the love between man
and woman in arousing the religious consciousness.
Let me disclose to you a secret that lies concealed in one of the most
ancient sources of poetry and religion. As long as the rst man was alone
with himself and nature, the deity did indeed rule over him; it addressed
the man in various ways, but he did not understand it . . . Since the deity
recognized that his world would be nothing so long as man was alone, it
created for him a partner, and now, for the rst time, living and spiritual
tones stirred within him; now, for the rst time, the world rose before his
eyes. In the esh and bone of his bone he discovered humanity and in
humanity the world; from this moment he became capable of hearing the
voice of the deity and of answering it, and the most sacrilegious transgres-
sion of its laws from now on no longer precluded him from association
with the eternal being.
:
This, Schleiermacher tells us, is not only a myth but is the history
of us all. To have religion man must rst, through love, nd hu-
manity. Each person embraces most ardently the one in whomthe
world is reected most clearly and purely; each loves most tenderly
the one in whom he believes everything brought together that he
himself lacks for the completion of humanity.
:6
Heterosexual love is thus seen not merely as the satisfaction of a
biological drive and still less in terms of fullling a social obligation
but as a way of achieving wholeness. Yet, as opposed to Schlegel,
such love is not itself the nal step for Schleiermacher. It is the
presupposition, not the fullment, of religion.
We can pursue this subtle but unmistakable difference further
by looking at what, at rst sight, seems to be a purely literary
:
Wilhelm Dilthey (ed.), Schleiermachers Leben in Briefen, Vol. IV, Berlin, :86, p. o.
:
F. D. E. Schleiermacher, On Religion: Speeches to its Cultured Despisers, translatedby R. Crouter,
Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, :q88, p. ::q.
:6
Ibid., p. :.o.
A literary scandal :.
point, namely, the question of the form of Lucinde and its lack of
clear narrative structure. In his review Schleiermacher defends the
absence of external action in the novel by arguing that though such
action has its place in dramatic art it cannot ultimately portray
the sentiments and thoughts which constitute the life of the inner
man. There is thus an aesthetic need for a formof art in which the
relation to an object recedes and vanishes in the light of the relation
to ideas.
:
In the Letters he argues that the key to a true work of
art is that world of ideas which lies behind the world of external
appearances: works of art should . . . open mens minds so that
they can receive ideas into their hearts and lives . . . A work of art
contains a life-view (eine Anschauung). Ultimately everything must
start from this . . . What matters here is a synthesis which cannot
be demonstrated.
:8
The synthesis to which Schleiermacher refers is the synthesis of
the central idea being expressed in the work of art and the parti-
cular form that the artist chooses (or is inspired) to give it. What he
admires about Lucinde is precisely the economy of the whole by
which the idea is worked into and through the manifold of par-
ticular episodes in which it comes to expression.
This is very much in keeping with the fundamental concept
of art in Early Romanticism, namely, that art is an expression of
the aesthetic intuition in which spirit and sense, noumena and
phenomena are unied and reconciled. From this perspective it is
clear that poetry and love are inextricably intertwined since the
structure of the aesthetic synthesis corresponds precisely to the
synthesis of the male and female polarities experienced in love. This
is the basis for Schleiermachers claim that the centrality of love
makes Lucinde also poetical (and, we may add, moral and religious
into the bargain).
None the less, though Schleiermacher defends the minimizing
of the external action in principle, his defence of Schlegel is not
unqualied. In the Letters Friedrich praises the expression of the
idea of love to be found in the novel.
Love is all in all in this work, it has nothing else and it needs nothing
else . . . It is the simplest composition and the gures are emphasized in
such a way and in so great a measure that behind them and around them
:
Dilthey, p. 8.
:8
Vertraute Briefe, p. 8:.
:. Kierkegaard, religion and culture
you see nothing else, and, when you come to reect on this, you nd
nothing lacking.
:q
His correspondent, Ernestine, is not, however, convinced. She asks:
Despite the perfection of exposition does love not go a little bit too much
back into itself in this book? I wanted it also to go out into the world
and perform some good work there . . . If Hercules is to be the symbol
of manliness which we are to honour, then in all honesty the strength he
uses in embracing woman is not everything, but his deeds also necessarily
belong to his manliness.
.o
Moreover, she is critical of the way in which Schlegel analyses the
moods of love, not, she says, because she is opposed to abstraction
and analysis as such, but simply because she has a sense for where
it belongs: a prophet has never dared to anatomize his spiritual
condition to such an extent, and if he had then unbelief, in himself
and in others, would have been the natural consequence; it is the
same with the prophet of love too.
.:
Both of these criticisms hinge on the connection, or lack of con-
nection, between the ideal vision of the novel and the way in
which this vision is externally expressed. Friedrichs response to
Ernestine is not entirely unambiguous. He argues that the absence
of real life in the novel is justied both by its aesthetic purpose
and by the prevailing corruption of life and manners in the real
world. Lucinde only abstracts from the bourgeois world and its
relationships, and that is nevertheless absolutely necessary in a
work of art dedicated to love, because these relationships are so
bad.
..
This, however, is a substantial shift in emphasis in compari-
son with Schlegels own position since it effectively undermines
the claim made in Lucinde that the time has now arrived for the
new age of love to begin. The ideal of love, as expressed in the
novel, thus comes to have an aura of illusion about it. It is de-
moted from the status of a new revelation to that of a dream,
a poem, hovering on the margins of reality, but unrealizable in
the context of bourgeois society with its bad moral conventions.
Commenting on precisely this point Hans Dierkes has written that,
for Schleiermacher, all art, precisely when it presents love as its
:q
Ibid., p. ..
.o
Ibid., p. .
.:
Ibid., p. .
..
Ibid., p. o.
A literary scandal :.
highest object, utters only what ought to be, but never that which
really could be . . . Schleiermacher thus understands Lucinde not as
an anticipation of a real utopia but as a standard by which to or-
ganize reality as perfectly as possible at an individual level.
.
In Kantian terminology art is now seen as a regulative rather
than a constitutive ideality and the Romantic ideal of love must
undergo a similar transformation. But if aesthetic ideality is unable
to pregure a new and better world as a concrete, real possibility,
even its illusory ideal is able to showup the badness of conventional
morality for what it is. Schleiermacher thus uses Lucinde, and the
controversy it provoked, as a means by which to criticize its critics.
These, he says, are the uncomprehending, the representatives of
those in every age who seek to chain and restrain the dynamic
forward-moving life of the spirit. However, when a new idea is
established and despite their former opposition they claim it
for their own by mummifying it and changing it into an empty
formula. Such people, he conjectures, will never be lacking
although the irony is that in each age they nd themselves de-
fending quite different and even opposing laws and customs.
.
The
Essay on Modesty contains a far-reaching expos e of the dynamics of
sexual repression by which the self-righteous indignation of such
prudes is in fact fuelled.
.
True modesty, he argues, means having a proper respect for
the mental condition and freedom of others, in allowing others
to develop their own thoughts and feelings without interruption.
Modesty as such is not exclusively related to sexuality but to any
interference with others mental space. It is a kind of tact which is
essential to true sociability. For example, If I tell a funny story to
someone who is depressed while they are in the throes of pain then
I am not to blame if thereby I actually do bring him into a cheerful
mood; only if I have miscalculated and my effort goes awry have
I been immodest.
.6
.
Hans Dierkes, Friedrich Schlegels Lucinde, Schleiermacher und Kierkegaard in Deutsche Vierteljahrss-
chrift f ur Literaturewissenschaft und Geistesgeschichte, Vol. , No. , :q8, pp. 6f.
.
Vertraute Briefe, pp. .6ff.
.
It is interesting to note that Schleiermacher regarded England as the natural home of
prudery long before the accession of Queen Victoria. Perhaps we should not put all the
blame for our national sexual reticence on the Victorians alone.
.6
Vertraute Briefe, p. .
:.6 Kierkegaard, religion and culture
By extending the denition of modesty in this way Schleierma-
cher is able to turn the tables on the prudes, for sexuality too has
its rights and it is a sign of immodesty to interfere with them:
It is very one-sided if one only damns that which disturbs the condition
of thought or repose in general by means of an incitement to sensuality
or desire: the condition of enjoyment and of a dominant sensuality also
has a certain sanctity and equally requires respect, and it must be equally
immodest to interrupt it forcibly.
.
Not only are the protestations of the prudes themselves immod-
est, but they reveal a deep fascination with the whole topic of sex,
despite their pretensions to virtue. What, he asks,
should one think of those who give themselves out to be in a condition
of tranquil thought and action, and who are nevertheless so innitely
sensitive that at the slightest disturbance fromwithout passionate impulses
stir within them, and who believe themselves to be the more modest the
more they nd something suspicious everywhere? One can only think that
they are not really in that condition (of tranquillity); that their own raw
desire is everywhere on the look-out and leaps up as (soon as) something
shows itself in the distance which they can appropriate, and that they
eagerly push the blame for this onto whoever or whatever was the utterly
innocent occasion of this.
.8
He predicts that if this attitude is allowed to develop unhindered
it will come to permeate the whole social body with its repressed
sexuality and this will in turn lead to a catastrophic explosion in
which it will discard its hypocritical garb and expose the rawsensu-
ality that lies behind its modest fa cade. Such prudery is essentially
no different fromunbridled dissipation. The best way to avoid such
a course of events, he says in a truly liberal manner, is to regard
men as better than they are, since:
One should not presume that among moral human beings every some-
what lively representation will immediately be transformed by the imagi-
nation into a means of inciting desire; one should not believe that people
are incapable of making any better use of the beautiful than as a transi-
tion to wild passion; one should not believe that on this topic alone every
roguish joke and every witty reference will miss the essential point so that
.
Ibid., p. 8.
.8
Ibid., p. 6:.
A literary scandal :.
the charm of the game is lost and everyone gets bogged down in the
subject-matter with which the game is played.
.q
What is important is to educate our sensuousness and to make
of it a means of bringing us into relation with the Whole, not to
ban it or suppress it.
As we have seen, Schleiermacher sounds a subtle but clearly
recognizable note of caution in his defence of Schlegel against the
prudes. Perhaps, as a churchman, he was forced to be more aware
of the omnipresence of the prudes; perhaps, as the unhappy lover of
a married woman, he was forced to be more aware of the power of
convention to hinder and even to halt the course of love. Whatever
the personal grounds, however, he suggests that nal fullment is
not ours within the limits of this-worldly existence, although we
may receive, and should treasure when we do so receive, poetic
and erotic anticipations of such fullment and so learn in what
direction it lies.
I I I
Forty years later another theological voice took up the Lucinde
theme, the voice of Sren Kierkegaard. Kierkegaard was himself to
prove one of the most devastating critics of bourgeois conventions,
but in the Lucinde debate he put his considerable polemical pow-
ers at the service of the Establishment. Although writing a whole
generation later, Kierkegaard did not see the Lucinde affair as be-
ing of merely historical interest. After Schleiermachers death in
:8 the Letters were republished, with an introduction, by Karl
Gutzkow. Gutzkow was one of the writers of the Young Germany
tendency in literature, the left-wing avant-garde of the bourgeois
intelligentsia. We have already seen something of Kierkegaards
hostile reaction to them, and the sort of reputation they had in
society at large may be judged fromthe fact that in :8, the year he
published the Letters, Gutzkowwas himself imprisoned for immoral
writing. We have already seen in relation to From the Papers of One
Still Living how Kierkegaard was, from the beginning of his author-
ship, engaged in a critical confrontation with just this tendency.
.q
Ibid., p. 6.
:.8 Kierkegaard, religion and culture
He described Lucinde as the gospel of Young Germany and the sys-
tem for its Rehabilitation des Fleisches [rehabilitation of the esh]
(CI, p. .86).
Before proceeding to Kierkegaards own critical response to the
Lucinde debate, then, it will be worth getting a avour of Gutzkows
advocacy of Schleiermachers review to see just what Kierkegaard
was engaging with.
Gutzkow begins by reecting on how this publication, his own
tribute to the deceased Schleiermacher, relates to the other offer-
ings being placed on the great mans grave. First, he imagines, come
the maidens attired in white, the younger sisters of those charming
creatures who, in my day, gave Sunday worship on the feast of the
Trinity such seductive persuasiveness.
o
These were the most un-
happy at Schleiermachers death, because this man alone amongst
the clergy and theologians offered them some kind of positive vi-
sion of heavenly things. All contemporary theologians (including
the Jericho-storming Strauss) are, in comparison, square, trivial,
bourgeois and unrened.
:
The maidens are followed by a suc-
cession of those whom Gutzkow predictably regards as less worthy
mourners: the bookish young theological students, the catarrhy
clergy, drawn to his corpse though they themselves were dead to his
message while he lived.
.
Finally come Schleiermachers academic
colleagues, who will not wish their complacency to be disturbed by
the memory of the masters youthful Romanticism.
Yes, you parsons, not everything in the world is theology. There are some
things totally alien to you. You, whose wish is to immolate nature and to
bury life, when its eyes have scarcely opened; presumptuous and corrupt
gatekeepers of heaven, Gods chamber servants, who like the ordinary run
of lackeys only ever see what is small in greatness not everything that
happens is the matter for debates such as those of L oscher and Calixtinus.
People also want to knowthat others have already had the experience that
the way to heaven that goes via the Church is a time-wasting, tiresome
detour, and that history, searchings after truth, enthusiasm and beauty
have also existed. Leave your catechisms for a moment, lift your holy-
seeming eyelids, throw away your clerical robes and collars, this priestly
coquettishness, forget the proofs for the divinity of a man still crucied
o
Karl Gutzkow, Preface to Schleiermachers Vertraute Briefe uber die Lucinde, Hamburg, :8,
p. v.
:
Ibid., p. 6
.
Ibid., p. ix.
A literary scandal :.q
by you, and listen to what happened long since in the realm of freedom,
youth and fantasy.

There is, he says, a new faith coming that will afrm humanity.
The Romantic periods obsession with beauty and ideality has led
to disappointment and pain. But, Gutzkow argues, that should not
be taken as proof for the superiority of the real world of day-
to-day affairs. Instead the pain of such idealistic longings is the
capital that Spirit has invested for the transformation of the real
world. Love itself is a pledge of how the material can serve the
realizationof the ideal. Andif the dreams of the sentimental period
seem over-enthusiastic, that is because we have not yet seen the
kind of emancipation of women that would really bring about a
new status quo in the relations of the sexes. Women have been
kept back from the public sphere and limited to petty domestic
preoccupations. This is what Schlegels book challenged (as when
he invited speculation on the interchangeability of gender roles).
Finally, then, Gutzkows message is: Be not ashamed of passion
and do not regard ethical life as a matter for the State . . . The only
priest who can unite two hearts is a moment of ravishment, not the
Church with its ceremonies and its calculating servants!

Such
declarations may lead to his exclusion from church, but he needs
no sacraments whose symbols I bear in my heart.

As with Schlegel and Schleiermacher the theme of erotic passion

was of intense personal concern to Kierkegaard. The year in which
he was working on The Concept of Irony was also the year of his ill-
fated engagement to Regine Olsen, a young woman with whomhe
had been in love for some years. Shortly after becoming engaged to
her, however, Kierkegaard became convinced that their marriage
would be against the will of God and that, metaphorically at least,
his way was to be the way of the cloister. The psychological roots of
this decision have never been satisfactorily cleared up, but there is
little doubt that, for whatever reason, he experienced considerable
anxiety and guilt in the face of the sexual function.
There is a close connection between Kierkegaards tale of un-
happy love and the whole of his early authorship, in which traces of
the broken engagement can be found everywhere. The question of

Ibid., pp. xiixiii.

Ibid., p. xxxv.

Ibid., p. xxxvii.
:o Kierkegaard, religion and culture
Lucinde as to the signicance of sexuality for human fullment was
therefore central to Kierkegaards thinking at this time. This makes
the questionof the precise scope of the inuence andpresence of the
Lucinde debate in his work extremely complex. Two texts, however,
stand out as particularly relevant: the formal critique of Lucinde in
The Concept of Irony and the less direct, more imaginative treatment
of Romantic love in Either/Or.
In The Concept of Irony Kierkegaard attacks the Romantics from
a standpoint akin to that of Hegelianism. He argues that what the
Romantics claim to be an established fact, namely, the integration
of the polarities of existence so radically sundered by Kant, is really
just a claim and not a fact at all. He questions whether the unity
and harmony which they celebrate has actually been sufciently
grounded and worked through. Poetry, he argues, is a kind of rec-
onciliation of the polarities of being, but it is a purely imaginary
reconciliation, which fails to touch the substance of the real world.
It offers no transsubstantiation of the given actuality . . . but it rec-
onciles me with the given actuality by giving me another actuality
(CI, p. .q), or it is an emigration from actuality (CI, p. .q). The
other actuality into which the poetic takes us is nothing other than
the ctional reality of the work of art. Kierkegaard thus extends
and carries through to a fundamental level Schleiermachers hinted
reservations about Lucinde. This leads him, ultimately, to a quite dif-
ferent judgement regarding the moral and religious nature of the
book. For Kierkegaard only the religious reconciliation is the real
reconciliation, in which the subject is not dreaming but possesses
himself in innite clarity, is absolutely transparent to himself . . . not
in nite and egotistical self-satisfaction, but in ones absolute and
eternal validity (CI, p. .q8). In religion life comes to be based on
an innitization of reality that is given rather than on the merely
horizontal innity of the egos own creative possibilities.
[I]t is indeed one thing to compose oneself poetically; it is something
else to be composed poetically. The Christian lets himself be poetically
composed, and in this respect a simple Christian lives far more poetically
than many a brilliant intellectual. (CI, pp. .8o:)
Because Schlegel does not base himself on such an experi-
ence of being poetically composed but sets up his own absolute
right to cause creative confusion as an alternative to the Christian
A literary scandal ::
revelation, the poetry of Lucinde is fundamentally illusory. The
book is not religious and, in Kierkegaards opinion, this means that
it is not poetic either.
Kierkegaard also questions the ingenuousness that Schlegel
claims when he identies himself in spirit with the little Wilhelmine.
Schlegel, Kierkegaard says, wants us to believe that the whole thing
is an innocent game, sheer spontaneous fun, but in fact the book has
a distinctly doctrinaire character. It sets out not merely to under-
mine the absurdities of popular convention (which Kierkegaard
is also well aware of ) but also to destroy the true morality, the
true religion, which consists in the mastery of the spirit over the
esh (CI, p. .qo). Schlegels delight in nudity is interpreted as a
wish to divest man of his spiritual being as well as of his clothes.
Archimedes, Kierkegaard reminds us, did not run naked through
the streets of Syracuse just because he was the innocent child of a
sunny southern clime, but because his intellectual joy, his eureka,
eureka was adequate attire (CI, pp. .q:.).
Schlegels claim to be the ingenuous well-beloved son of Wit
is therefore dismissed by Kierkegaard as a mystication: Schlegel is
not a naive sensualist such as Don Juan; he is a personality who is
trapped in reection (CI, p. .q), a split personality who, even in
the midst of his enjoyment, looks at life froma cold, ironic distance.
If the image presented by the gure of Julius in Lucinde is thus
a deliberate deceit, Kierkegaard sets out in Either/Or to show us
the truth behind that image. It is interesting to speculate how far
Either/Or is a deliberate counter to Schleiermachers Letters. For what
Kierkegaardwrote of the Letters canbe appliedquite well toEither/Or
(as it can to several of his other pseudonymous works), with the pro-
viso that the views which it expressed are reversed in Kierkegaards
writings. He says of the Letters that:
It is probably a model reviewand also an example of howsuch a thing can
be most productive, in that he constructs a host of personalities out of the
book itself and through them illuminates the work and also illuminates
their individuality, so that instead of being faced by the reviewer with
various points of view, we get instead many personalities who represent
these various points of view. But they are complete beings, so that it is
possible to get a glance into the individuality of the single individual and
through numerous merely relatively true judgements to draw up our own
nal judgement. Thus it is a true masterpiece. ( JP IV: 86)
:. Kierkegaard, religion and culture
Kierkegaards reinterpretation of the gospel according to Julius is
perhaps most vividly expressed ina sectionof Either/Or entitled The
Seducers Diary. Johannes, the Seducer, is an eerie, phantom-like
gure who embodies the spirit of cold, cynical reection. His plea-
sure consists in the alleviation of his intellectual solitude by a series
of carefully contrived love-affairs, each one designed to elicit the
maximum of aesthetic resonance. Johannes, like Julius, allocates
the polarities of being to the two sexes respectively. Woman is thus
Nature, sensuous beauty, spontaneity (immediacy); man is Spirit,
ideality, reection. In common with the rest of phenomenal nature
woman is being-for-another, that is to say she only nds fullment
through her relation to another (man). As such a being-for-another
woman is essentially virginal (we are told), and her being nds its
most perfect expression in the moment in which she gives herself
to her lover. Johannes thus has no use for permanent relationships;
the whole art of love-making is, for him, solely directed towards
this moment of intense feminine self-surrender. The moment is
everything, he says, and in the moment woman is everything: the
consequences I donot understand (EOI, p. ). Among these con-
sequences are marriage and children. As another of Kierkegaards
pseudonyms puts it: If the girls name is Juliane, then her life is as
follows: Formerly empress in loves far-reaching realm of exorbi-
tant speech, and titular queen of all the exaggerations of tomfoolery
now Mrs Petersen at the corner of Bathhouse Street (SLW, pp.
8 amended).
In this way the Romantic celebration of love and of the eternal
feminine is pilloried by Kierkegaard for being basically dishonest. It
is in fact a subtle expression for male dominance and the reduction
of woman to the status of being-for-another, a means, and not an
end in herself.
How if at all do we get beyond these deceits to authentic
love? Kierkegaard answers this question by means of the pen of the
ctional Assessor William, whomwe meet in Volume II of Either/Or.
The Assessor is both a married man and a Christian and a prolic
writer of letters. In the rst of his two extremely lengthy letters, The
Aesthetic Validity of Marriage, he gives us a thorough-going cri-
tique of the Seducers (and so, in Kierkegaards eyes, of Schlegels)
view of love. He does not want to abolish the passionate, sensuous
A literary scandal :
element in love but, he argues, to ground the erotic in religious
faith and experience. Love needs to be concretely related to God by
prayer and by submissionto revealed religion(i.e., by going through
the marriage ceremony of the Church). The ontological comple-
mentarity of the sexes is not enough to ensure that their coming-
together is ultimate fullment and communion. Something more
is necessary the God-relationship. So, writes the Assessor, let
Don Juan keep his romantic bower, and the knight his nocturnal
sky and stars if he sees nothing beyond them (EO II, p. q).
The fact that humanity is unable, by its own efforts, to nd
wholeness outside the God-relationship is, for Kierkegaard, both a
sign and a consequence of the universal sickness unto death: sin.
We are not, in terms of our own natural capacity, perfectible beings.
The Assessor thus comments approvingly on the way in which the
marriage rite of the Church reminds the bride and groom that
in the Bible there is a close connection between the matrimonial
state and the Fall. (It is interesting to note the difference between
Schleiermacher and Kierkegaard with regard to the way they use
Genesis to support their widely disparate arguments.) Moreover,
by demanding a vow the Church underlines the point that abiding
love is not a natural growth but depends on a resolution of the will
which sets itself against the inclinations of the natural man. Unless
such a religiously grounded resolution is present, love will dissolve
into a sequence of momentary affairs, as in the case of the Seducer.
The Assessor believes, and devotes much of The Aesthetic
Validity of Marriage to proving, that this religious foundation does
not destroy the sensuous beauty of love but enhances it. He rests
his case on the principle that:
we are not to read about or listen to or look at what is the highest and most
beautiful in life, but are, if you please, to live it. Therefore, when I readily
admit that romantic love lends itself much better to artistic portrayal than
marital love, this does not at all mean that it is less esthetic than the other
on the contrary it is more esthetic. (EO II, p. :q)
It is more aesthetic because it is able to give a real form to
the ideal, rather than retreating into the false reconciliation of po-
etic fantasy, which, in Kierkegaards eyes, leads to a diminution of
concern for external reality.
: Kierkegaard, religion and culture
The second of the Assessors letters gives a more detailed analysis
of the act of self-choice which is the existential foundation for the
possibility of being able to make a vow, to make the sort of commit-
ment which the marriage ceremony requires. It goes beyond the
scope of this chapter, however, since it leads to a complex discussion
of the metaphysics of personality.
Kierkegaards later writing is more pessimistic than Either/Or
and he comes to question whether this sort of commitment is in fact
at all possible for a human being existing under the conditions of
nitude. He reaches the conclusion that the sort of happiness and
fullment one might hope to nd in a merely human love is utterly
illusory and to pursue it is a distraction from the main task of man,
which is to seek an eternal blessedness in a life beyond this world, a
life in which man will be transformed into an angel, a being existing
solely and exclusively for the praise and worship of God. Sexuality,
as the universal condition for the continuation of biological life,
now comes to be seen by Kierkegaard as an inherently corrupt
and corrupting drive which fuels the separation of man from God,
andwhichties us ever more strongly tothe animal life of this world.
Woman is strongly identied with the sensuous pole of life and,
therefore, with the sexual function. Thus, she comes to share with
sexuality in general the unenviable status of egotism personied.
This is the ultimate, tragic conclusion of Kierkegaards attempt to
provide a metaphysical justication for his own existential decision
to follow what he regarded as the promptings of the divine voice
within by renouncing the possibility of marriage. In his late thought
we thus nd an almost complete reversal of the Early Romantics
apotheosis of sensuous love and of the eternal feminine.
It would be easy for children of a sexually permissive society
to dismiss Kierkegaards pessimism as a reection of some kind
of sexual morbidity, but perhaps his pessimism enabled him to
see issues which the Romantics had missed. His insights into the
tensions and deceptions that can mark sexual relationships are of
abiding signicance, even if the quasi-metaphysical interpretation
which he latterly gave to these insights is considered to be highly
dubious. In this respect he can be seen as a forerunner of the
analyses of sexual politics which were to be given by such as Ibsen
and Strindberg in the next generation, and which anticipate many
A literary scandal :
aspects of more recent discussions of sexuality. In fact Kierkegaards
critique of the Romantic cult of the feminine as being an inverted
andmysticatory formof male dominance is, despite his owndislike
for the movement for the emancipation of women, not far removed
from what some modern feminists would wish to say.
6
Kierkegaard was intuitively aware of the phenomenon of projec-
tion which psychology has since described more fully and identied
as a key mechanism in erotic relationships. It was this awareness
which enabled himto see through some of the extravaganzas pro-
duced by the Romantics. He implicitly makes use of this concept in
The Seducers Diary, where we are shown howthe Seducer uses others
simply as foils to his own psychic development, himself projecting
onto them the signicance they are to have for him. This mecha-
nism is almost inescapable in personal relationships, and when it is
conscious on both sides, and where the projection corresponds to a
real trait in the character of the other person, it need not be a bar-
rier to true relationship. But it may also happen as Kierkegaard
shows us in the Seducer and as so often emerges in cases of marital
breakdown that the other in an erotic relationship merely func-
tions as a blank screen onto which we project our own fantasies.
What we love in such a case is nothing more than an externalized
reection of our own wishes; the other is allowed no independent
existence, no genuine otherness, but becomes, or is reduced to,
an instrument for the realization of our own egotistical purposes.
Kierkegaards argument against the Romantics concept of love,
especially in view of the way this concept was developed in close
conjunction with the idea of productive imagination, was that it
functioned as a justication for precisely this kind of utilitarian
relationship. From the mans point of view woman becomes an
object of voyeuristic pleasure; from the womans point of view
man becomes simply an adjunct to her biologically determined
task of child-bearing and rearing.
In conclusion it can also be said that the debate reveals once
more and from another side the extent of Kierkegaards (and,
for that matter, of Schleiermachers) profound engagement with
6
On the question as to if and, if so, how Kierkegaards thought might relate to feminism,
see, for example, C. L eon and S. Walsh (eds.), Feminist Interpretations of Sren Kierkegaard,
University Park, PA, Pennsylvania University Press, :qq.
:6 Kierkegaard, religion and culture
contemporary culture. Although this has not been emphasized
here, it is notable that both Schleiermacher and Kierkegaard estab-
lishedmilestones inthe literary receptionof Lucinde, as well as relating
its themes to the wider question of the relation of Romanticism to
religion. For they were not like so many modern theologians who
speak about secular culture as if they themselves stood outside it.
They were both men who participated fully in the cultural expe-
rience of their respective generations, and whose theology did not
speak down to culture but from within it.
CHAPTER
The reception of Either/Or
The thread we have been following in the preceding chapters has
been provided by Kierkegaards critical judgement of the times in
which he lived and, more specically, of the cultural life of his con-
temporary Copenhagen. But how did Kierkegaard himself or,
more precisely, his writings appear to his contemporaries? And
which of those contemporaries were interested in it, and why? In
this chapter I shall attempt to open up these questions with particu-
lar reference to Either/Or, his third book, but the rst of what he was
himself to refer to as his authorship, the sequence of pseudony-
mous works and their accompanying religious discourses that ran
from Either/Or itself through to Concluding Unscientic Postscript.
Either/Or was made available to the Danish reading public on
.o February :8 by C. A. Reitzel, University bookseller and pub-
lisher in Copenhagen, at a cost of four dollars, four marks and
eight shillings per copy. Within two years the entire edition of ve
hundred and twenty-ve copies had been sold, making it (by the
standards of the day) a literary success.
:
A second edition followed
in :8q, and since then it has been translated into a wide variety of
languages, riding on and spreading the fame of its now acknowl-
edged author, Sren Kierkegaard. In the beginning, of course, it
had appeared under the name of its pseudonymous editor, Victor
Eremita, and although there were some of Kierkegaards contem-
poraries who had a good idea of the identity of the real author,
those rst readers were not inuenced (for better or for worse)
by their preconceptions as to the signicance of Kierkegaards life
and work. This does not, of course, mean that they were without
:
On the signicance of sales gures see Uffe Andreasen, Romantismen, Copenhagen,
Gyldendal, :q, p. :6.
:
:8 Kierkegaard, religion and culture
preconceptions: simply that, inevitably, they were not the precon-
ceptions of all subsequent readers. An examination of the notices
andreviews responding to Either/Or at the time of its publicationand
of Kierkegaards own response to these is therefore of interest and
even importance to later readers for a number of reasons.
Such an examination throws considerable light on Kierkegaards
own attitude to his contemporaries and on his standing among
them, and, in particular, it opens up further dimensions of his char-
acteristically ambivalent relation to the world of the contemporary
feuilleton. After :86 and the bitter satirical attack on Kierkegaard
launched by The Corsair this relationship was to be transposed to a
darker and more embittered key, but the critical (or, in some cases,
uncritical) response of the press to Either/Or shows us something of
its original conguration. As will become clear, the relationship was
never unproblematic, but the tone of these earlier quarrels was no-
ticeably lighter than anything in the post-Corsair period. They also
provide evidence that considerably weakens the (self-proclaimed)
myth of Kierkegaard as the writer and genius who had the misfor-
tune to live in a provincial market-town where no one understood
him.
Such a study also, and no less importantly, serves to highlight
the major themes of the book itself, themes that were to be of
continuing importance in Kierkegaards authorship as a whole.
This last point gains insignicance for us today insofar as it relates to
the vexed issue regarding the religious intentions of that authorship.
Kierkegaard himself was, famously, to claimin The Point of Viewthat
the authorship had been religious from the beginning; present-day
readers, however, are too much students of suspicion with regard
to the authority of authors to take such claims at their face value.
This more sceptical attitude to The Point of View has been forcefully
championed by, amongst others, JoakimGarff.
.
I do not claimthat
the study of the contemporary reception of Either/Or puts an end to
such debates: I do, however, argue that it supports Kierkegaards
own claim in the Point of View that at the time of writing Either/Or
he was already, religiously, in the monastery, i.e., that his position
was one that involved a radical religious critique of contemporary
reality, the world.
.
J. Garff, Den Svnlse: Kierkegaard lst stetisk/biogrask, Copenhagen, Reitzel, :qq.
The reception of Either/Or :q
There is, of course, a widely held view that Kierkegaards writ-
ings went completely beyond the intellectual horizons of his Danish
contemporaries. This view was undoubtedly held and fostered by
Kierkegaard himself, and subsequent scholarship has tended to ac-
cept his views on the subject. Patrick Gardiner, for instance, states
that these Danish contemporaries either . . . did not read what he
wrote or else, if they did, they misunderstoodhis underlyingintent.

With regard to Either/Or itself Vincent McCarthy has written that

as contemporary reviews and Kierkegaards own annoyance in-
dicate, the effect of Either/Or upon the Danish readers of :8 was
overwhelming rather than thought-provoking as Kierkegaard had
hoped . . . the Danish literary public was bewildered by its size and
format, and even further distracted by the seemingly endless series
of Chinese puzzles in which the author enclosed the work.

The
evidence of the sales suggests that the literary public did at least
buy it, but, if McCarthy (who here represents a wide consensus)
is to be believed, they probably bought it for the more titillating
sections of The Seducers Diary or to puzzle over the real identity of
Victor Eremita rather than to grapple with its deeper philosophical
and religious themes. But is this so? If we actually read those rst
reviews, a different picture starts to emerge. For there, alongside
those reviews and notices that were indeed supercial and uncom-
prehending, there were others that devoted considerable time and
care to the text, honouring it with substantial, intelligent and rel-
evant comment. Of course, these reviews did not deliver the nal
word on Either/Or, but it is simply unfair to describe their authors as
overwhelmed, bewildered or distracted by the books supercial
novelty.
Let us, however, begin with the less perceptive reviews and
Kierkegaards reaction to them. First in the eld was The Day
(Dagen), which, only two days after the publication of Either/Or,
announced that In recent days a phenomenon has appeared in our
literary sky whose reappearance we have every reason to desire,
and referred to it as a philosophical work.

The anonymous

Patrick Gardiner, Kierkegaard, Oxford, Oxford University Press, :q88, p. :. To be fair to

Gardiner he seems to acknowledge that this was at least Kierkegaards view of things.

Vincent McCarthy, The Phenomenology of Moods in Kierkegaard, The Hague, Nijhoff, :q8,
p. 6.

All references are to Dagen, Vol. :, No. ., .. February :8.

:o Kierkegaard, religion and culture
journalist ponders the implications of the nancial cost of pro-
ducing such a book and wonders whether there might not be more
than one author. Whether or not this is so, he believes that Every
lover of serious reading will nd many engaging hours in this book,
which in no way requires any philosophical education, but only
presupposes the desire for self-understanding. We draw special at-
tention to the splendid sermon with which the work ends. The
nal verdict (vindicated, it could be said, by history) is that a work
such as this . . . is a true adornment to our literature. Whether two
days is sufcient time to read, let alone form a considered opinion
of Either/Or, must be a moot point, and there is nothing demonstrat-
ing serious engagement with the text in the review. Nevertheless, in
a looser sense, the reviewer has not been unappreciative; still less
could his interest be described as salacious.
The following day the new literary phenomenon was greeted
in The Free Enquirer (Den Frisindede) by Claud Rosenhoff. In recent
days a book has been published which is remarkable in many re-
spects . . . the language is rich, brimming with humour and gaiety;
but suddenly the most profound seriousness once more emerges. It
is piquant in the highest degree, and testies to a well-read writer
who also knows how to use what he has read.
6
Most of the (rather
skimpy) broadsheet spread of The Free Enquirer for that day was in
fact given over to excerpts from Either/Or, with most space being
given to an episode from The Seducers Diary recounting Johannes
adventures with the servant-girls, in addition to a selection of apho-
risms from Diapsalmata expressive of post-Romantic despair. With
regard to The Seducers Diary, Rosenhoff comments that One might
be tempted to call upon the moral watchmen of the society for
the freedom of the press to anathematize the author, or to beg the
moral police force to conscate the work and burn the unknown
[author] in efgy; but in the next moment one will completely
grant that those who read this book will hardly take any harm
from it.

This is not to say that the book altogether escaped censure:

exception was taken to the excessive use of Germanic terminology.
Rosenhoff concludes by deferring the decision as to whether or not
6
All references are to Den Frisindede, Vol. q, No. ., . February :8.

Ibid.
The reception of Either/Or ::
the author has misused his undoubtedly great talent until a more
opportune occasion!
J. L. Heiberg, the leading man of letters of the day, was, as we
have seen at several points, someone whom Kierkegaard greatly
admired as a writer and critic. On : March :8, in an article en-
titled Literary Winter-Seed and published in his own periodical
Intelligensblade, Heiberg devotes considerable attention to Either/Or.
As in The Day and The Free Enquirer, the new work is greeted in
portentous phrases: in recent days a monster of a book has, like
lightning from a clear sky, suddenly struck our reading world.
8
Heiberg fears that the sheer bulk of the book may deter potential
readers: One thinks, Have I the time to read such a book?, and
What guarantee do I have that the sacrice will be worth it?
q
Heiberg does not immediately dispel the doubts of such a hesi-
tant reader but explores them further. One becomes impatient at
the way in which the authors exceptional brilliance, learning and
stylistic accomplishments are not united with an organizing capac-
ity that would enable the ideas to leap out in plastic form. It all
seems dreamy, indeterminate and evanescent.
:o
As we saw in a
previous chapter,
::
Heiberg rejects altogether the interpretation of
Scribes The First Love (which he had himself translated) in Either/Or
I, in the fateful words that He [the author] has sought to make a
masterpiece out of a pretty little bagatelle and has ascribed to it a
motive which is virtually the opposite of that which Scribe openly
acknowledges.
:.
As for the Seducer: one is disgusted, one is sick-
ened, one is enraged, and one asks oneself, not if it is possible for
a man to be like this Seducer, but if it is possible that a writer can
be so formed as to nd pleasure in studying such a character and
working at perfecting him in his quiet thoughts.
:
All these reactions, we note, are those of the reader, to whom
Heiberg refers as one. This one he describes as a true child of
the railway age, whose task is to master the greatest distance in
the shortest time.
:
But the negative reaction of such a one is
not the only possibility. There will, he says, be other individuals
(Enkelte a term that was to acquire an almost technical precision
in Kierkegaards own later championing of the individual or the
8
J. L. Heiberg, Litterr Vintersd, p. .88.
q
Ibid.
:o
Ibid., p. .qo.
::
See Chapter . above.
:.
Intelligensblade ., p. .qo.
:
Ibid.
:
Ibid., p. .8q.
:. Kierkegaard, religion and culture
single one against the crowd) who will not be content with an
idle stroll through Either but will press on to the Or. Here, he
believes, they will encounter quite different experiences:
now, at every point to which chance leads them, they will stumble on such
lightning-thoughts, that suddenly light up whole spheres of existence, that
they sense that there must be an organizing power here which makes
everything into a genuine whole. And now they begin, like orderly and
conscientious readers, once more with this Or and read the whole vol-
ume from rst to last, word by word. Through the whole of this reading
they are so entranced by the book, that they can scarcely put it down,
they feel themselves continually under the inuence of a rare and highly
gifted spirit, which brings forth before their eyes the most beautiful ethi-
cal point of view as from a deep speculative spring, and which seasons its
presentation with a stream of the most piquant wit and humour.
:
This being done, the reader will be in a position to answer the
riddle of the books title. For by the time it has been read to the
end, it is clear that there is actually no eitheror: rather, the posi-
tion adopted by the second half, the or, is absolute. Here, says
Heiberg, there canbe no questionof aneitheror, and the book, far
from maintaining the assertion that the basic law of contradiction
has been annulled, is, on the contrary, more in the way of proving
its correctness.
:6
Such a reader, Heiberg suggests, will then be able
to return to the Either and perhaps one such individual will be
able to deliver the results of his reading to the public, he concludes,
somewhat mysteriously.
Within a fortnight of its publication, then, Either/Or had received
a good many compliments, ranging from references to the authors
stylistic virtuosity to comments on his speculative depth. But had
there been any real engagement with the content of the book? And
what did the author himself think?
For The Free Enquirer he had nothing but contempt. It is rather
well known that on occasion, when it sees its chance, it tries to jump
on the bandwagon every time a phenomenon in literature makes it
possible, and thus the editor of Either/Or must be prepared to have
:
Ibid., pp. .q:..
:6
Ibid., p. .q.. This remark is especially signicant in that Heiberg himself, in a series of
publications, had argued for just such a suspension of the law of contradiction as a basic
principle of logic.
The reception of Either/Or :
that newspaper intrude upon this work also and if possible hold fast
to it for a moment (see EO II, p. q). As for Rosenhoff s conclusion
that no one will take any harmfromthe book and that he will defer
his nal judgement on it till a later occasion, Kierkegaard adds the
wish that The Free Enquirer, which, when it has not had time to read
the work, nevertheless has found time to review it, may never nd
time to read it, in order to remove the only conceivable possibility
that anyone at all would be harmed by reading it (EO II, p. q).
He is moreover incensed that the review was entitled An Episode
fromthe Seducers Diary, thereby giving a totally distorted viewof
the work as a whole. Such a procedure, especially when it dares to
display itself in print, is no more than literary prostitution, a rush
job that without a doubt is completely unwarranted, and he goes
on to warn readers against the pirated version of Either/Or offered
by the paper (EO II, p. q).
As for Heibergs review, it threwKierkegaard into what can only
be described as a literary frenzy. Suddenly the pages of the journals
are crowded with jibes against Heiberg. These are aimed chiey
at what Kierkegaard (quite accurately) perceives as Heibergs pose
of literary authority. Prof. Heiberg is also in the habit of holding
judgement day in literature. Have you forgotten what happened
to Xerxes? He had even taken scribes along to describe his victory
over little Greece (EO II, p. o.). Above all, he objects to the fact
that Heiberg should give so much space to and even appear to take
the part of the reader he calls one: He [Heiberg] is not alone,
has muses and graces and for safetys sake he has acquired a new
co-worker: one, an energetic co-worker who demands no fee and
accepts any treatment (EO II, p. o.). By doing this Heiberg has
reduced his perspective to that of the lowest common denominator.
Some of these bitter reections found their way into print in
an article published in The Fatherland on March :8 by Victor
Eremita. The article is entitled A Thank You to Herr Professor
Heiberg, but the thanks are, inevitably, loaded with sarcasm, es-
pecially when the Professor is thanked for helping him nd out
how one treats Either/Or (COR, p. :q). Indeed, the draft of the
article in the journal had been headed How Does One Treat
Either/Or? (EO II, p. o). Despite the positive nature of Heibergs
conclusion, Victor Eremita takes his critic to task for giving so
: Kierkegaard, religion and culture
much space to the point of view of one. That a one so numer-
ous that the only contrary term is some could actually behave
as irresponsibly as you describe . . . with respect to the reading of
Either/Or I would not believe it if it were not you, Professor, who
said it! (COR, p. :).
It is probable that Heibergs lack of appreciation of Either/Or
(as Kierkegaard saw it) marked a deterioration in the relationship
between the two men that, exacerbated by Heibergs equally (if not
more) condescending remarks about Repetition,
:
opened the way
for the bitter polemics that were to come in Prefaces. It must be said,
however, that Kierkegaards reaction is not entirely justied, since
Heiberg does not in fact take the part of the one and, indeed,
makes it quite clear that the book should not be read as one reads
it. His argument is, on the contrary, that only a serious engagement
with the Or will enable the reader to discover the real message of
the book. On the other hand, it is certainly true to say that Heiberg
himself does little to suggest what this real message is and does not
seem to be especially interested in nding out.
Kierkegaard was, however, to acquire readers who were pre-
pared to do more than merely take a stroll through the text. On
:: March :8 the newspaper The Outpost (Forposten) began a four-
part review, entitled Fragments of a Correspondence, which con-
stituted an extended discussion of Either/Or in epistolary form.
:8
The anonymous reviewer does not claim to be doing more than
giving a subjective response, an expression of the impact which the
book has had on me as a reader (FP ::, p. :). He sees the struggle
for a proper life-view that he nds in the text typical of the ferment
of the present age, an age that, in his view, has its quintessential
expression in France, where everything is in a state of dissolution,
everything is negation (FP ::, pp. .). What we see in Either/Or,
he suggests, is a vision of the negative as the struggles through
which a gifted and genial spirit must pass in order to come to a
positive life-view. There is little doubt that these remarks indicate
a recognition of what was to be one of the fundamental themes of
Kierkegaards authorship, a theme which was already present in
:
See Chapter above.
:8
The review is to be found in Forposten, :. March, :q March, . April and :q April :8.
References are given to FP in the text.
The reception of Either/Or :
his early journalism and in From the Papers of One Still Living, which
ran through much of the pseudonymous writing, found its most
concentrated expression in Two Ages and is implied in the nal
attack on State Protestantism. It is the theme of an empty, nihilistic
society that has lost itself in reection, is incapable of decisive action
and is deaf to the requirements of authentic faith. It is, moreover,
a theme that contributes signicantly to Kierkegaards critique of
the aesthetic as representing the typical mode of consciousness of
the present age of contemporary European humanity.
The Outposts reviewer frankly admits that (unlike Heiberg) he
particularly enjoys the expression of the aesthetic life-view in the
rst half of the book, in which he nds a true record of what
doubt, what despair, a gifted, genial spirit must undergo in order
to reach a positive life-view in an age when everything shakes and
is dissolved (FP ::, p. :). He assumes that the mood of despair
portrayed in it will be familiar both to his and to the books readers
and sees analogies between the aesthetic position of Part : and
the world-view of Heine. Speaking of the imaginary society of the
Symparanekromenoi, who embody the spirit of nihilistic pessimism
of Either/Or I, he ventures the statement that I do not believe that
any of us will lack sympathy for the idea which lies at the basis of
this society (FP :, p. q). He defends A against Heiberg on the
question of The First Love: Heiberg is right as far as Scribes play
goes, he concedes, but a work that was constructed along the lines
suggested by the author of Either/Or I would indeed be a work of
genius. He is also attentive to the signicance of the denite article
in The Seducers Diary: we are already guided by this to the fact
that the whole novel is a problem, a thought-experiment . . . It is
evident that this idea is particularly appropriate to our time, just as
the musical idea of Don Juan originated in the Middle Ages (FP :,
p. :). He recognizes that whereas Don Juan is characterized by an
immediate sensuous passion, the Seducer is thoroughly permeated
by the spirit of nihilistic reection that is symptomatic of the age.
He is less pleased by the portrayal of the ethical life-view in the
second half of the book, because he suspects that it will appeal in the
wrong way to the Danish philistines. He suggests that the basis of
the Assessors ethical life-view presupposes a view of the State that
is not made explicit in the text itself which could have been made
:6 Kierkegaard, religion and culture
more of. None the less, he is adamant that his criticism of Either/Or
II is inseparable from his admiration for the work as a whole: he
is simply unwilling to see any stone left unturned by the author.
It does not mean that he wants to see the aesthetic triumph over
the expression of faith towards which he sees the book moving, but
this goal should not be confused with bourgeois compromise. The
construction of a universal ethic is, he suggests, impossible at the
present time, and although there may be some individuals who can
break through the despair characteristic of the age, and although
it may be possible to transcend reection in the abstract sphere of
philosophy, such solutions are limited in scope. In the beginning
of his reviewhe had drawn an analogy between the present cultural
situation and the biblical story of Samson: just as the Philistines of
old thought that they had successfully bound Samson once and for
all, only to have him bring their temple crashing down about their
heads as soon as his strength returned, so the latter-day philistines
have bound the spirit of the age in its sleep but when its strength
returns, their edice too will be laid low. Either/Or is in his view
a sign of just such a return of strength, one that can rebut both
the negative spirit of unbridled reection and the philistinism of
the bourgeoisie alike. The reviewer is encouraged to see such a
clear and powerful spirit as that of the present writer, permeated
by conviction and faith (FP :, p. 8).
It is this same conict between nihilistic reection and faith that
is highlighted in a three-part reviewby J. F. Hagen in The Fatherland.
Who, Hagen asks, has not perceived the rending and dissolution
which, like a stream of screaming dissonances, is heard from our
ages most gifted children?
:q
Although the summons to acquire
a more positive life-view is heard frequently enough, he adds, it
all too often sounds like the cry of a drowning man. He sees this
contemporary nihilism manifested in such movements as Young
Germany andinwriters suchas Karl Gutzkow, whose novel Wally
Die Verzweierin (Wally: Woman of Despair) dealt with themes of suicide
and despair, or Theodor Mundt and his apotheosis of Casanova.
:q
Fdrelandet, May :8, p. q86. The review continued in the issues for : May and
.: May :8. Further references are given in the text as F, followed by page number.
Hagens question rather nicely and aptly anticipates Allen Ginsbergs Howl : I have
seen the best minds of my generation destroyed . . .
The reception of Either/Or :
The relevance of Either/Or to all this, he asserts, will be clearly
seen by anyone who has followed the many branchings of modern
literature, not so much in the realm of pure academic study, but in
the sphere of belles-lettres. In this sphere there has, over many years,
been a busy attempt to throw doubt on the absolute validity of the
ethical life-view and to rob it of its former credit by setting it in
opposition to the requirements of a free spirit (F, p. q88). This
conict, which we see mirrored in Either/Or, is nothing less than the
ancient conict between faith and scepticism: It concerns nothing
less than life itself: To be or not to be (F, p. q86).
Again, we may say that the reviewer has caught something of the
pulse of Kierkegaards work. His reference to Young Germany is
particularly relevant, since, as we have seen at several points, this
movement was very much the focus of Kierkegaards own critique
of the present age. On the literary front, as we saw in the last
chapter, it was precisely Gutzkows re-edition of Schleiermachers
Condential Letters on Schlegels Lucinde which made Lucinde itself of
such relevance to Kierkegaard. Moreover, Hagens perception that
the work concerns the conict between faith and scepticism indi-
cates that he has identied an element in Either/Or that would be
expanded in Kierkegaards more directly philosophical works.
The fullest review of all was to appear in the Odense quarterly
For Literature and Criticism (For Literatur og Kritik). It was signed K-H,
a transparent nom-de-plume for the young theologian H. P.
Koefoed-Hansen.
Here too the reviewer drew attention to the timeliness of the
theme of the struggle for a life-view, and observed that there had
been a massive decline in the force of authority, so that the truly
modern individual had to construct his life-view for himself rather
than receive it on the authority of others. The Church, he said,
was regarded by an increasing number of those in the educated
classes as a half-superuous left-over froman earlier time, to which
one can attach oneself if one wants to, which one can let alone if
one does not.
.o
Without the support of objective authority the
individual is left to choose for himself between two opposing life-
views: the aesthetic and the ethical that of egotism and that of
.o
All references are to Fyenske Tidsskrift For Literatur og Kritik, Vol. :, No. , :8. Further
references are given as FLK in the text, with page number.
:8 Kierkegaard, religion and culture
humanity, that of self-love and that of love for humanity (FLK,
p. 8). It is, of course, this very conict which he nds represented
in Either/Or. However, he argues that there are in fact two forms of
the aesthetic life-view shown in Either/Or I, embodied in A and the
Seducer respectively. A represents a failed attempt to live out such
an aesthetic point of view, while the Seducer shows us how such a
viewmight be consistently carried out in existence. By his portrayal
of the aesthetic point of view in all its nuances and consequences
the author has won for himself a greater standing in literature
and in cultured life than the majority of those who have sought to
portray aspects of this point of view in concrete form in novels and
stories, not to mention the wealth of philosophical, psychological
and aesthetic observations and expositions which this part of the
work contains (FLK, p. q8).
Muchas he admires the Either, andrecognizing that this is what
most interests many of the public, Koefoed-Hansen believes that
coming to the Or is like coming to an oasis after a long journey
through the desert. Indeed, the general preference of the public
for Part : reveals that this same public has much more in common
with the aesthetic point of view than it cares to think. The author,
however, has laid bare the truth of this aesthetic stance in all its
brilliant and deceptive pride and in all its pitiable hollowness and
comfortless emptiness (FLK, p. o).
Either/Or certainly makes demands on its readers, but this is
scarcely a fault, for one journeys through a novel by Bulwer or
Eugene Sue more easily and far more comfortably than through
a work like Either/Or, but precisely on this account it yields a quite
different result and offers a quite different content than such works
(FLK , p. o).
The argument of the Assessor against the aesthetic point of view
is well thought out, he adds, since the mere statement that anethical
attitude is morally better would not go far with an aesthetically
minded reader. The Assessors technique is far more subtle, in that
he shows the aesthetic point of view to be essentially unaesthetic.
Similarly, with another implied comment on the performance of
the contemporary Church, he remarks that the closing sermon will
make a much deeper impression on an aesthetic personality than
most of those we have heard till now (FLK , pp. o).
The reception of Either/Or :q
Koefoed-Hansens aspersions on the failure of the Church did
not go unnoticed. Bishop Mynster himself, writing under the
pseudonym Kts, took up the gauntlet in Heibergs Intelligensblade
on : January :8. He objects to the reviewers belief that only
a reformulated Christianity will be able to appeal to the educated
classes and accuses himof trivializing the issues. He cites an array of
Christian preachers who have combined faith with the highest in-
tellectual standards: Chrysostom, Luther, F en elon, Schleiermacher
and Marheineke (though this last would not have cut much ice with
the radical left Gutzkowhad singled Marheineke out as typical of
the dead hand of contemporary theology in his sarcastic comments
about the mourners at Schleiermachers tomb
.:
). Indeed, Mynster
asserts, many of Copenhagens churches are full to overowing,
and many of those attending them belong to the educated classes.
It is therefore wrong, he suggests, to concede intellectual superior-
ity to the aesthetic point of view. Such ironic aesthetes, he claims,
are merely the half-educated, the one-sidedly educated, the mis-
educated,
..
and he adds that the preacher must address his words
to those who are actually there, in church, and not to such mists.
Mynster is also suspicious of what he sees as Koefoed-Hansens
implication that there is one gospel for the intellectual elite and
another for the uneducated cobbler. Such a view he regards as
pandering to the aesthetic cult of genius.
As a counter-example to all this he appeals to the recently pub-
lished work Fear and Trembling, which, he says, has nothing in com-
mon with the self-attery of the moral genius. He also alludes to
the dedication of Sren Kierkegaards Upbuilding Discourses to the
memory of his late father. Here, says Mynster, is an example of
someone of outstanding intellectual brilliance who is none the less
able to acknowledge that the last things of faith do not depend on
intellect, since the father to whom these works are dedicated was
himself a man without formal education.
Several days later an article by A Priest appeared in The
Copenhagen Post entitled Boorish Lies and accusing Kts of intem-
perance and vanity. The author denied that the churches were
overowing on Sundays and, more seriously, suggested that Kts
.:
See Chapter 6 above.
..
Kts ( J. P. Mynster), Kirkelig polemik, Intelligensblade :., p. :..
:o Kierkegaard, religion and culture
had completely failed to come to terms with the signicance of
such writers as Heine, Feuerbach and Bruno Bauer.
.
The Fatherland stepped in to give the last word to Koefoed-
Hansen, who stated that he did not himself subscribe to the modern
atheistic philosophy, but that it was not sufcient simply to dismiss it
in the way that Kts had done. The Protestant Church, he said, was
too closely identied with worldly authority and its message was
therefore too easily confused with the maintenance of such author-
ity. He does not want, as Kts had accused him of wanting, to have
philosophy from the pulpit, but he does want to see the Church
taking a philosophical bath so that it can show signs of having
taken the signicance of contemporary thought seriously. All this,
he adds, is not just a problem for big cities like Copenhagen: the
new ideas have already reached small provincial towns as well. It
is no good burying our heads in the sand.
.
But what of Kierkegaards own reaction to these more serious
reviewers? He was at least willing togrant themthe status of reviews.
In the persona of Victor Eremita he drafted an unpublished article
in which he acknowledged that To have even one well-disposed
reviewer is a rarity, but such a trinity among reviewers, at least well
disposed towards the whole if not in judgement of the parts, is a
rarity that surely will please the books unknown authors (EO II,
p. :8). But Heiberg is not forgotten in this expression of delight:
I dare not call Professor Heiberg a reviewer; his advertisement
or, more accurately, his mixed notice in Intelligensblade was probably
intended only to orient, and I can only thank himfor the courtesy
and service shown (EO II, pp. :8-:q). None the less, he feels that
even the trinity of genuine reviewers have all missed something
essential. For there is a movement in Either/Or that cannot be made
or at least not in this way. The judge has unquestionably perceived
this himself, I cannot believe otherwise. Since his task was only
to circumscribe an ethical view, an irregularity of that sort was
unavoidable, and I rather believe that on behalf of his view he has
tried to hide it (EO II, p. :8).
What is this movement? It is, it seems, a movement towards the
more radical religious dimensionthat cannot accommodate itself to
.
Anon., Plump Usandhed, Kbenhavnsposten, January :8.
.
K.-H., Replik til Kts, Fdrelandet, :q January :8.
The reception of Either/Or ::
the world in the manner of the Judge. Such a form of religious exis-
tence perhaps cannot be encompassed within the scope of a literary
work such as Either/Or, lying outside the perimeter, beyond the no-
mans-land of angst, the nemesis of all aesthetic communication.
.
This being said, it is clear that all three reviewers were able
to see, with Kierkegaard, that the problematic nature of faith in
the situation of modernity was not being taken seriously enough
by the Church itself, and that the avant-garde of contemporary
thought, nihilistic, reective, dissolute as it was, could not be simply
brushed aside. In their eyes Either/Or did speak to the age, from the
very depths of the age. Moreover, the ecclesiastical polemics of
Kts, arising from Koefoed-Hansens review, further underlined the
point at issue in Either/Or itself: what is it to have faith in an age of
reection?
Howdo these contemporary responses to Either/Or helpour read-
ing of Kierkegaard?
They must, in the rst place, weaken the self-propagated im-
age of Kierkegaard as having been absolutely unique among his
contemporaries in his understanding of the crisis of Christianity,
a crisis that involved both the role of the Church in society and
also the conict between aesthetic and ethical world-views. This
crisis was already on the public agenda when Either/Or was pub-
lished (after all, Schleiermachers Speeches had been published more
than forty years previously), and Kierkegaards (genuine) reviewers
make it plain that, for them, the issue of faith versus modernity lies
at the heart of Either/Or, which is, for this very reason, a timely book
in their eyes. Even if it was unique in terms of its literary and philo-
sophical quality, and even if it struck some contemporary read-
ers (one!) like lightning from a clear sky (Heiberg), Either/Ors
problematic was already a part of the agenda of what, somewhat
anachronistically, one might call the intelligentsia of Europe. The
intervention by Mynster and the responses to that intervention also
had an eerie prophetic signicance in this context, anticipating the
nal polemics of Kierkegaards own Attack upon Christendom .
What the reviews and the Kts controversy showis that this debate is
already latent in Either/Or itself. This would certainly count against
.
See my Kierkegaard: The Aesthetic and the Religious, pp. 66..
:. Kierkegaard, religion and culture
the view that the Attack is radically discontinuous with the rest of
Kierkegaards authorship and suggests that we should see it more
in terms of the direct statement of what, in Either/Or, is already
stated indirectly and obliquely. Moreover, these contemporary re-
sponses lend support to Kierkegaards own claims in The Point of
View regarding the essential unity of his authorship and its funda-
mental religious intentions. On the other hand, the very fact that
Either/Or was recognized in its own time as an essentially religious
book does somewhat spoil the picture painted in The Point of View
of Kierkegaards contemporaries complete inability to see it, tak-
ing with their right hands what he offered with his left. Similarly,
his disparagement of The Day and of The Free Enquirer seems unfair
in this: that if the strategy of indirect communication as set out in
The Point of View really was aimed at meeting Kierkegaards au-
dience where they were, in their aesthetic illusions, it must have
been integral to that strategy to get Either/Or into the very world
of popular feuilleton literature represented by such papers. The
whole concept of indirect communication seems precisely to de-
mand gaining the attention of those who, in the beginning, cannot
understand what it is about. When Kierkegaard himself had an ar-
ticle published in The Fatherland under the title Who is the Author
of Either/Or ?, (COR, pp. ::6), what was he doing if not stirring
the surface of the literary pond and stimulating just the kind of
interest he affected to despise? This does not, of course, mean that
he is wrong in castigating the superciality of The Day and The
Free Enquirer, simply that, on his own account, engaging with the
readership of such journals was part of the plan.
Lastly, we may note that whilst Victor Eremita chides the three
reviewers for overlooking the decisively religious movement of the
Ultimatum, Kierkegaards later characterization of a radically
individualized and radically interiorized kind of faith is precisely
contextualized in relation to a perception of the mass nature of
the modern world and the impersonality of an age of reection.
The three reviewers did, therefore, correctly identify the arena in
which, for Kierkegaard, the trial of faith was to be held. This his-
torical specicity is important, not least because our reception of
Kierkegaard today will be inuenced by the extent to which we be-
lieve that the nihilismof what many nowsee as a post-metaphysical
The reception of Either/Or :
and post-modern intellectual climate is in key respects anticipated
by the nihilism of the :8os. If, as Habermas for one argues, we re-
main contemporaries of the Young Hegelians,
.6
if we are still living
within the same cultural, intellectual and spiritual paradigmas that
which sawthe birth of Kierkegaards authorship, then Either/Or will
continue to have for us as for the best of its contemporary readers
an impact that is not reducible to the verve of its stylistic virtuosity
or the fascination of its intellectual intrigue. But its signicance will
not so much be in terms of its challenge to the spirit of the age, as in
its uniquely forceful and precise posing of the question of the age.
.6
Quoted in T. McCarthy, Introduction to J. Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse of
Modernity: Twelve Lectures, Cambridge, Polity Press, :q8, p. vii.
CHAPTER 8
New Years Day
I
Kierkegaards edifying or upbuilding writings are often treated as if
they belonged to a world apart from the poetically and philosoph-
ically genial works of the pseudonymous authorship. They might
seem especially remote from the kind of aesthetic and cultural de-
bates that have been reected in the previous chapters. And, of
course, there are real differences. Nevertheless (and very much in
keeping with the essential ambiguity of the moment vis-` a-vis the
simultaneity of the sublime and the ephemeral) there are also im-
portant points of thematic contact. It is precisely such points of
contact that enable Kierkegaard, through the discourses, to de-
velop a strategy of resistance, a counter-movement, to the onward
march of the levelling values of the public. In this chapter, then, I
shall explore one such point of contact, namely, the question of time
itself and the particular experience of time in the cultural milieu of
Kierkegaards age.
In their espousal of the values of modernity, the radicals of
Kierkegaards generation no less than the promoters of fash-
ionable entertainments like Tivoli made ample and effective use
of the rhetoric of novelty. Like later artistic modernists and their
distant post-modern relatives, the exponents of the emerging cul-
ture of mid-nineteenth-century modernity understood themselves
to be the bearers of Newness. The vocal spokesmen of the rising
generation sought to administer the shock of the new to a com-
placent, mummied Establishment in order to awaken it to the
reality of the modern world.
But if this characteristic self-understanding has continued to
resonate in successive waves of aesthetic, political and cultural
:
New Years Day :
modernisms and postmodernisms down to the present, it is equally
true that the New was already in the :8os nothing new. This was
no sudden vogue, but reected a complex of values and aspirations
interwoven with the whole movement of European Enlightenment,
values and aspirations that came to expression in the literature of
Sturm und Drang and in the expectations spawned by the French
Revolution and the Early Romantic movement.
Ernst Bloch sees Goethes novel The Sorrows of Young Werther as
an early expression of faith in radical novelty, and of an artistic
programme in which every production intends an element of the
seventh day of creation, as the statement of the previously unsaid,
the humanhearing of the previously unheard.
:
Blochnds it telling
that eventhe old Goethe could say There is no past whichwe ought
to long to have back, there is only an eternally Newwhich is formed
from the expanded elements of what is past, and true longing must
always be productive, must create a new Better. On which Bloch
comments that The style of old age is itself a Novum.
.
Recall Lucinde, and its heros belief that The time has come
when the inner being of the Godhead can be revealed and shown,
when all mysteries can be disclosed and fear is to end. Dedicate
yourself and proclaim that nature alone is worthy of honour and
health alone worthy of love.

For all its medievalism (or, in some

cases, classicism), Early Romanticism is suffused by the sense of
excitedly standing on the threshold of a new age, a time when the
ossied dogmas and moral codes of society will be swept away by
a stream of recreating re, most immediately and urgently present
in the demands and utopias of liberated sexuality. As Julius later
declares:
The re of love is altogether inextinguishable, and even under the deepest
ashes sparks glow. The highest honour I can attain as a man is to awaken
these sparks, to purify themof the ashes of prejudice, and where the ames
already burn more brightly, to nourish them with chaste sacrices . . . It is
the oldest, most child-like and simplest religion to which I have returned,
for I honour re as the supreme image of the Godhead, and where is
there a more beautiful re than that which nature has enclosed in the soft
bosom of woman?

:
Ernst Bloch, The Principle of Hope, vols., Oxford, Blackwell, :q86, Vol. III, pp. q8:..
.
Ibid., pp. qq8q.

Schlegel, Lucinde, pp. ..

Friedrich Schlegels Lucinde, p. .q.
:6 Kierkegaard, religion and culture
In his Phenomenology of Spirit Hegel too had embraced the spirit
of the New:
it is not difcult to see that ours is a birth-time and a period of transition to
a new era. Spirit has broken with the world it has hitherto inhabited and
imagined, and is of a mind to submerge it in the past, and in the labour
of its own transformation . . . The frivolity and boredom which unsettle
the established order, the vague foreboding of something unknown, these
are the heralds of approaching change. The gradual crumbling that left
unaltered the face of the whole is cut short by a sunburst which, in one
ash, illuminates the features of a new world.

In Sturm und Drang and in Romanticism, however, Hegel sees only

the initial formof this newworld, as immature as a new-bornchild,
only the immediate formof what must nowbe worked through and
grasped in its inner rational necessity, but, note well, it is precisely
this new world, the Novum, that is the matter of Wissenschaft, i.e.,
scientic knowledge.
Goethe, Early Romanticism and the Phenomenology were all fea-
tures of Kierkegaards intellectual background, though separated
from him by several generations. Nevertheless, the Novum they
hailed continued to make its mark on thought and culture, often
in still sharper and more iconoclastic forms, as in Young Germany
itself and, of course, in its caricature in the novelties of fashion
and entertainment.
The New was, unsurprisingly, no less a factor in Scandinavian
Romanticism and Hegelianism than in Germany. hlenschlger
hailed the battle of Copenhagen in :8o as a call to national awak-
ening, and, in :8., N. F. S. Grundtvigs poem New Years Morning
demonstrated how the motif of the New could be taken as the uni-
fying element of an apologia pro vita sua that wove together aspects
of Nordic mythology, Christian history and personal development.
The outcome is that the poet identies his mission with the task of
arousing the ancient powers from their long slumber and thereby
ushering in the new era. In his introduction Grundtvig speaks of
his joyous morning feelings
6
and of how he reckoned the great,

G. W. F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, Oxford, Oxford University Press, :q, pp. 6.

6
N. F. S. Grundtvig, Nyaars-Morgen: Et Rim, in Udvalgte Skrifter, Copenhagen, Gyldendal,
:qo6, Vol. IV, p. .q.
New Years Day :
reborn hope for the North that sprang up in my heart as the most
joyful thing I have experienced on earth.

The very aimof his work

is said to be to awaken the peoples of the North from their deep
soul-slumber on the surface, in which they seem to be as if dead
and buried.
8
The pattern of rebirth fromspiritual death is one that
Grundtvig has experienced in his own life at several points, but it
is a pattern that he also sees as having a national, historical and
cultural signicance.
In the poem itself the image of the sea provides a gure of unre-
deemed time, of mere change, history without goal or purpose.
However, as the sun rises from the sea to herald a Nordic summer,
the poet is carried by Odins eight-legged steed Sleipnir (signifying
the spirit of poetry) to Valhalla, a place of song and rejoicing: a
manner of speaking that reects how Grundtvig envisages Nordic
mythology as a north star pointing to the sun of Christianity and
poetry as anticipating the true eternity of Gods Word that brings
spiritual life. This Word must be freed from book and letter so that
it may be fullled in the heavenly Eucharist: For a Word of the
Truth/ Can never prove false/ And did He not say/ I shall drink
it anew/ With you in the Fathers realm!
q
But was it possible philosophically to justify the claims made on
behalf of radical novelty? This question is interdependent with the
interrelationship between nature, history and freedom, a question
that was at the centre of philosophical debates in this period. For
if the world was, as Newton seemed to have shown, governed by
regular and unalterable laws that were without exception, how
could there be room for any Novum? If all phenomena manifest
the same underlying uniformities, how can anything really new
ever happen?
It was no little part of the promise of post-Kantian idealismthat it
seemed to offer an answer to this question, a way that retained the
Enlightenments acceptance of Newtonian physics, but also held

Ibid.
8
Ibid., p. .o.
q
Ibid., p. .68 (verse 6). There is an interesting sub-theme running through the poem that
it is not possible to examine further in the present context, namely, the way in which
Grundtvig gures the Word as a feminine element (the poets mother-tongue) in opposition
to the masculinity of heroic action.
:8 Kierkegaard, religion and culture
out the prospect of genuine progress within history, such that the
future was not condemned merely to repeat the past, but to su-
pervene upon it and to move it on up to a new and higher level.
Crucial inthis transformationis the emergence of Spirit or freedom,
an emergence that is often described as interdependent with con-
sciousness of the eternal. In J. L. Heibergs early work On Human
Freedom, he describes this emergence in terms of the Moment
(ieblikket).
That it is indeed the moment in which, as we have seen, all the contra-
dictions of the empirical will are concentrated, is understandable if we
recall that the moment itself is, as such, a contradiction in itself. For on
the one side it is only in the moment that man lives and exists, since the
past is no more and the future has not yet come, so only the moment is
or has reality. But on the other hand, the moment is not, it has no reality,
for it is past as soon as it begins, its death coincides with its birth; it is
stillborn, the greatest of all anachronisms. The moment thus contains the
whole of that great contradiction that is found in time, Chronos, who
devours his own children. For just as man is only living in the moment,
so, on the contrary, can he die in the moment. The last is the case when
he does not consciously distinguish the moment from the past and from
the future, does not elevate it above the transient stream of time, or, as it
is said, does not use it, i.e., does not recognize it as something that is in
itself. By way of contrast, that man is alive who feels the eternal power of
his substance in the moment and raises himself out of time, thus using his
libertas indifferentiae, which is nothing but the wills or freedoms eternity,
and which can therefore express itself in the moment, for only the moment
is eternal, since it is the only aspect of temporality in which there is no
succession.
:o
For H. L. Martensen, writing in Heibergs journal Urania in :8,
the emergence of freedomin, throughandgoing beyondtime is em-
bodied in the Churchs year, of which he writes that whilst the astro-
nomical year regards the universe in terms of its subordination to
the laws of nature and necessity, the Churchregards it fromthe view
point of freedom and personality.
::
However, this is not to be un-
derstood dualistically (as, Martensen believed, Kant and Fichte
only arrived at a dualistic understanding of freedom), but as the
:o
J. L. Heiberg, Om den Menneskelige Frihed, Kiel, :8., p. o.
::
H. Martensen, Kirke-Aaret, in Urania: Aarbog for , Copenhagen, :8, p. :6.
New Years Day :q
innermost kernel of Nature.
:.
In this way the providential order-
ing of time serves the fullment of Gods purposes: The powers of
nature and of history must all serve to establish the eternal realm
of the personal.
:
Heibergs discussion once more anticipates what will be
a key topic in Kierkegaards authorship and here, in particular,
Kierkegaards and his contemporaries meditations on the theme
of NewYear. For the question is whether it is possible for the break-
throughfromnature to freedomto acquire concrete andcontinuing
formin the world: whether in the re of passion, in the rule of Spirit,
or in personal and national rededication to Christian worship.
I I
We have already seen from several angles how From the Papers
of One Still Living and Two Ages, two works that frame the rst
pseudonymous authorship, both take issue with the cult of the
New. Furthermore, this is in each case precisely the burden of
Kierkegaards opening pages: each book begins with an assault
upon the cult of new beginnings. It is, then, striking that the issue
of novelty should also be prominent in the very rst of the series of
religious discourses published under Kierkegaards own name that
accompanied the pseudonymous works. That New Years Day
provides Kierkegaard with the theme for the rst of all the many
discourses he was subsequently to publish is by no means acciden-
tal or arbitrary. If this is most obviously true in the case of the rst
discourse, I believe that the theme runs, albeit unevenly, through
the whole of the rst eighteen discourses and provides one of their
unifying threads. As suggested above, this enables us to read the
discourses not simply as would-be timeless religious texts, but,
with the rest of the authorship, as a very specic response to a very
specic cultural situation.
If the pseudonymous works call into question not only the social
and erotic utopianismof the Early Romantics and Young Germany
but also the cynicismsubsequent on the failure of successive revolu-
tionary movements, Kierkegaards religious discourses offer a way
:.
Ibid., p. :88.
:
Ibid.
:6o Kierkegaard, religion and culture
forward that acknowledges the negative power of time with regard
to all things worldly, including and indeed emphasizing the way
in which time brings to nothing all collective and, indeed, individ-
ual attempts to realize a new world on the plane of phenomenal
history (external history, as Assessor Vilhelm put it), but that also,
in the struggle with time, nds that which is more-than-temporal:
the eternal that gives meaning and value to our being-in-time. Yet
Kierkegaards way forward does not coincide with that of other
religious apologists such Grundtvig or Martensen (or, as we shall
see, with that of Schleiermacher or Mynster). In this respect it is
precisely Kierkegaards novelty that a comparison between the
rst of the discourses and other contemporary New Year sermons
brings to light. Can we specify in what that novelty consists?
I suggest that it has primarily to do with the way in which
Kierkegaard sets up the relationship between author and reader,
and, in this regard, the essentially dialogical nature of the
Kierkegaardian text. The importance of this in relation to
Kierkegaards critical involvement in the debate about culture is to
do with the way in which such a dialogical approach engages the
reader in a very different way both fromthe products of contempo-
rary high art, understood as self-contained exemplars of internal
perfection, and from the spectacular displays of popular culture. If
the feuilleton critic seeks to prescribe for his reader what is or isnt
worth seeing or how it is to be viewed, the discourses are used by
Kierkegaard to open a conversation in which the reader was to be
thrown back on his own obligation to awaken and to nurture his
own faith.
I have elsewhere argued for the dialogical nature of the rst two
discourses with particular reference to the way in which they can
be understood as addressed to her (i.e., to Kierkegaards former
anc ee Regine Olsen), yet in such a way that they are not limited
by such a biographical reference but are also able to appeal beyond
their immediate addressee to any reader who is able to become my
reader.
:
But this autobiographical context is not directly imposed
on the reader (as in Grundtvigs New Years Morning, where the poet
conates his own awakening with that of the nation). Instead, the
:
See G. Pattison, A Dialogical Approach to Kierkegaards Upbuilding Discourses, Journal
for the History of Modern Theology , :qq6, pp. :8.o.. See also Chapter :: below.
New Years Day :6:
narrative of the engagement crisis is transmuted into the question
as to what members of the congregation may best wish for each
other. In this process a member of the congregation becomes a
substitute for her, and we as readers are then called upon to place
ourselves imaginatively in the hypothetical consciousness of the
bewildered man invoked by the author/speaker. It is specically
in relation to this question that the task of edication and the ex-
pectation of faith, incorporating as these do the question of human
being-in-time, are proposed. It is out of the the bewildered mans
concern for what he can justiably wish for the other that we are
led to realize the limits of what we can directly do for each other,
and the impossibility of giving the best of gifts, faith, to the other,
leaving us with the more limited task of praising faith in such a
way as to move the other to will to acquire it more deeply, while
presupposing that s/he is already in possession of it. This means
that the question of the eternal, the question of God, rst becomes
an issue for us on the basis of our concern with and for the human
other. In this regard Kierkegaards position is fundamentally, but
instructively, different from that of, for example, Sartre, for whom
the other is a continual threat to the integrity of the self, such that
we rst become selves by wresting ourselves away from the gaze
of the other. For Kierkegaard, however, and for the discourses in
particular, the impossibility of being absorbed into or by the other,
or of absorbing the other into myself, is a key element in his an-
thropological starting-point.
Now, it has to be said that although this concern with the human
other provides the guiding thread of the prelude to the discourse,
it appears only in order to disappear. We hear only snatches of
dialogue between human interlocutors and lovers in this and in
the remainder of the eighteen discourses. I suggest, however, that
if we look at the edifying writings as a whole, the question of the
human other does not disappear completely: rather, it reappears
as the question of love, and of how best to witness to love (most
clearly in Works of Love a work that concludes by sketching the
radical, suffering witness of the disciple conformed to the image of
the crucied one).
To sum up: despite being without authority and lacking
overt Christological content, the discourses, contextualized by the
:6. Kierkegaard, religion and culture
question of responsibility for the other, are positioned by the rst of
the series in relation to the hopes and fears aroused by the passing
of time. To such sublime anxiety they respond by proposing a way
of being-in-time that is not seduced by the lure of the New, that is
congruous with and anticipates the content of Christian faith, but
that formulates and appropriates the expectation of faith within
a human horizon that neither assumes nor invokes any special
revelation.
I I I
I shall now proceed to summarize New Year sermons by Schleier-
macher, Mynster and Martensen. I do not claim that Kierkegaard
actually read any of these (though it is likely, especially with regard
to the rst two) before or after writing his own NewYear discourse
nor do they exhaust the possible range of New Year sermons with
which he might have been familiar. However, especially in the light
of their common features and the themes that recur in all of them,
I do take them fairly to represent the kind of theological approach
to the occasion of New Year with which Kierkegaard would have
been well acquainted.
I begin with Schleiermachers :8o: sermon On the Similarity of
the Future to the Past.
:
Schleiermacher starts by acknowledging
that thinking about the future is in a sense unjustiable, and can
easily lead to discouragement, robbing us of the present moment.
Apious person, however, does not allowhimself to speculate in that
way: no feverish activity of the imagination alters the pulse of his
temper, no ebb or ow of hope drives turbulent waves across the
mirror-like surface of his soul, but stillness and equanimity is the
tenor of his contemplation of the future.
:6
Schleiermacher who, as we have seen, was himself a participant
in the spirit of the new era takes as his text Ecclesiastes :.8q in
order to invoke the mood expressed by the Solomonic thought that
there is nothing new under the sun. This, he says, is a natural
expression for the way in which one who seeks God in all things
:
F. D. E. Schleiermacher, Die Aehnlichkeit der Zukunft mit der Vergangenheit: Am
Neujahrstage, in Predigten, Vol. I, Berlin, :8, pp. ::..
:6
Ibid., p. :..
New Years Day :6
sees the world. To those who only have regard for the external it
may seem as if everything is continually new:
Every human soul is continually moved by love or repulsion, thoughts and
feelings proceed out of its inner powers and shape a singular moment of
its being, in relation to which the memory of an earlier moment is lulled
into a gentle sleep from which it will perhaps never awaken, in the stream
of discourse, in the ash of an eye, insights and impressions ow from one
person to another, and everyone passes them on with the mark of their
peculiar characteristics. This is the fermentation and movement of every
moment, and behold, each one is something new. Never was the innite
world so arranged as now, never did the light of the sun nd our earth so
adorned and beautied as even now; never was there a being like the one
that even now begins or concludes its singular existence; never was the
same thought, with the same power and inuence in any human soul, as
now stirs within each of you: everywhere innite multiplicity proclaims
itself to be without insignicant repetition.
:
But all of this is only the viewpoint of the one who sees things in
their external aspect. If we attend to the inner aspect, things look
different. For human nature is governed by constant laws no less
than is outward nature. We must not be misled by appearances.
The same power is at work in all. If we are astonished by some
beauty or depravity of human personality, we must reect that it
proceeds from the same reason, will, heart, understanding, imagi-
nation, passion and connectedness of thoughts. Whatever is done
is what has been done before and will be done hereafter.
Analogously, there is no difference, despite outward appear-
ances, between great and small. Death snatches away the highest of
men, but, conversely, even the one who occupies the lowest place is
not insignicant. Thrones tumble, wars rage, the earth is in tumult
and the great mass of men see in all of this new and unheard
of things, the like of which have never been on earth. The pious
person, however, sees only the same force of custom, of example,
of imitation, the same necessary downfall of a totality whose parts
no longer hang together.
:8
Or a new discovery is announced, but
the sudden ame with which it illuminates the earth has long been
prepared by little sparks, easily overlooked but no less important for
all that. The pious person does not necessarily have insight into all
:
Ibid., p. :.
:8
Ibid., p. :.
:6 Kierkegaard, religion and culture
the detailed workings of the world-order, but sees that it is a unitary
world-order in which nothing completely new ever occurs. This is
what produces the calm and resignation with which he faces the
future.
Such a one will also be content with his station in life, whether it
be high or low, whatever or wherever God has set him. He does not
envy or chase after someone elses lot, for that would be to overlook
the divine Spirit that is active in small and seemingly insignicant
actions and to be misled by the appearance of greatness and by
differences that have no ultimate existence. No one place is more
perfect than any other. That in a person which alone constitutes
his true worth is everywhere the same.
:q
These reections will lead a person to be both more diligent in
the task allotted to him and also more hopeful of improvement, for
if we believe that something new has to happen in order for some-
thing better to become of us, then we shall only be disappointed.
To recognize that the greatest of Gods works on earth is the
sanctifying of man is to realize that whatever and wherever we are
we can contribute something to that task. And whoever knows that
there is nothing new under the sun knows also that there is no evil,
no trial or torment that has not been faced and conquered by those
with powers no greater than our own. Instead of bringing to God
a long list of stupid wishes we should calm ourselves by growing
in the conviction that we shall receive nothing from Him, except
that which His fatherly love has already prepared for us.
.o
In this
spirit, Schleiermacher exhorts his congregation to have patience in
the midst of the tumult of a stormy age (in his case, of course, this
tumult was not simply a matter of rapid social and cultural change
but the overwhelming tumult of the Napoleonic Wars).
We can see here some of the characteristic features of the early
Schleiermacher and the way in which his pietistic origins and his
so-called Spinozism ow together into a world-view in which
inwardness, piety and a sense for the unity of all things condi-
tion one another at every point. Also characteristic is the way in
which Schleiermacher commends conforming ourselves to the
:q
Ibid., p. :8.
.o
Ibid., Predigten, p. ...
New Years Day :6
world-order rather than invoking any transcendent or other-
worldly resolution of this worlds conicts and apparent contra-
dictions and injustices. Important in this respect is his fundamental
presupposition that human experience provides the starting-point
of the religious consciousness, and it is striking that the sermon is
virtually devoid of Christological references.
In contrast to this, J. P. Mynsters New Year sermon of :8:
begins by speaking of the appropriateness of beginning the year
by greeting one another in the Name of Jesus Christ, to which
the most joyful memories and greatest hopes of the human race
are joined.
.:
When this Name was rst spoken, Mynster continues,
there was a moment of stillness on earth, but it was only a moment
of stillness in the midst of violent, bloody storms. The high and
mighty of the world did not recognize the tale told in Judaea of a
Saviour as worthy of attention, but this was indeed the one who
brought healing for the deep wounds of the human race. Nor was
the saving name of Jesus named for that time alone, but for all times:
it means that a light has been lit that cannot again be extinguished, that a
kingdomhas been established which shall never be overthrown, it signies
unto us that God has loved the world and taken it unto Himself . . . it calls
on us to believe that . . . [God] will in every age, in every circumstance,
both know and be able to apply the means to let good break forth from
evil.
..
Indeed, we can be more condent of this than of the sun returning
each morning, or of the spring following on winter because all of
these are part of a nite order that will come to an end, whereas
Gods promises concern a new heaven and a new earth that follow
upon the end of this nite world.
Mynster goes on to remind his hearers that their primary task
in coming together is to pray together and that prayer ought to
begin with adoration of God, calling to mind His perfections, then
remembering the good things we have already received from Him
and only then proceeding, in condence, to bring our desires before
Him.
.:
J. P. Mynster, Froprdiken paa Nytaarsdag :8:, in Prdikener, Vol. II, .nd edition,
Copenhagen, :8., p. ..
..
Ibid., pp. .
:66 Kierkegaard, religion and culture
As he continues, Mynster argues that the contemplationof time is
itself a ground for praise of the God whose years are not numbered,
and who knows neither decay nor change.
.
Deep in the foaming,
limitless abyss sank glory and misery, joy and sorrow, evil and good:
and ever runs on the stream bearing one after another past the
watchful eye, until we too are snatched away and leave our place
to others who will soon have forgotten us.
.
However,
it is only the outward forms that are dissolved, but the inner life which
is grounded in Gods eternal being, which holds fast to Him in faith and
love, cannot be overthrown by death; and the eye which He opened that
it might see, and the heart which He made ready to know His glory, shall
never again be shrouded in darkness, He shall continue to reveal His
divinity in us and to us, ever more perfectly, according to our ability to
bear and apprehend it.
.
God is the Almighty, and the world is no playground of arbitrary
forces. Therefore, although God gave us freedom, He sets limits
where and as he will. He providentially governs all things justly: He
gives grief and anxiety to those who do wrong, honour and peace
to those who do good, and our own hearts, our own consciences,
know this to be so. There is, of course, much trouble and strife
on earth, but even more ugliness or lack of graciousness. People
complain so much! About their ofce, their home, their friends,
and they would complain if things were otherwise. We would do
better to thank God for giving us the opportunity to serve Him
in whatever situation we are in, for giving us occasion to humble
ourselves and to free ourselves from the service of folly. God has
cared for all in the past and will care for all in the future. That
His Name should be hallowed is the beginning of true prayer and
of true wisdom. With this remark Mynster launches into a prayer
that the fear of God may spread through all lands and His word
be taught everywhere, its fruits apparent in the lives of high and
low, master and servant, man and woman, the aged and the little
children alike. God will guide all things to a good end, and guide us
through the temptations that accompany our wanderings on earth,
and that He might shape our hearts according to Gods will should
be our rst and last goal in the coming year.
.
Ibid., p. q.
.
Ibid., p. 8.
.
Ibid., p. :o.
New Years Day :6
In a later collection, Sermons for Every Sunday and Feast-Day in the
Year, there are two sermons that relate to our theme. The rst of
these was for the Sunday between Christmas Day and New Years
Day On the Passage of Time.
.6
This sermon begins by remarking that even the light-minded
person becomes thoughtful at New Year and has a heightened
awareness of the passage of time, for we are naturally moved on
such an occasion to consider the meaning of our lives in this short
time here below.
Mynsters text, Galatians .:, speaks of God sending His Son
in to bring us from a state of infantile dependency to mature
adult responsibility. This suggests that development through time
is indeed development towards a denite goal, a goal revealed in
the Christmas message of God sending His Son born of woman in
the fullness of time. It is this that gives Mynster the cue to take as the
object of his observations the passage of time.
Inevitably, reection on the passage of time leads to thoughts of
mortality. We scarcely notice time as it passes, but with each day,
each year, a part of our lives comes to an end. Oh you, whose life
on earth is slipping by as time passes, you mortal man! Can you
forget that, as the ship is borne onward by the waves towards its
port, or towards the place on which it will be wrecked, so you too
are borne by the stream of time towards your goal, whether it be to
peace or to destruction?
.
Even the most light-minded, distracted
person, if asked Why have you lived?, would not be satised with
the answer that he had lived only for time to take his life away.
In contrast to such a light-minded person, however, the poor but
honest worker, the worthy housewife and the loyal, dutiful servant
can hold their heads up high.
For the feeling of transience that oppresses the sensuous man as
he contemplates the passage of time is dispelled if we realize that
while outward things change,
your consciousness abides: your inmost being is the same . . . Times have
been and gone, they have sunk into their abyss; but memories rise up from
the deep grave, and you feel that that which was, that which is said to have
.6
J. P. Mynster, Om Tidens Gang, in Prdikener paa alle Sn- og Hellig-Dage i Aaret, Vol. I, th
edition, Copenhagen, :8, pp. 8oq..
.
Ibid., p. 8.
:68 Kierkegaard, religion and culture
disappeared, to have sunk into nothingness, nevertheless still is, it stands
forth in your consciousness, whether in accusation or defence.
.8
Times come and go, all streams run into the sea which is never full,
man has nothing to show for all his efforts under the sun, except
that
the more seriously we observe the passage of time, the more we feel that
there is that which has meaning and worth: there is a difference between
good and evil that none may abrogate, there is a striving that deserves
honour, glory and power, and which cannot therefore be in vain.
.q
This conviction is inscribed in our conscience so that even if our
lips deny it, our hearts never will.
In addition to the testimony of our hearts, however, we also
have the evidence of scripture and of the life of the Church. This
can benet the individual if he remains attached to the main stem
and does not cut himself off. Every individual must join himself
to the general [almindelige] growth. In such ways time brings us
nearer to fullment, and therefore we cannot complain about the
passage of time, for mans existence is, or ought to and can be,
an eternal progress.
o
Even if your noblest powers are weakening
with age, be sure that your soul is about to spread its wings, to gain
its freedom, to renew its youth.
In the following sermon, Christian Resolutions at the Beginning
of the Year, Mynster again advises us that if New Year can lead
to a melancholy feeling of human transience, the one who strove
to ll his soul with the eternal will be able to thank God for what
he has experienced and will view this day as a day of renewal.
:
The invocation of the name of Jesus gives Mynsters heart a feeling
of expansiveness and warmth, of condence and peace in facing
whatever the year will bring: the conviction that whatever happens
will happenaccording to the will of the one who sent His Sonto save
the world, and has given victory and honour to His Name, raising
it above every other name. In this condence we must begin the
New Year not with wishes but with resolutions. The chief of these
must be that we should preserve faith. Faith is not just a matter
of doctrine but of something to hold fast to and to keep alive in
.8
Ibid., p. 8.
.q
Ibid.
o
Ibid., p. q:.
:
Ibid., p. q.
New Years Day :6q
our innermost being. The year ahead is unknowable and therefore
uncertain, but we do not go out to meet it with troubled minds
[Bekymring] or with fear but with trust in the living God, Father
of all, who providentially steers all things, lifting our hearts to the
eternal. In all of this Mynster acknowledges that he is speaking
quite generally, but that each individual must apply it in your own
heart, deep in your conscience, according to your condition and
calling. The message is the same whether the auditor holds high
ofce or low, whether his sphere of action extends widely in society
or is limited to the domestic world.
.
The themes that emerge fromMynsters sermons are those of the
constancy in the midst of change that comes from the souls imme-
diate but inward participation in or connectedness to the eternal,
the inward equality of all, irrespective of social or personal circum-
stances, the assuring testimony to the souls eternity revealed in the
incarnation and focussed in Jesus Name (a motif connected with
the coincidence of New Years Day and the feast of the Circum-
cision), the need for participation in the life of the community in
order to appropriate that assurance and, on that basis, the possibil-
ity of both personal and common progress, a progress that reects
Gods providential guiding of the world and the individual.
Mynsters vision relates back to that of Schleiermacher at several
points, especially with regard to the immediacy of the souls appre-
hension of the eternal. Nevertheless in these sermons he shows
himself to be both more Christological and more ecclesiastical in
orientation than (at least) the Romantic Schleiermacher. In this
regard, Schleiermacher is perhaps closer to Kierkegaards New
Years Day discourse than is Mynster.
Martensens collection of Sermons for every Sunday and Feast-Day of
the Year contains two sermons specically for New Years Day. The
rst is entitled Faith in Providence in Jesus Name.

Martensen begins by commenting that although NewYears Day

is not a Christianfestival, the marking of time is something that God
in His wisdom has been pleased to allow us to do. This day has its
special mood: as we sense the passage of time and as we gather our
.
Ibid., p. q8.

H. Martensen, Forsynstroen i Jesu Navn in Prdikener paa alle Sn- og Helligdage i Aaret,
Copenhagen, :8, pp. 6:.
:o Kierkegaard, religion and culture
thoughts for quiet contemplation, we dwell inmemories of vanished
days. In their joys and sorrows we arouse expectations concerning
the future, its hopes and fears, and we ponder resolutions. But all
of these are merely vanishing billows on the stream of time unless
we hold them fast in something eternal, something abiding that
does not vanish as things change.

This something is the Name

of Jesus.
We all have memories of various things, but in Gods house there
is one holy memory, the memory of Gods gracious guidance which
has accompanied us in life. This is not just something general; it is
also individual, and if we doubt this, we should listen again to the
words to you a Saviour is born.

Jesus Name helps us to see the

order in the ages of the world and also in individual life. Much in
our lives will remain obscure, as in history.
We can indeed see only imperfectly the many individual threads in the
wonderful weave that providence effects in the course of an individuals
temporal life, and so often the pattern is lost to our gaze in darkness, but
if the Name of Jesus is in truth come into your temporal life then you
have therewith revealed [to you] the thread of providence, the guiding
thread that discloses the nal Why and the nal Wherefore of your lifes
circumstances.
6
We have various concerns for the future indeed, we cannot
be without concern so let us have a concern that we do not lose
faith in Gods providence, and let us keep before us the holy thread
which is only visible to the eye of faith. Let us keep before us the
image, the pattern of the one in whose footsteps we must follow.
May all our deeds be done in Jesus Name, Martensen concludes.
The second sermon, Remember to Live, opens with a prayer
that alludes to a passage of scripture well known to readers of
Kierkegaard (and named by Kierkegaard as his favourite scrip-
tural text), as Martensen addresses God as the Father of lights,
with whom is no variableness or shadow of turning. God is also
said in this prayer to kindle the light of conscience in our souls as a

Ibid., p. 6..

Words that, interestingly, stand at the centre of Luthers Christmas sermon in which he
emphasizes the category of the for you, i.e., that unless Christ is born for you He was
not born at all.
6
Martensen, Prdikener, p. 6.
New Years Day ::
testimony that heaven and earth will pass away before His kingdom
and His justice will undergo alteration.
Martensens text for the sermon is Luke :..:6.., the parable of
the man who, occupied with buying and selling and settling down
to enjoy his riches, learns that his soul will be demanded of him
this very night. The message of this text challenges us to live our
lives in the here and now in such a way that change has no power
over us, and we must remember that we risk being like that man
in the parable not only when we sit back to indulge in the fruits of
our labours, but also when we get taken up with various plans and
projects. But really to live is not a matter of achieving something,
but of becoming something: and what this means is that we are to
increase inwisdomandingrace. Wisdomis the eye of life, the vision
of the invisible and eternal, and grace is the power of life, which
creates a bond between the soul and its God. We do not grow like
the lilies of the eld, we growthrough conict and strife, as we strive
to preserve and to defend the inner life, the hidden immortal self
[Uddelighedsmennesket] in our breast.

If we do this then time has no

power over us. Then old age will be a time of wisdom, as it was for
Simeon, a part of the Christmas gospel that Martensen is condent
will be fresh in the minds of his auditors. And when we behold this
image, may we burst out in unison: that was a life!
8
And, he asks
rhetorically, Is not the apostolic word hereby conrmed, namely,
that if the outward man is consumed away, the inner man is daily
renewed? Then we know the meaning of Eckharts words, that he
will strive to be younger tomorrow than today. The value of a life
is not its duration after all, Jesus did not have a long life, but
though His life was short it was long enough to be the fullness of
time. And if a persons life seems to have been buried in times
billows, then . . . it is like a star that goes down into the ocean but
this descent is merely apparent, it is only in the eyes of the world,
for in reality it is an ascent to Christ.
q
Jesus Christ is the same,
yesterday, today and for ever: in Himis the eternal, and He teaches
us how to transform time into eternity. The Christmas gospel is a
pledge of the promise that the new, eternal kingdomshall more and
more triumph in us over the old kingdom of sin and worldliness.
o

Ibid., p. o.
8
Ibid., p. :.
q
Ibid., pp. :..
o
Ibid., p. .
:. Kierkegaard, religion and culture
Martensen concludes by moving his hearers to use this time, this
hour, as a time of renewal, a time in which they should commend
themselves to the Father of lights who gives Yule and New Year,
and can give more abundantly than we can ask or conceive, that
He might root us and ground us in love, and keep our hearts in
Christ.
Martensens addresses are strongly Christocentric, more so than
Mynsters (and it is striking that he addresses his congregation
specically as Christian listeners), although by emphasizing Christ
as the fullness of time and the eternal in time, he pointedly connects
the promise of the gospel with humanitys natural anxiety in the
face of time, an anxiety and concern that the secular celebration
of New Year is already able to arouse of itself. His sermon is also
signicantly permeated by the rhetoric of novelty.
I V
What light, then, do these varied treatments by Kierkegaards con-
temporaries of the New Year theme mean for our understanding
of his rst discourse?
Clearly there are many continuities. Time is a central issue and,
like so many thinkers in the religious and philosophical tradition,
both Kierkegaard and the others we have been examining gure
time as a stream or turbulent ocean, an image of ceaseless, ungras-
pable change lending itself to the sublime metaphorics of storm
and stress, of uidity and ux and converging with a traditional
depiction of the passions as tumultuous and insubordinate. Such
guration already dictates the moral and spiritual task to which
the sermons and discourses address themselves, namely, nding
that which abides in the midst of change, a still point, tranquil-
lity a quest imaged in the stilling of the turbulent waves of time,
passion and the mania of revolutionary novelty, in order that the
transguring light of God may be the more purely reected in the
transparent depths of the heart. Typically they seek this in inward-
ness, inthe inwardrelationof the self tothe eternal, a relationrooted
in conscience, and, in the case of Mynster and Martensen, invok-
ing, whether as ground or as guarantee, the incarnation of Christ.
Memory, conscience and faith establish the continuumalong which
New Years Day :
the soul nds its peace. More generally, condence in Gods prov-
idential ordering of time is seen as offering assurance as to the
viability of achieving a relation to the eternal. The inward quest
for the relation to the eternal, whether this is assumed as some-
how indwelling the soul or not, is seen as the essential task of the
believer, a task that is the same, yesterday, today and for ever. In
this respect, all the sermons we have been considering establish a
critical marker in the face of the cult of the New. Even when, as
for Schleiermacher and Mynster, there is talk of progress, the line
of progress is determined by the nature of the task itself, which is
not at all new. And even when, as for Martensen, there is talk of
the newness of Gods kingdom, this is qualied by the fact that it
is also an eternal kingdom. In this regard, all of them are proposing
a clear alternative to the kind of utopian optimism seen by Bloch
in Sturm und Drang, in Early Romanticism and in the Phenomenology.
The counsel of our preachers is not to be distracted by time from
the one essential task and, therefore, not to be distracted by the
times, the present age, for there is nothing new under the sun
and the fullness of time has already been revealed, a perspective
inherently suggestive of a certain reserve towards modernism and
its cult of the New.
Similarly, although (especially for Mynster) there is a common
insistence on the social dimension of faith, the need for a common
faith and common worship, the task of relating to the eternal is
conceived in fundamentally inward terms. Concern with the ex-
ternal disposition of social arrangements is strictly secondary, since
the one thing needful is the same for high and low, rich and poor,
master and servant, male and female. Again, this puts down a clear
marker inthe face of radical demands for a transformationof social,
economic and sexual relations.
In such ways, the texts we have been considering might be taken
as providing much of the agenda, not only for Kierkegaards New
Year discourse, but for much of his edifying writing, running from
the Eighteen Upbuilding Discourses to Works of Love and, indeed, to his
last offering in this genre, The Unchangeableness of God.
The theme of nding, establishing and maintaining a coherent
and consistent unity for the self through a relation to the eter-
nal, in inwardness, is at the centre not only of this but of many of
: Kierkegaard, religion and culture
the discourses, and, as with the sermons, this relation to the eternal
is brought about through trust in Gods providential guidance of
the individual in and through time, i.e., it is not a matter of self-
construction but of choosing ones self from the hand of God. Self-
hood must be willed, but it can only be willed in response to Gods
giving.
The discourses are not, of course, immediately Christological as
are the sermons of Mynster and Martensen. For them, New Year
is brought into a specic relation to the Christmas season, and the
incarnation is invoked as directly providing us with grounds for
hoping in the possibility of accomplishing a relation to the eternal
in time. If this incarnational reference is lacking in Kierkegaards
discourses, it is noticeable that several of the discourses do invoke
themes or gures that relate to the Christmas cycle, such as John the
Baptist (Advent) and Anna (the Presentation; cf. Martensens refer-
ence to Simeon). The themes of time and of Gods gracious giving,
brought into focus by this season, are also illustrated by references
in the sermons to the Letter of James and to Ecclesiastes, references
which are also reected in several of Kierkegaards discourses.
However and with one eye on Kierkegaards critique of
Mynster and Martensen for robbing Christianity of its transcen-
dent authority the outcome of this incarnational contextualiza-
tion does not seemto add to the basic conceptualization of time and
eternity that is in play in their sermons. These explicit references
do not, by themselves, establish a difference in content between
these sermons and Kierkegaards discourses.
But Kierkegaard is, we assume, not merely a representative
of Schleiermacherian and post-Schleiermacherian established
Lutheranism. I have already touched on the point that he is unique
in the way in which he positions the question of the individuals
being-in-time in relation to a prior question: that of the individuals
relationtothe humanother. This, I suggest, relates dialogically both
to the crystallizing of Kierkegaards thought in the engagement
crisis and, refracted through the ction of preacher and congre-
gation, to his appeal to us as readers. Whereas Mynster speaks of
his generalizations needing to be applied individually by his listen-
ers, Kierkegaard speaks of his individual crisis being broadened
and generalized by providence to speak to others. Kierkegaard, in
New Years Day :
other words, does not just build on the general human response to
the experience of temporality as do the other sermons we have
considered but starts from the very specic crisis of meaning in
his own singular existence. As the discourse makes clear, however,
no individuals singularity is transferable. In praising faith, he does
not and cannot immediately address the question that concerns me
in my singularity. This is not a general principle that the individual
can apply in his particular circumstances. This is an appeal from a
single one to a single one and, as such, indirect, refracted through
the generalized meditation on time, the eternal and faith. Here we
see perhaps another reason for the distinction between sermon and
discourse, since the sermon is, after all, addressed to a congrega-
tion, to a general gathering. The discourse, however, is addressed
to a reader, and the act of reading is always singular. I listen to
a sermon as a member of a congregation. I read a discourse or
devotional work on my own or, perhaps at most, with an intimate
other even when, paradoxically, it is a part of my task as reader
to imagine myself caught up in the dialogue between preacher and
congregation.
What this means is that Kierkegaards very starting-point andthe
very form of his presentation undercut the ecclesiastical and doc-
trinal presuppositions of the sermons we have been considering. It
is in our own existentiality, in whatever concrete form that takes,
in the singularity of every individual case, which is nevertheless not
therefore necessarily to be understood as lacking in essential relat-
edness to a no less singular other, that the question of the meaning
of time arises. Just as Heidegger was to dene his question not as
the question of Being, but as the question of the meaning of Being,
so too Kierkegaards question is not that of time, a question that,
for all the anxiety it arouses in the individual, can still be answered
within a generalized conceptualization of Gods providential or-
dering of the world, but the question of the meaning of time. The
question of meaning, however, becomes urgent precisely in rela-
tion to my responsibility to and for the other. It is, in a fundamental
sense, a moral question. Kierkegaards question is not: how can I,
nding my existence to be dispersed and dissipated in the stream
of time, nd that which abides? Instead it is: what can I wish for the
other that would be a true good for him? Here, as elsewhere, then,
:6 Kierkegaard, religion and culture
it emerges that the core of Kierkegaards challenge to the present
age, both to the utopianism of the cult of the New and to the eccle-
siastical viewpoint of Mynster and Martensen, is that it obscures
or glides over the ineluctable moral responsibility that, precisely
as individuals, we each have for each other. The acceptance of this
responsibility must be made in full awareness of the omnivorous
levelling that is not only a product of modernity, of the present age,
but belongs to the essential character of time itself. At the same
time, just this acceptance provides the rst step towards a possible
manner of existence that is not simply swept along by the times,
or even by time, but nevertheless remains in time and does so in
the manner of the times. The summons issued by the discourses
is not simply to abandon the concrete reality of the present age,
but, in, with and under the anxiously sublime space of possibilities
inhabiting the surface of modernity, to recover a mode of existence
that, for each individual singly, marks the beginning of the eternal
novelty that is the new creation itself.
CHAPTER q
Kierkegaard and the nineteenth century ( ) Manet
I
Apart froma couple of minor studies, some reviews and a fewpass-
ing references, very little was written in English about Kierkegaard
until after the First World War, and it was really only fromthe :qos
onwards that he became anything like well known in the English-
speaking world as a major gure of modern thought. The situation
was not dissimilar in France, and, if Kierkegaard had begun to
be noticed in Germany in his own lifetime, the highpoint of his
inuence was from the :q.os onwards. Elsewhere the story of the
reception of his work has mostly been even more fragmented and
belated. The time-lag in what, after Habib C. Malik, might be
called receiving Sren Kierkegaard contributed to the perception
that Kierkegaard was, somehow, a thinker who was born before
his time, a prophet of the crises of the twentieth century, particu-
larly with regard to the mutual alienation of Church and State, the
advent of what was called mass society and the consequent sense
of isolation of the individual. The age that could be described by
one of its leading poets, W. H. Auden, as the age of anxiety was,
it seemed, very much Kierkegaards age. The obverse of acclaim-
ing Kierkegaard as the prophet of twentieth-century alienation
and anxiety was, almost inevitably, the prevalence of the view that
prior to the social and cultural crisis resulting from the disaster of
the First World War he had been undeservedly overlooked. In a
nutshell: Kierkegaard belonged more to the twentieth century than
to the nineteenth.
But is it true that the nineteenth century overlooked Kier-
kegaard? The argument guiding the preceding chapters is that
:
:8 Kierkegaard, religion and culture
Kierkegaards own authorship was shaped by an extensive and in-
tensive engagement with the cultural questions of his own time:
how, then, could his own time fail to notice the originality and sig-
nicance of his analysis and critique? Or did it? Is the nineteenth
centurys ignoring of Kierkegaard perhaps yet another of the many
myths that have bedevilled the reception of Kierkegaard?
This question has recently been addressed in an extraordinarily
interesting study by Habib Malik, the title of which, Receiving Sren
Kierkegaard, was alluded to above. Maliks book is a painstaking trawl
through the most important (and many of the less important) works
about or references to Kierkegaard prior to the First World War.
Despite the impressive accumulation of source material amassed
as evidence, Maliks conclusion nevertheless seems to conrm the
prevalent view regarding Kierkegaards neglect. He describes the
history he narrates as a series of fumbles and missed opportunities,
of unfavourable circumstances and inept mediators, and of a few
shining examples of insight and dedication, to which he adds a
warning against reading too much structure and coherence into
a reception that had very little of either.
:
This is not all to the
bad, however, since, if it was exceptionally tortuous, the recep-
tion of Kierkegaard was also exceptionally colourful, involving
both famous and inuential thinkers and curiously minor and
intellectually peripheral gures.
.
And Malik has an explanation of
sorts for this, an explanation which, he says, belongs to the very
nature of Kierkegaards thought. This reason is that Kierkegaard
personalizes everything to such an extent that there is no escaping its
powerful and penetrating grip on the lives of those who come in
contact with it.

Although Malik does not really develop the implications of this

(understanding his task as the strictly historical labour of presenting
the evidence and steadfastly resisting the temptations of theory), it
would seem to follow that the very patchiness of Kierkegaards
nineteenth-century reception is not at all to be scorned, since its
connection to the arbitrariness of a motley collection of individual
:
Habib C. Malik, Receiving Sren Kierkegaard: The Early Impact and Transmission of his Thought,
Washington, DC, The Catholic University of America Press, :qq, p. xxi.
.
Ibid., p. xxi.

Ibid., p. xxii.
Manet :q
religious, cultural and personal journeys is of the very nature of the
case. Kierkegaard is the sort of writer who not only can but should
be received in this way, Malik almost implies, since to read him as
part of a larger intellectual movement or project would be to miss
the essentially individualizing and personalizing dimension of his
thought. At the same time this will also mean that the reception of
Kierkegaard is always at risk of being hijacked by merely personal
agendas. As Malik himself puts it,
A discernible tendency toward extremism, which only increases in mag-
nitude with time, is evident among the various early interpreters of
Kierkegaards thought. Subjectivity is readily transmuted into subjec-
tivism; the rigid limits Kierkegaard set on reason become license for ir-
rationalism and anti-intellectualism; the paradox gives way to absurdism;
Kierkegaards faith is labeled mysticism; his critique of Christendom is
fashioned into a convenient tool in the hands of anti-religious . . . Could it
be, it is asked, that Kierkegaards failure to sound a loud and clear warning
against misinterpreting his category of subjectivity as an easy pathway to
subjectivism-egotism left that category vulnerable to the kind of abuse it
has generated?

Two somewhat different requirements seem to be placed on

a proper reception of Kierkegaard. Firstly, that it engages with
the genuinely personal element in Kierkegaards thought in such
a way that the interpreter reads the Kierkegaardian text with an
appropriate subjective interest and enthusiasm, but, secondly, that
this existential appropriation is also kept within boundaries and is
not itself inated into a kind of ideology (i.e., existentialism).

Malik cannot be faulted on the thoroughness of his research

but are his conclusions justied? Was the reception of Kierkegaard
in the nineteenth century as haphazard as he suggests? And is it
necessary always to read Kierkegaard quite so subjectively what
about the kind of reading we have been indulging here, where
Kierkegaards personality and his account of the inner torments
of religious existence scarcely come into view but, instead, he is
approached as one amongst many contributors to a continuing

Ibid., p. q6.

Malik makes clear that his own position looks to what might be called the holism of
Catholic thought as the best context in which to achieve this difcult balance.
:8o Kierkegaard, religion and culture
ongoing debate about the nature of culture? In this debate religious
questions are, of course, crucial, but they are crucial as questions
that have a public no less than a private context.
Maliks own evidence could, it has to be said, be used against
him. Whilst it is undeniably true that there are curious elements
in the reception of Kierkegaard (as could equally be said of the
reception of many other major European thinkers!), those who
found in Kierkegaard a positive stimulus for their own thought or
creative work read like a roll-call of the dening gures of early
European modernism (understanding modernism in the narrow
sense as a particular cultural movement within the larger culture
of modernity). They include Ibsen (despite his own protestations to
the contrary), Strindberg, George Brandes ( perhaps the most in-
uential literary critic in Europe in the late nineteenth century),
J. P. Jacobsen, Harald Hffding, Miguel de Unamuno, Rainer
Maria Rilke, Martin Buber, Georg Luk acs, Ludwig Wittgenstein
and, though Malik does not discuss him, Mikhail Bakhtin, as
well as a number of leading Scandinavian writers, theological and
philosophical gures who did not, however, become widely known
outside Scandinavia itself.
6
Nietzsche, we know, was anticipating
reading Kierkegaard (on Brandess recommendation) at the time
of his mental collapse. It is furthermore striking that the contexts
in which Kierkegaard was discussed were often those of the key
issues of modernism: the woman question and, more broadly, the
revaluation of relationships between the sexes (particularly relevant
in the case of the Swedish woman writer Frederike Bremer, whose
work explicitly picks up Kierkegaardian themes, but also in Ibsen
and Strindberg); the relationship between Romanticism and real-
ism and between artist and society ( J. P. Jacobsen); the situation of
the individual in the face of the breakdown of moral and religious
6
This is not to say that the inuence of Kierkegaard was decisive for each of these gures:
simply that they recognized in Kierkegaard a gure who spoke to their own intellectual and
cultural world with a distinctive voice. In some cases, however, it is clear that Kierkegaard
was a major inuence. However, cultural gures of the stature of those listed rarely depend
on any one particular inuence. Rather, their genius has very much to do with their ability
to synthesize a maximum range of sources, questions and topics into a new vision. Even
where there is a clear line of transmission of a particular thought, theme or image from
one thinker to another it will usually be signicantly transformed by the way in which it
is recontextualized in the work of the recipient.
Manet :8:
consensus (Buber, Luk acs). In this connection the presence of
Kierkegaard in Vienna at the turn of the century is especially sig-
nicant, since this was precisely the time when Vienna was one of
the epicentres of European modernism. Kierkegaard was, in terms
of Brandess well-known analogy, a Columbus who had discovered
the new world of modernism even if (as Brandes also claimed)
he had persisted in believing it to be the old world of Christianity.
On this evidence, Kierkegaard was well enough received in the
nineteenth century, even if he did not then achieve the status of a
dening gure of modernity.
But to see Kierkegaardin the nineteenthcentury is not just a mat-
ter of retelling the nineteenth centurys reception of Kierkegaard,
i.e., who read him or how, still less how greatly they estimated him
or what level of inuence he exerted on them. All of this is, of
course, a perfectly legitimate exercise in the history of ideas in its
own terms and, insofar as there is a job to be done, Malik has done
it. However, the more interesting question in terms of the meaning
of Kierkegaards authorship is how far Kierkegaards theoretical,
critical and creative work can be seen to belong together with that
of other dening gures of early modernism, whether or not they
knew of him or were inuenced by him. The issue is not about
advancing the cult of a favoured thinker, but about engaging with
the questions and issues with which his work confronts us. In
the case of this book, the focus has been on what we might call
Kierkegaards Zeitkritik, his critique of the present age and, by
means of that critique, his attempt to open a space within the cul-
tural reality of the age for a re-envisioning of religious and Christian
truth truth that is therefore critical of the age whilst altogether
belonging to it (a mode or manner of being Christian that could
not, for example, have been thinkable in the Middle Ages).
The question then is whether Kierkegaards reading of the age
makes sense in terms of the ages own self-understanding. We have
seen that his diagnosis of the ills of his present age bore a close
resemblance in many of its essential features to that of such Danish
contemporaries as J. L. Heiberg: but does it resonate with any
broader European sense of cultural crisis? I have claimed that, for
many of those dealt with in Maliks study, it does. To pursue this
question further, however, I shall look outside the circle of those
:8. Kierkegaard, religion and culture
who explicitly received Kierkegaard in the nineteenth century
and, instead, attempt a comparison between two very different
(but, as I shall also suggest, not entirely unconnected) gures of
early modernism: Manet and Dostoevsky. Both belong to countries
where the reception of Kierkegaard was more than usually non-
existent, but which both made singular contributions to the history
of modernism Manets Paris being, as Benjamin has said,
the capital of the nineteenth century and the arrival in the West
of Dostoevskys novels being integral to the extraordinary impact
of Russia on the avant-garde of the early :qoos. Neither had any di-
rect or, probably, any indirect knowledge of Kierkegaard. It is, how-
ever, precisely the absence of any issue of inuence that enables us
through these comparisons to enlarge our picture of Kierkegaards
distinctive role within the culture of early modernism.
I I
Whereas the comparison between Kierkegaard and Dostoevsky
has, as we shall see, been made many times (though not always
felicitously), the comparisonwithManet might seemsurprising, not
least because we are in this case dealing with painting rather than
literature andconsequently have to face the problems that necessar-
ily arise in comparing what might appear to be incommensurable
bodies of work. Nevertheless, I hope through this comparison to be
able to showsomething of the way in which Kierkegaards religious
vision belongs integrally to nineteenth-century modernism. I shall
focus the comparison on a particular painting: Christ Mocked.
A particular challenge facing any such project is the widely
held view that, as a painter, Manet had no profound interest in
the content of his works. Georges Bataille stated this position well
when, comparing Manets The Execution of Maximilian with Goyas
The Third of May, he wrote that Manets work marks the passage of
painting from a language which narrates . . . to a language which is
bare . . . it is expressly to Manet that we must attribute in the rst
instance the birth of this kind of painting devoid of any signication
other than the art of painting itself, which is modern painting.

G. Bataille, Manet, in uvres compl`etes IX, Paris, Gallimard, :qq, p. ::.

Manet :8
Manet, Bataille said, painted the death of the condemned man
with the same indifference he would have adopted had he chosen
a ower or a sh as the subject of his work . . . this picture is the
negation of eloquence, the negation of a kind of painting which ex-
presses, as language expresses, a statement.
8
On this view, Manets
art is entirely suited to an age of levelling in which all qualitative
differences are attened out, and culture becomes a pure surface
without depth. But is this so? Is there no ontological difference be-
tweena deadChrist anda sh inManets art? Is it all just painting
and nothing but painting, an artistic programme that would cul-
minate one hundred years later in the pure two-dimensionality of
abstract expressionism?
I shall therefore begin by challenging this viewby looking, briey,
at the painting Dead Christ with Angels, and I shall mention two possi-
ble contexts for our reading of it, before turning to the Christ Mocked.
The rst context is that of the world represented by the painting The
Concert in the Tuileries, in which Manet portrays himself as a part of
a very specic artistic universe. Taking Baudelaire as a spokesman
for this world (he, with Manet, is portrayed in this work, as a part
of the crowd), I note the contrast between the intentionally super-
cial, non-metaphysical contemporaneity of the painting a world
of aneurs and feuilleton readers and the sombre tones of the
frock coats worn by the men in the picture, of which Baudelaire
asked rhetorically, Is it not the inevitable uniform of our suffering
age, carrying on its very shoulders, black and narrow, the mark of
perpetual mourning? . . . All of us are attending some funeral or
other.
q
The second context is that of Dostoevskys use of Holbeins
Dead Christ in his novel The Idiot, where the painting serves to focus
the motif of the death of God that is so central to that novel.
Dostoevskys novel thus allows us to name the funeral sublimi-
nally represented in The Concert in the Tuileries: it is the funeral of the
God whose death marks the inauguration of modernity. The Dead
Christ itself can thus be seen as Manets depiction of the essential
godlessness of modern art, and yet, in this very depiction, the death
of God is inscribed into the fundamental project of modern art as
8
Ibid., p. :..
q
C. Baudelaire, Selected Writings on Art and Artists, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press,
:q., p. :o.
:8 Kierkegaard, religion and culture
its inner, violent transguring referent. Modernity itself is thereby
established as a sustained, pluriform exegesis of the cross.
:o
Let us turn to Christ Mocked. It has become a commonplace of art
criticism to see the gallery or museum as modernitys church, as a
place set apart for the solemn contemplation of venerated images.
That Manets Christ Mocked is hung in a roomwithin a room, a holy
of holies, in the Art Institute of Chicago certainly enhances the
sense of it as a work of potential religious signicance. However,
just as the analogy between museum and church chiey draws our
attention to the process of secularization whereby the church has
ceded its transcendental power to the museum, in a similar fashion
to speak of Christ Mocked as a religiously signicant painting may
also testify to the decay of authentic religious art and our willingness
to make do with a purely secular substitute. For this painting was
by no means regarded at the time of its rst showing as in any
important sense religious.
The previous year, Manet had exhibited his one other major
work on a religious theme, the Dead Christ with Angels, a painting
that had drawn almost universal disapproval, being seen as a visual
expressionof the humanizing anddemythologizing ideas of a writer
such as Renan. Indeed, in many ways the painting was even more
shocking than the literary expression of a critical approach to reli-
gion. Manet himself appears to have been both surprised and hurt
by the criticisms, many of which were drawn from the muddiest
depths of art journalism. After a period when it seemed as if his
career were on a steady upward path, Manet had once more (as in
the wake of the Dejeuner sur lherbe) become the object of critical and
public abuse.
That this is the background against which the Christ Mocked was
produced is not unimportant. However, Christ Mocked was not itself
destined to restore Manets fortunes (in any sense: it remained un-
sold for almost thirty years!). Under the title Jesus insulte par les soldats
(a title which is, of course, far more neutral with regard to its dog-
matic signicance thanthe EnglishChrist Mocked and whichpossibly
alludes to Renans Life of Jesus) it was offered to and displayed in the
:o
Cf. my article Art, Modernity and the Death of God, The Month, Vol. .8, No. :8,
October :qq, pp. 8:. Also Bataille, Manet, pp. :.
Manet :8
Salon of :86, along with the more famous (or infamous) Olympia.
It was, of course, this latter work that became the chief butt of
Manets opponents. Very few paintings of modern times have been
so reviled as the Olympia.
::
Nevertheless, our concern here is with
what, from now on, I shall refer to by a more literal translation of
its French title, Jesus Insulted by the Soldiers.
If this did not attract quite the level of abuse directed towards
the Olympia, it fared no better than the Dead Christ with Angels. As in
the case of the earlier work, the criticisms were aimed both at the
technical quality of the work and at its content. Here are some ex-
amples. Paul de Saint Victor, writing in the Presse on .8 May :86:
The mob, as at the morgue, crowds around the spicy Olympia and
the frightful Ecce Homo [yet another title and one to which we shall
return] by Manet. Art sunk so low doesnt even deserve reproach.
Do not speak of them; observe and pass by, Vergil says to Dante
while crossing one of the abysses of hell. But Manets characters
belong rather to Scarrons hell than to Dantes.
:.
Gautier ls:
The Jesus Insulted by the Soldiers cannot be described. Charles
Cl ement ( Journal des debats): As to the two canvases contributed by
Manet they are beyond words. F elix Jahyes, in an unofcial guide
to the Salon, referred to Manet as the apostle of the ugly and repul-
sive. Th eophile Gautier ( in the Moniteur, . June :86): the artist
seems to have taken pleasure in bringing together ignoble, low and
horrible types . . . the technique recalls, without the verve, the most
foolish sketches of Goya when he amused himself as a painter by
throwing buckets of paint at his canvases. And Ernest Chesneau,
who had purchased an earlier work by Manet and might therefore
have been presumed to be not entirely unsympathetic (Constitutionel,
:6 May :86): The grotesque aspect of his contributions has two
causes: rst, an almost childish ignorance of the fundamentals
of drawing, and then, a prejudice in favour of inconceivable
vulgarity . . . he succeeds in provoking almost scandalous laughter.
On the subject of laughter Louis Le Roy and F elix Desi` ege accused
::
In the light of possible connections between Christ Mocked and a work of Titians on a
comparable theme that was exhibited in the Louvre, some critics have seen this double
presentation as a deliberate allusion by Manet to Titian having presented his patrons
simultaneously with a passion scene and a Venus.
:.
Quoted in G. H. Hamilton, Manet and his Critics, New York, Norton, :q6q, p. :.
:86 Kierkegaard, religion and culture
Manet of illegitimately introducing comedy and caricature into the
serious eld of religious painting, while one Bertall, in the Journal
amusant, dubbed the work The Foot Bath , claiming that it repre-
sented a group of sewage collectors who are clubbing together to
give a foot bath to a ragpicker, who is completely surprised by their
attentions. Some of Manets friends were greatly amused by the fact
that Manet had used a well-known model, one Janvier, a locksmith,
and so referred to the painting as Christ at the Locksmiths.
There is affront as well as mirth, however, in the tones of Duboscq
de Pesquidoux, who interpreted Manet as believing that in order
to strike an epoch as blas e as our own it is necessary to overturn
everything, common sense, traditions, accepted ideas and even to
hazard ridicule. He gives us a salad of German mercenaries and
Roman soldiers in buckskin boots for Christs tormentors.
:
The verdict of the feuilletonistes, then, was unanimous: Manets
painting had no place in what the world of cultured Christians
cared to see.
It is perhaps difcult for us to see what is scandalous about this
work. We, almost inevitably, approach it as the work of a known
master of modern art; the kind of technical innovations that so
bewildered Manets contemporaries have entered the repertoire
of modern art and, in any case, have long been overtaken by the
virtual innity of transformations that have marked the history of
twentieth-century art; we have lost the sense for the contemporary
associations of the work (we do not ourselves meet Janvier the
locksmith as we walk the streets of our towns); by calling it Christ
Mocked we assimilate it to a dogmatic understanding of its subject;
we have become familiar to humanizing representations of gospel
subjects in a range of media; and, in any case, our uency in the
symbolic language of religious art is sodecayedthat we are prepared
to allowthe label religious to be used of anything that has any kind
of explicit reference to the narrative sources of Christianity.
It is therefore important to be reminded of the oddity of the pic-
ture in formal terms and of the ways in which it does indeed subvert
received assumptions about the representation of religious subjects.
:
Quoted in Anne Cofn Hanson, Manet and the Modern Tradition, Newhaven, CT, Yale
University Press, :q, pp. :o6.
Manet :8
First of all, then, let us examine the important discontinuities
between Manets work and that of previous treatments of the sub-
ject. As in many of his other works, Manet shows himself to be an
intensely intertextual painter who achieves singular effects by the
way in which he simultaneously quotes, interprets and transforms
images from the history of painting. The same is true here, only in
this case there would seem to be relatively few direct models, the
most frequently mentioned being works by Titian, Van Dyck and
Velasquez. If we are to understand Manets painterly intentions,
then, we need to look at these models.
The work by Titian, Christ Crowned with Thorns, belongs to the
Louvre and could therefore have been known by Manet. Here,
however, it is the contrasts that most spring to mind. There are few,
if any, compositional links. Moreover, Titians gure is a muscular,
heroic Christ, who seems to be struggling to break his bonds and
looks powerful enough to overwhelm his tormentors at any mo-
ment. This is different from the gure of Manets Jesus, with his
pallor and poor physique. If there is any relationship at all between
the two works it is a relationship of critique, very much in the spirit
of Manets instruction to his models, Ne poitrinez (Dont stick out
your chest), i.e., his refusal to indulge in the exaggerated postures
and false heroism of prevailing history painting.
The echoes of Van Dycks Christ Crowned with Thorns are more
obvious. This work existed in a number of forms. There were two
painted versions, hung in Berlin and Madrid (under the title Ecce
Homo), and an engraving, reproduced in Charles Blancs History of
Painting, with which Manet was familiar. Although Van Dyck has
an additional gure in the Berlin version (used for the engraving)
and shows a barred window in the background through which an
inquisitive face is peering, the overall grouping and posture of the
gures are clearly recalled in Manets work. Here too, however,
there are important changes. Van Dycks gures are connected
in the dynamic unity of dramatic action: the crown of thorns is
even now in the process of being placed on Christs head, the
crimson robe is even nowin the process of being draped around his
shoulders and in his depiction of this action Van Dyck exploits the
uidity, the colour, the feeling of a true baroque master. In Manets
work, by way of contrast, the gures are disconnected from each
:88 Kierkegaard, religion and culture
other. There is not even any visible complicity amongst the soldiers.
They look past each other. The soldier kneeling and holding out
the reed seems to be looking at Jesus but Jesus is looking away
fromhim. In any case, the soldier seems to be making no real effort
to force Jesus to take the reed. It is just held out inertly. The crown
of thorns is already in place. The robe simply hangs fromthe hands
of the guard holding it, as if he cant be bothered to nish putting
it on. It is no more than a featureless backdrop to the main gure.
Nor is Manet interested in setting the stage, as did Van Dyck, so as
to make us believe that we are watching an event in a guardroom
or prison cell. There is no attempt to create the illusion that we
are seeing a real event that once occurred in real space and real
time.
Van Dycks Christ who, like Titians, is a strong, muscular
gure is only half-naked. His torso is exposed, but his legs are
covered by his traditional robe. Manets Jesus, however, is almost
completely nude, protected only by a loin-cloth a difference that
emphasizes his utter powerlessness and the indignity of his situa-
tion. Finally, whereas the engraving (though neither of the paint-
ings) shows the head of Christ surrounded by a nimbus, no such
feature appears in Manets work. Manet, then, would appear to be
systematically negating everything about Van Dycks picture that
makes his Christ an exemplary gure engaged in a meaningful
action, worthy of being called salvic.
One further work is regularly mentioned as a possible source,
Velasquezs Adoration of the Magi. As in Manets Jesus the gures in
this painting stand out against a virtually featureless and almost
uniformly black background. None the less there is a break in
the clouds against the distant horizon, a break through which the
(morning?) light is breaking, and, although Velasquezs gures are,
like Manets, suspended in virtual immobility, they are represented
with a reverent dignity for which there is no analogy in the Jesus
Insulted by the Soldiers.
Perhaps the closest anticipation of Manets representation of
Jesus, however, is a three-dimensional representation known as Ecce
Homo (a title that, as we have seen, some of Manets critics spon-
taneously though mistakenly gave his work), which was frequently
reproduced in the fteenth century. It is an image of which Emile
Manet :8q
M ale has said This pathetic statue is to be found everywhere in
France,
:
suggesting the likelihood of Manet being familiar with it
in some form. The example M ale reproduces is from the church
at Sommery and shows a Christ whose posture and nakedness
immediately connect it with Manets Jesus.
:
M ale points out that
Ecce Homo is a misnomer, since the Ecce Homo scene proper is of the
moment when Pilate showed Jesus in his robe and crown of thorns
to the waiting crowd. Instead, M ale understands it to be showing
Christ seated on Calvary, awaiting crucixion. This sitting Christ,
he writes, is a summing up of the Passion. He has explored all the
depths of violence, ignominy, and bestiality in men.
:6
Bearing in
mind that Gothic art was not, of course, fashionable in Manets
France, I suggest that what we have here is nonetheless an im-
portant clue, at least, to Manets work, and one to which I shall
return.
The fact that there are striking models available in the tradi-
tion for one or more elements of the painting does not, however,
mean that Manets contemporaries were mistaken in seeing the
work as provocative vis-` a-vis traditional ways of representing its
subject-matter. Furthermore, the means used by Manet not only
subvert the traditional models, but threaten to subvert the unity
and integrity of the painting itself, showing us a group of discon-
nected, uninterested gures, accidentally grouped together with-
out any unifying compositional or ideological force. Thus far, at
least, Manets contemporaries were not reacting altogether inap-
propriately when they found it disconcerting. Even a more recent
(and essentially sympathetic) critic, G. H. Hamilton, wrote of it
that it is the most eclectic of all [Manets] paintings. The Ital-
ianate composition, the somber Spanish colouring, the theatri-
cal properties, and the contemporary personages are parts which
fail to coalesce into a whole convincing either as design or as
expression. Hamilton also comments of the soldiers that they are
dressed in a curious mixture of modern clothing and theatrical
costume.
:
:
Emile M ale, Religious Art from the Twelfth to the Eighteenth Century, London, Routledge &
Kegan Paul, :qq, p. ::.
:
Ibid.: note that this version of the gure does not appear in all editions of M ales book.
:6
Ibid.
:
Hamilton, Manet and his Critics, p. 66.
:qo Kierkegaard, religion and culture
A positive view of this lack of coherence is given by Anne Cofn
Hanson, who takes it as the key to her interpretation of the painting.
[T]he disjunction may have been intended, she writes,
and if so, the parts will coalesce in a rather different fashion. Manets
Christ is particular and immediate, recognized as a contemporary
Parisian. His esh is reddened where the sun has reached his neck above
the collar, his hands even redder where the rope has cut off the circulation.
In contrast his body, set off against the red-brown cloak, is pale, naked and
vulnerable. His tormentors are darker skinned, but like their costumes not
identiable to any particular culture or type. If Christs ordeal were being
shown to us as it occurred centuries ago consistent historical references
would be appropriate, but it is not. Manet has attempted to make a uni-
versal image for all time, anytime, all people and all places which has to
do with human feelings on a level shared by saints and heroes with the
most ordinary of men. He attempts to say much with almost too little,
and he creates an image with curious tensions. Any lack of resolution
here functions as an added emotional vibration comparable to the lack
of resolution or direction of religious feeling aroused in a time and place
where traditional practice can no longer serve for its appropriate vehi-
cle. The modernity in Manets Christ Mocked is not simply a matter of his
having painted contemporary people in a realistic style but having caught
poignantly the irresolution of a century ghting equally hard against both
past and future. If it speaks of the present, it is because the present was
not comfortable then and is not now.
:8
This helps us forward. Hanson is able to recognize in a way
that the vast majority of Manets contemporaries were not that
the disorientating eclecticismand modernity of the painting do not
count against its religious signicance but may be precisely where
we are to look for it. If the nineteenth century was concerned to
make present the religious meaning of the gospels in a variety
of ways, stretching from historical reconstruction (with or without
dogmatic colouring) through to Kierkegaards concept of contem-
poraneity (towhichwe shall return) thenManets Jesus alsolocates
its subject in a very specic present: a present that is dened both
religiously and artistically by a crisis of traditions and of received
modes of appropriation, interpretation and expression. This Jesus
is indeed a contemporary of the unresolved tensions and loss of
direction in both religion and art.
:8
Hanson, Manet and the Modern Tradition, pp. :oq:o.
Manet :q:
Yet Hansons interpretation is not nally satisfactory. I, at least,
do not see in Manet the kind of artistic idealism that is concerned
to produce contemporary images of timeless truths. Indeed, the
loss of direction of which she speaks is a very specic cultural event
and, in fact, I think that we can specify the context of the painting
still further and that, in doing so, we can also specify more closely
its religious force.
Let us go back to M ales comment that the sitting Christ of
the fteenth century is a gure in whom we see all the depths of
violence, ignominy, and bestiality in men. This Christ is no more or
less than the completely broken victim of that violence, ignominy
and bestiality. Victimization is also, I suggest, a crucial element
in what Manets Jesus Insulted by the Soldiers is representing. Recall
that the painting was produced in the immediate aftermath of the
abuse poured upon the Dead Christ with Angels. If that painting can be
interpreted(as I have suggested) as apowerful expressionof the mid-
century experience of the death of God and if we take into account
the hostility that Manet endured for making his vision public, then
we can begin to see how Jesus Insulted by the Soldiers might function
as a self-representation (though not, of course, a self-portrait) of
the artist as victim of his disorientated, directionless and irresolute
age. The artist becomes victim precisely because he is the one who
mirrors the age to itself not in the manner of the feuilletoniste
who shows his contemporaries the self-image they most want to
see, but as one who shows the public to itself as it does not wish
to be seen. The bourgeois public believes that it upholds marriage
and the family and practises prostitution and adultery; the public
believes that it values art but makes its wealth in the factory rather
than in the studio; the public believes that it admires genius but
relies on journalists and critics to tell it who the geniuses are; the
public believes that it believes even when it experiences and, to
put it in the strongest terms, by its own manner of existing brings
about the death of God. To speak truthfully in this situation is to
court the fate of one who was also despised and rejected by men;
it is to invite being made the victim, the scapegoat, who must atone
for his presentation of societys unwanted self-knowledge.
That Manet, then, turns to the image of Christ as victim the
ultimate image of victimhood available in the dominant symbolic
:q. Kierkegaard, religion and culture
system of Western culture in order to interpret his own fate as
an artist may seem, in Nicholas Wolterstorff s expression, a good
(or at least a comprehensible) example of ttingness. But is such a
self-representation on the part of the artist justied? Can it ever be
tting for the artist to take on such a burden? From the Christian
point of view isnt such a self-imposed task necessarily an example
of hubris, a false imitatio Christi, grounded in self-selection rather
than divine vocation? Isnt such a pose symptomatic of the ina-
tion and therewith the devaluation of religious language and
symbolism? And isnt it suspicious that in the culture of modernity
so many artists have been proclaimed as Christ-gures either
by themselves or their supporters? Doesnt this exemplify how the
death of God leads inevitably to the self-glorication of the man-
God (a logic acceptable both to those who embrace and those who
condemn such a development) even if this takes the negative form
of suffering? Worse still, hasnt it become a clich e in the repertoire
of any artist who is not instantly rewarded with international recog-
nition? Howare we to begin to distinguish between the true and the
false suffering saviours of modern art? Is there, in fact, anything to
choose between, say, the torment of Oscar Wilde in Reading Gaol
and John Lennon in bed with Yoko Ono and the worlds press in
the Amsterdam Hilton, given that both Wilde and Lennon also
took Christs passion as a model for their own suffering as artists?
:q
I I I
With this question I turn to Kierkegaard and, specically, to
Kierkegaards treatment of the interface between the crisis of art
and artist, on the one hand, and Christs sacricial victimhood on
the other.
:q
Wilde is an interesting and complex case of an artist who uses the sufferings of Christ
to interpret his own sufferings, as he does in De Profundis. Although it might be objected
that Wilde was not sent to prison for reasons to do with his art, there is none the less an
arguable connection between his general poetic stance and the overriding of conventional
morality that did lead directly to his downfall. Moreover, it is precisely as a suffering poet
that he rediscovers Christ, so that it is the image of Christ the suffering artist to whom he
looks for both personal and artistic renewal. Without minimizing the reality of the pain
suffered by Wilde in prison, it is at least plausible to see his recourse to Christian imagery
(in precisely Kierkegaardian terms) as an aesthetic response to existential suffering.
Manet :q
What strikes us immediately is that Kierkegaard typically rep-
resents the relationship between Christianity and art in negative
terms, as a matter of either/or, to allude to the title of his rst major
book an either/or specically relating to the choice between an
aesthetic and an ethical-religious view of life. The interconnection
between this choice and the question of suffering discipleship is
eloquently expressed in an entry from his early diaries, where he
writes of the poetic that, although it is the cord through which the
divine holds fast to existence, those who serve it are by no means
blessed.
Madness is their lot; yes, and envy, lostness . . . they go through the world
misunderstood, neglected, criticized (can anything more ridiculous be
imagined?) yes, misunderstood, for must not everyone who understands
the poet also undergo the same experience of being burned? And this is the
glory of the world; this is the highest and the best on earth: the poet this
illustrious name to which one attaches the most elevated conceptions, the
most lofty expectations and yet this is his fate: to know a thirst which is
never satised. The poetic life in the personality is the unconscious sac-
rice, the molimina of the divine, because it is rst in the religious that
the sacrice becomes conscious and the misrelationship is removed.
( JP I: :o.)
There is an extraordinary tension in this passage. On the one
hand, the poetic is the highest andthe best onearth: it mediates be-
tween the divine and the human and reveals the most profound and
most powerful passions that stir the human heart. Yet the same poet
who is the glory of the world is also misunderstood, neglected,
criticized. Moreover, it becomes clear that, in this situation, the
poet himself suffers from a false consciousness and does not him-
self really understand the dynamics at work in his situation. The
poet does not set out to be the victim of envy or misunderstanding.
The poet believes in his vocation to be the glory of the world. He
believes himself to be creating out of and for a shared humanity.
He wants to be understood. He does not want madness. Although
he is sacriced to the envy of the crowd, his sacrice is made un-
consciously in other words, this is not a path he chooses with
clear and conscious deliberation. Therefore, although the poet
may come to suffer the same fate as a Christian disciple, the
Christian chooses suffering as an integral part of discipleship. To
:q Kierkegaard, religion and culture
nd oneself on the wrong side of the crowd and to become its victim
are an explicit part of the Christian deal. Indeed, it is only in the
context of such opposition that a Christian can be a disciple at all
in the most eminent sense. In the case of the Christian the sacrice
is made conscious and the misrelationship is removed.
There is a complex relationship between inner and outer suf-
fering in Kierkegaards work, and it is equally true for both artist
and Christian (in their differing ways) that suffering has an inner as
well as an outer aspect. Once more, however, there are important
differences. In one of the most powerful of all his images, and one
which signicantly he uses to open the great debate of Either/Or
Kierkegaard denes a poet as
Anunhappy personwho conceals profound anguishinhis heart but whose
lips are so formed that as sighs and cries pass over them they sound like
beautiful music. It is with him as with the poor wretches in Phalariss
bronze bull, who were slowly tortured over a slow re; their screams
could not reach the tyrants ear to terrify him; to him they sounded like
sweet music. And people crowd around the poet and say to him, Sing
again soon in other words may new sufferings torture your soul, and
may your lips continue to be formed as before, because your screams
would only alarm us, but the music is charming. (EO I, p. :q)
The source of the poets creativity, in other words, is in interior
suffering, suffering that his work sublimates into beautiful images.
Yet he himself is the product and not the instigator of this process.
He is passive in relation to the origins of his suffering, even when
he takes it as material for his art. He does not, as the Christian
must do, choose it. And yet there is also an analogy to the situation
of the Christian, an analogy that is brought out when, in the year
before his death and at a time when he was engaged in a very
public polemic against the established order, Kierkegaard said of
the Christian witness to the truth that
Like those in the ox of Phalaris whose screams sounded like music those
whomGod uses are conned in an even worse way for all their suffering
is always taken by their contemporaries to be arrogance, which means
that the contemporaries nd joy in bringing more suffering upon them
because of their arrogance. But so it must be, O innite Love. ( JP VI:
68q)
Manet :q
Nor can we say that what divides poet and Christian witness is
merely the degree or kind of suffering that each respectively en-
dures. It is not as if the poet merely had to suffer bad reviews, whilst
the Christian might be thrown to the lions. Kierkegaard was the
rst to realize that, whilst the established powers of the modern
world are no less hostile to dissidents than their predecessors in
ancient empires, their means may be much more sophisticated.
They do not need to kill when they have innumerable other ways
of marginalizing and silencing their victims. Kierkegaards own
martyrdom, for example, was what he himself referred to as his
martyrdom of laughter at the hands of The Corsair ( JP VI: 68):
the obverse of the publics mindless applauding of celebrity is the
equally mindless exclusion and vilication it bestows on those who
are outside the circle of its approval. On the other hand, the twenti-
eth century provided innumerable examples of artists and writers
and by no means all of them political in any narrow sense who
have suffered exile, torture or killing.
What, then, is the difference between the poet and the Christian?
The poet, as we have seen, understands neither the suffering that
lies at the origin of his gift nor the suffering that it will bring upon
him. He is at one and the same time the victimof his own false con-
sciousness and of the envy of his contemporaries. The Christian, on
the other hand, has an understanding of life which makes it abun-
dantly clear that to be a witness to the truth will lead to rejection
and persecution. The situation of the one is determined by fate
the fortune of genius the other by choice. It also, importantly, fol-
lows fromthis that the one whose suffering is determined by choice
may neither seek to evade it nor complain about it. Indeed, he
will understand his suffering as a vindication of his discipleship
although it will by no means be thereby lessened. For this is the
way by which the disciple effects what Kierkegaard calls contem-
poraneity with Christ, a status that he at one point declares to be
the unifying thought of his entire authorship. We do not become
contemporaries of Christ by amassing historical information re-
garding His life, nor yet by imaginatively empathizing with the
sufferings that He underwent two thousand years ago. Only by suf-
fering as He suffered, now, in the present, and in this way becoming
Christ-like, do we become His contemporaries. But, to pick up a
:q6 Kierkegaard, religion and culture
phrase quoted at the end of the rst chapter of this study, it must all
be done, here in Amager Square, i.e., in the midst of and under
the conditions of our contemporary culture and life.
Are the internal crises of this culture, then, such that it will be
pre-eminently the artists to whom the task of giving form to such
contemporaneity will fall? Is the repeated drama of innovation
and rejection that has characterized artistic life for two centuries
and more a scenario in which we can rediscover the lineaments
of the Christian passion narrative? Or, to put it another way,
does the Christian passion narrative give us an appropriate means
wherewith to disentangle what is really going on in such aesthetic
dramas?
In responding to such a question, we have to acknowledge that
there is of course no simple rule we can apply that does not require
careful interpretation. What would seem to be decisive, however,
is the artists response to such rejection. For, as Kierkegaard under-
stands it, contemporaneity is not a matter of historical accuracy
a comment which, if we apply it to painting (as he himself did
not), has a direct bearing on the way we understand Manets Jesus.
Contemporaneity is a matter of taking a decisive stand on the un-
derstanding of truth one has been able to attain, even especially
when it provokes rejection (as Kierkegaard believes it surely will).
Let us recall once more that Manets Jesus was painted precisely in
the wake of the massive rejection of the Dead Christ with Angels. By
his very choice of topic and by his refusal to compromise his work
stylistically, Manet made a work that turned back on his persecutors
the challenge of contemporaneity in Kierkegaards sense. Such
contemporaneity is not, however, a truth for all times and all
places, as Hanson put it. It is something which is always specic
and, to use another Kierkegaardian category, achievable only
under the sign of repetition: it is not a fact or a truth timelessly
awaiting appropriation, but a work to be undertaken and brought
to good effect. Reading the work in this sense is, then, to read it
as a challenge and a question. It is not quite as if Manet is saying
I, the reviled artist, am the Christ who is despised and rejected
by men. Such self-dramatization would be aesthetic precisely
in Kierkegaards pejorative sense. Rather, what he is saying to his
contemporaries (and, I believe, can say to us) is something like,
Manet :q
When truth is at stake in times and places when accepted forms
no longer serve, do you have the courage to hold to the truth
as you see it or will you succumb to the spell of the crowd or
public that, as my friend Kierkegaard put it, is untruth and
that, by means of envy and fear, institutionalized in the publics
organ of the press, will make you adapt your beliefs and opinions
to every passing fashion?
We are, I believe, helped in understanding the painting as ques-
tioning the viewer in this way by an important formal feature: the
lighting of the picture comes entirely from in front of the canvas;
the source of this light seems to be coming from all around where
the viewer is standing, from the bright, articial, contemporary
world of the gallery itself, the very modern world for which Manet
painted. The background, on the other hand, is plunged in dark-
ness and there is no hint of any supernatural light that might give
the work a transcendental meaning. The action is a transaction
between what is happening on the surface of the painting and the
world of the gallery, modernity, itself. In tearing this image away
from its traditional context of Christian narrative art, Manet thus
revitalizes it and makes it contemporary, i.e., modern, in a world
for which that narrative no longer provides an all-inclusive frame
of moral reference.
I certainly do not wish to ascribe any specic doctrinal position
or intention to Manet himself. Yet, because it asks such questions,
this painting makes it possible to correlate the diverse projects of the
Danish Lutheran apologist and the Parisian painter of modern life
to a degree that might seemextraordinary, if we see in Kierkegaard
only the negative, puritan critique of culture and in Manet (and,
with Manet, modern art as such) nothing but painting devoid of
any signicationother thanthe art of painting itself (Bataille). Such
a correlation illustrates how the nineteenth centurys experience of
modernity was by no means simply the experience of a closed
system but, in terms of our opening discussion in Chapter : above,
allowed for the opening up of anxiously sublime spaces, nested, as
it were, within the pure surface of the urban spectacle. It is such a
space that makes possible within this culture (of which the artist is
the quintessential expression, the highest and the best on earth) a
reawakening to the image of Christ and Him crucied.
CHAPTER :o
Kierkegaard and the nineteenth century
() Dostoevsky
I
As an exercise in the history of ideas, the comparison between
Kierkegaard and Dostoevsky needs little justication. They were
already being linked at the beginning of the twentieth century as
amongst those best representing the spirit of modernism. So, for
example, Dr Angelo Rappoport in the English modernist journal
The New Age:
The superman was the dream of all poets and philosophers. Everyone
imagined himin his own way. Flaubert and Renan, Carlyle and Emerson,
Kierkegaard and Dostoieffsky, Wagner, Ibsen, and Nietzsche. Only, none
of themwent so far as the last named. Most of themreturned ruefully from
their weary journey to the place where they had started from. Such were
Carlyle and Emerson, such were Dostoieffsky, Ibsen and Kierkegaard.
:
Martin Buber could speak in the early :qoos of Kierkegaard
and Dostoevsky as the two men of the nineteenth century who
will . . . remain in the centuries to come.
.
After the First World War and throughout the era of existential-
ism (approximately, therefore, from :q.o to :q6o) Kierkegaard and
Dostoevsky, along with Nietzsche, continued to be named as the
three great nineteenth-century precursors of existentialist thought.
In contrast to Nietzsche, however, Kierkegaard and Dostoevsky
had one further element in common: that they were both Christian
writers, They could therefore serve to illustrate the extent both
:
Angelo S. Rappoport, Ibsen, Nietzsche and Kierkegaard, The New Age, :q September
:qo8, p. oq.
.
Quoted in Maurice S. Friedman, Martin Buber: A Life of Dialogue, London, Routledge,
:q, p. .
:q8
Dostoevsky :qq
to which religious concerns were central to existentialism and of
how faith could respond to the challenge posed by existentialism,
a philosophy that, in the popular imagination at least, was strongly
identied withthe atheismof Nietzsche, Sartre and (many claimed)
Heidegger. Nor were they merely thought of as two separate his-
torical sources of subsequent intellectual development. Again and
again we nd them virtually identied as saying essentially the same
thing. I shall therefore begin by taking three examples of writers
who, from distinct but not unrelated perspectives, saw them as be-
ing joined in this way.

Thereafter I shall attempt to open a new

front along which to conduct a dialogue between the two writers,
and to do so in a way that reects the themes of urbanity, feuil-
leton literature, the sublime and the cult of the new that have been
central to this study.
Karl Barths commentary on St Pauls Letter to the Romans was
one of the dening works of European intellectual life in the :q.os.
In the Preface to the second edition of this commentary, Barth lists
the most signicant areas of difference between this and the rst
edition. Amongst these he mentions the inuence of what may be
culled from the writings of Kierkegaard and Dostoevsky that is of
importance for the study of the New Testament.

The importance
of this culling may be deduced from a further comment in the
same preface, when he says: if I have a system, it is limited to

The rst person to work on developing a substantial link between them seems to have
been George Luk acs, who was planning a book on Dostoevsky in the period immediately
preceding the outbreak of the First World War. Luk acs used Kierkegaard, about whom he
had already written an important essay in the collection Soul and Form, to provide several
of the key interpretative categories for his study of Dostoevsky. These categories included
what he called Second Ethics (i.e., ethics that, following the example of Kierkegaards
Abraham, break with the Kantian requirement of universalizability) and the challenge
to a form of Christianity that had aligned itself with the State. The onset of war led to
Luk acs breaking off this project. However, the notes are published inG. Luk acs, Dostojewski:
Notizen und Entw urfe, Budapest, Akademia i Kiado, :q8. The only book-lengthcomparative
study of which I know is J. Mllehave, Kaerlighed og Daemoni: hvorfor fejladvikler kaerligheden sig?
Copenhagen, Lindhardt og Ringhof, :qq.; Mllehave takes as his leitmotif the gaze or
manner of looking of various Dostoevskian characters and Kierkegaardian pseudonyms.
Although of interest, it is not a serious academic study. For other comparative studies
see Geoffrey Clive, The Sickness Unto Death in the Underworld, Harvard Theological
Review :, :q8, pp. :6; John L. Greenway, Kierkegaardian Doubles in Crime and
Punishment, Orbis Litterarum , :q8, pp. 6o; Cyrena Pondrom, Two Demonic Figures:
Kierkegaards Merman and Dostoevksys Underground Man, Orbis Litterarum ., :q68,
pp. :6:; Einar Thomassen, Kierkegaard og Dostojevskij, Edda , :q, pp. .66.

Karl Barth, The Epistle to the Romans, Oxford, Oxford University Press, :q68, p. .
.oo Kierkegaard, religion and culture
a recognition of what Kierkegaard calls the innite qualitative
distinction between time and eternity.

In the body of his text Barth quotes or alludes to Kierkegaard

and Dostoevsky in a wide range of contexts although he only occa-
sionally cites them together, as when commenting on Romans .:,
What shall we say then of Abraham?: Jesus would not be the
Christ if gures like Abraham, Jeremiah, Socrates, Gr unewald,
Luther, Kierkegaard and Dostoevsky remained, contrasted with
Him, merely gures of past history, and did not rather constitute
in Him one essential unity; if their positions were merely dissolved
by the negation He proclaimed and were not at the same time
established.
6
These names constitute what Barth calls the crim-
sonthread running throughhistory, by virtue of whichwe canknow
that the revelation of God in Jesus Christ is not just an arbitrary
event, unconnected with anything else in history, but the fullment
of the Law, the meaning and substance of the whole history of
religion. They are the chosen representatives of a sacred history
hidden within the course of secular history but secretly judging it
and pointing to its nal meaning.
Still later, in the discussion of Romans .q::, Barth speaks of
the ambiguity of humanitys relation to Gods commandments.
In conventional religion this ambiguity is concealed, but in the
men of the crimson thread it is disclosed in its perilous risk so
perilous that we may well want to draw back from the precipice
thus revealed. We may, however, judge the relentlessness of Calvin,
the dialectical audacity of Kierkegaard, Overbecks sense of awe,
Dostoevskys hunger for eternity, Blumhardts optimism, too risky
and too dangerous for us. We may therefore content ourselves with
some lesser, more feeble possibility of religion.

In such ways Kierkegaard and Dostoevsky are portrayed as

united in depicting the human situation in extremis, as it appears
at those boundaries where normal rules, normal ways of thinking
and judging and acting, break down and where the human beings

Ibid., p. :o.
6
Ibid., p. ::. It is highly characteristic of Barths rhetoric in Romans to argue by means
of producing long lists of witnesses to the point of view he is putting forward a concrete
example of the theological tradition of appealing to authority as a supplement to reason
and revelation!

Ibid., p. ...
Dostoevsky .o:
inability to stand in the presence of God is revealed without re-
serve or pretence.
8
In such boundary-situations the human subject
is revealed as profoundly resistant to incorporation in any rational
system or any universal framework of understanding.
An extreme statement of the view that Kierkegaard and
Dostoevsky share an effectively identical ideological standpoint is
to be found in the works of Lev Shestov (:866:q6), the idio-
syncratic but inuential Russian critic and philosopher, who left
Russia in :q.o, settling in Paris the following year. Straddling the
worlds of philosophy and literary criticism, Shestov may be read as
a profoundly anti-philosophical philosopher, decrying the claims
of rationalism to explain human life, which, he believes, is always
life lived on the edge of the abyss. Dostoevsky and Kierkegaard
(the latter of whom he only discovered in the later part of his
career, reading himon the advice of Husserl,
q
with whomhe struck
up a somewhat improbable friendship) feature as two of the writers
who most honestly and completely reveal this situation. Shestov
was himself well aware of the charge that he read his own views
into his favourite authors, telling his friend Benjamin Fondane how
Berdyaev teased him for Shestovizing his sources.
:o
Shestovs study Kierkegaard and the Existential Philosophy was to prove
highly signicant for the French reception of Kierkegaard when it
was published in :q6, and in many ways it created the portrait
of Kierkegaard that was subsequently accepted amongst French
existentialists (Camus, for example, refers extensively to Shestov
in The Myth of Sisyphus). In the Introduction to his book Shestov
sought to demonstrate the connection between Kierkegaard and
Dostoevsky. Taking Hegel as representing a line of philosophy that
privileges knowledge over existence and systematic thought over
8
It is perhaps relevant to note that Barth mentions his indebtedness to his friend Eduard
Thurneysen for his knowledge of Dostoevsky and that Thurneysens book on Dostoevsky
( published in :q.o) is prefaced with a motto from Kierkegaards journals!
q
Although he rst heard of Kierkegaard shortly before that, when he visited Martin
Buber in Frankfurt, where, he reported, Kierkegaard was very much the topic of the day.
Benjamin Fondanes memoir suggests that Shestov discussed Kierkegaard with Berdyaev
in the early :qoos. Kierkegaard was known to some in Russia at that time, but it seems
more likely that Fondanes account, based on conversations with Shestov in the :qos, is
not entirely accurate. See n. :o below.
:o
See N. Baranova-Shestova, Zhiizn Lva Shestova po perepiicke ii vospomiinaniiyam sovremeniikov,
Paris, La Presse Libre, :q88, p. 8.
.o. Kierkegaard, religion and culture
the contingencies and particularities of life, Shestov comments
that both Dostoevsky and Kierkegaard (the rst without real-
izing it, the second fully aware of it) saw their life work as a
struggle with, and victory over, that system of ideas embodied in
Hegelianphilosophy.
::
For bothof themFaithis above andbeyond
knowledge,
:.
and both oppose the biblical Job to the complacency
of rationalism. Knowledge, as Shestov sees it (and as he believes
both Dostoevsky and Kierkegaard saw it too), is the cause of hu-
manitys original Fall: knowledge reveals to human beings their
subjection to necessity. But for God all things are possible. This
constitutes the struggle of faith: a mad struggle for possibility. For only pos-
sibility reveals the way to salvation. And, he adds (famously), here
[Kierkegaard] comes so close to Dostoevsky that one may say . . .
that Dostoevsky is Kierkegaards double.
:
According to Shestov the Underground Man speaks with
Dostoevskys own voice, entering the lists on behalf of mans abyssal
freedom: Will you still maintain, Shestov asks rhetorically, that
Dostoevsky and his underground hero are not one and the same
man?
:
Yet, like Barth, Shestov regards this freedomas profoundly
elusive with regard to the human beings situation over against
God. Indeed, he believes that both Dostoevsky and Kierkegaard
ultimately fail to live up to or to think consistently in the light
provided by their most profound insights. The truth is almost too
unbearable for human beings.
Colin Wilsons The Outsider was one of the most inuential works
of literary criticism in Britain in the :qos. Despite its many aws it
remains a good example of how existentialism was received in the
post-war period outside the precincts of the academy. Once more,
Dostoevsky and Kierkegaard share centre-stage. In his discussion
of Dostoevskys novella Notes from Underground, whose anti-hero he
refers to as the beetle-man, Wilson remarks that Kierkegaards
Unscientic Postscript . . . is the beetle-mans case extended to several
::
L. Shestov, Kierkegaard and the Existential Philosophy, Athens, Ohio University Press, :q6q,
p. :.. For comment on this as an interpretation of Kierkegaard, see J. M. McLachlan,
Shestovs Reading and Misreading of Kierkegaard, Canadian Slavonic Papers, Vol. :8,
No. ., pp. :86.
:.
Ibid., p. :.
:
Ibid., p. .:.
:
Shestov, In Jobs Balances, London, J. M. Dent, :q., p. .
Dostoevsky .o
hundred pages.
:
And what is this case? Essentially, Wilson says, it
is a belligerent reaction against something, and that something is
rational humanism. And suddenly, Dostoevskys beetle-man starts
up, with his bad teeth and beady eyes, and shouts: To hell with
your System. I demand the right to behave as I like. I demand the
right to regard myself as utterly unique. In this protest, the beetle-
man becomes a pure representative of the outsider-type, to whom
Wilsons study is devoted, and whom he also regards as central to
the work of such other writers as Blake, Nietzsche and Kierkegaard:
we have here a strange group of men Blake, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche,
Dostoevsky: two violently unorthodox Christians, one pagan philosopher
with a hammer, and one tormented half-atheist-half-Christian [Im not
sure if thats meant to be Blake or Kierkegaard or Dostoevsky!], all be-
ginning from the same impulse and driven by the same urges . . . these men
held basically the same beliefs . . . the basic idea is the same in all four.
:6
Following in the footsteps of Barth and Shestov, Wilson sees
Kierkegaard and Dostoevsky as representing the impossibility of
enclosing or comprehending human existence within the limits
of any conventional human system of thought or ethics. More hu-
manistically inclined than either Barth or Shestov, however, Wilson
believes that although the path of the outsider through history is
littered with tragedy and failure, that is merely the preliminary re-
sult of an effort that may yet lead to better things. The individual
begins the long effort as an Outsider, he concludes, but he may
nish it as a saint.
:
Three views, then, that despite their differing lines of vision
present a common picture of Dostoevsky and Kierkegaard as
prophets revealing to modern man the abyssal freedom, the wild
frontiers and the midnight cries that threaten the rational system-
building of philosophers and social engineers as well as the moral
complacency of a pseudo-Christian bourgeois world that is only
too happy to believe that all is well.
Unfortunately, this image is deeply awed and relies on serious
misreadings of key texts. It is certainly true that both Dostoevsky
:
C. Wilson, The Outsider, new edition, London, Picador, :q8, p. :..
:6
Ibid., p. :.
:
Ibid., p. .q.
.o Kierkegaard, religion and culture
and Kierkegaard participated thoroughly in the culture of moder-
nity and, within that, helped to formulate the distinctive agenda
of modernism in the narrower sense. Both were indeed critical of
totalizing rational systems and bourgeois complacency but they
were equally critical of the kind of arbitrary, capricious and individ-
ualistic protest that Dostoevsky portrays in the Underground Man
and Kierkegaard in his various aesthetic characters. Both recognize
that such protest is reactive and ultimately incapable of challeng-
ing the system against which it cries out so passionately. Indeed,
both writers criticize such outsider protesters so strongly that some
have interpreted them as apologists for ecclesiastical and political
conservatism. But that, I suspect, is another misreading.
The point is this: that both see the outsider syndrome as repre-
senting a vitally and fundamentally important event in the spiri-
tual, moral, social and intellectual life of modernity. The outsider
is the inevitable shadow of modern rationalism, in such a way that
both rationalist and outsider are mutually interdependent, symbi-
otic life-forms that, in their mutually destructive rivalry, threaten
to obliterate altogether the integrity of the human being and de-
stroy the bases of authentic sociality. Nihilism, in short, is not to
be identied simply and solely with the voice of the outsider, the
voice of protest, the negation of rationality: nihilism is the denial of
authentic humanity, which both rationality and the protest against
rationality conspire to bring about. The person who would allow
himself to be absorbed without remainder into the collective iden-
tity of the public, if such a thing were possible, would be as much an
exemplar of nihilism as any outsider although it does not follow
that, merely by protesting, the outsider has found a better way. If
I claim that Kierkegaard and Dostoevsky both understood this,
then the question arises as to whether they have any common
insight into how to get out of the sterile and destructive conict
between a conformist public and the outsiders.
I I
It has been a constant theme of this collection of studies that
Kierkegaard participated far more extensively in the popular cul-
ture of his day than is usually recognized. If he was scarcely a
Dostoevsky .o
run-of-the-mill feuilletoniste, his literary world overlapped at many
points with that of the feuilletons and the intra-cultural debate rep-
resented in and by the feuilletons as to the signicance and value of
the constantly shifting constellation of cultural life itself. The same
could equally well be said of Dostoevsky, only in this case his jour-
nalism has been a well-known and much-commented-on part of
his authorship fromthe beginning, although the early feuilletons he
wrote for the St Petersburg Gazette were not included in early editions
of his works.
:8
For Dostoevsky as for Kierkegaard involvement in the world of
the feuilletons marked his participation in the literary culture of
modern urbanity. The crucial nature of Dostoevskys literary sym-
biosis with St Petersburg is pinpointed by Donald Fanger, who re-
marks that Petersburg is the most obvious constant in Dostoevskys
work; it is the setting for his rst novel as for his last but one, and it
is likely that, hadhe livedtonishhis last one, Alyosha Karamazovs
career as a great sinner would also have led him into its
maelstrom.
:q
But what did the city mean to Dostoevsky and, more
precisely, what does it mean for the comparison of Doestoevsky
and Kierkegaard?
In Chapter : above, I spoke of the neurasthenic as a charac-
teristic product of this particular phase of urban life, a man of
the crowd stripped of his functional normality, a victim of over-
exposure to sublime experiences, one in whom the passion of
freedom and individuation nds no corresponding objective ex-
pression. In Kierkegaards idea of a pair of binoculars of which one
lens reducedits objects andthe other magniedthem, inhis parable
of the man on the pontoon bridge and in Hertzs remark that the
typical feuilletoniste makes ies into elephants and elephants into
ies we saw just this crisis of identity, this chronic slippage between
inner and outer. In the indeterminate social and cultural space ex-
pressed in such ideas and images the question is, continually, howto
name and howrightly to value the shifting impressions of the utterly
transient ephemera of day-to-day living, reality. In this situation
the city itself is not so much a given and determinate objectivity
:8
See Frank, Seeds of Revolt, Princeton, Princeton University Press, :q6, p. .:8.
:q
D. Fanger, Dostoevsky and Romantic Realism: A Study of Dostoevsky in Relation to Balzac, Dickens,
and Gogol, Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press, :q6, p. ::.
.o6 Kierkegaard, religion and culture
standing over against its inhabitants, but is itself an ever-changing
quantity.
This way of experiencing the city is nicely summarized in one of
Kierkegaards sketches for his uncompleted Writing Sampler:
The special point about my diversions is that they are varied. Here are
two principal variations. I regard the whole city of Copenhagen as a
great social function. But on one day I view myself as the host who walks
around conversing with all the many cherished guests I have invited; then
the next day I assume that a great man has given the party and I am a
guest. Accordingly, I dress differently, greet people differently, etc. [. . .]
I also vary my diversions by sometimes regarding Copenhagen as a large
city and sometimes as a little one. (P/WS, p. :q)
Dostoevskys early feuilletons and journalism reveal a similar
experience. Inone of the feuilletons, Petersburg itself is personied
for example, as a moody individual:
Petersburg got up feeling angry and malicious, like an angry society
woman who is green with malice because of what happened to her at
the ball the night before. Petersburg was bad-tempered fromhead to foot.
Whether he had had a bad night or a particularly bad attack of jaundice,
or caught a cold in the head, or lost his shirt like a stupid youngster at
cards that lasted from the evening before so that he had to get up the
next morning with empty pockets, feeling vexed with his bad, pampered
wives, his rude, lazy children, the grim, unshaven mob of servants, his
Jewish creditors, the scoundrels of councillors, calumniators and all sorts
of other scandalmongers it is difcult to say; but he was so angry it
made one sad to look at his huge, damp walls, his marbles, bas-reliefs,
statues, columns, which also seemed to be angry with the lthy weather,
shivered and chattered with the damp cold, with the bare, wet granite on
his sidewalks, which seemed to have cracked under the feet of passers-by
out of sheer malice, now, nally, with the passers-by themselves, looking
pale-green and stern, terribly angry with something, mostly beautifully
clean-shaven and hurrying hither and thither to carry out their duties.
.o
In connection with the dissolution of rm identity we may note
how, in this passage, the city shifts from being a frustrated society
woman to a badly behaved married man with a host of dependants,
who nevertheless feels himself to be like a stupid youngster, before
.o
D. Magarschack (ed. and tr.), Dostoevskys Occasional Writings, London, Vision Press, :q6,
p. :.
Dostoevsky .o
we are reminded of its massive, if decaying and angry grandeur,
and its function as a place of work for beautifully clean-shaven and
dutiful citizens. In the next feuilleton article Dostoevsky has an-
other role for Petersburg:
I dont knowif I amright, but I always imagined Petersburg (if such a com-
parison is permissible) as a spoiled younger son of a highly respectable
father, a man belonging to a past age, rich, generous, sensible and ex-
tremely good-natured. Papa at last retires, goes to live in the country and
is happy . . . But his son has been left to face the world alone, his son has
to study every conceivable subject, his son has to be a young European,
and he, papa, who has only a vague idea of education, has set his heart
on his sons becoming the most educated young man in town. His son at
once gets a smattering of high life, acquires European airs and grows a
mustache and an imperial . . . [O]bserving that his son is a bit of a free-
thinker and egoist, papa grumbles, is angry, accuses both education and
the West, and is most of all vexed at his son for teaching his grandmother
to suck eggs. But his son wants to live and he is in such a hurry that one
cannot help wondering where he gets all his energy from. To be sure, he
is throwing money about right and left.
.:
Of course, the city is home to frustrated society ladies, worried
householders and spendthrift young men about town and its own
identity is inseparable from the ux of the constantly changing
roles, values and dramas that make up its life, the comedie humaine.
As has often been noted, many of Dostoevskys novels and short
stories are not simply set in St Petersburg, but are, in a real sense,
about St Petersburg as the composite, unstable ensemble of all its
personalities and their tales. Central to Dostoevskys vision was
what Fanger called a myth of the city and it is striking in terms
of the present study that Dostoevskys literary route to this myth
was via the feuilleton and feuilleton-roman as developed in France
(that is to say, in, for and about Paris) and that served Dostoevsky
as a bridge between realism and his own Gogolian penchant for
fantastic realism.
..
As Dostoevsky was to say in Notes from Underground, St Petersburg
was the most theoretical city in the world, i.e., it was not a city
.:
Ibid., p. ..
..
See Fanger, Dostoevsky and Romantic Realism, pp. :6 and p. ::. We may note that
Dostoevsky explicitly identies several of his novels as belonging to the genre of feuilleton-
romans.
.o8 Kierkegaard, religion and culture
that had grown up through a long, slowprocess of gradual develop-
ment, accumulating sedimented layers of historical cultures, values
and even civilizations: St Petersburg was a city invented a century
and a half before Dostoevsky began his literary career with a de-
termined ideological intention, and its life was the manifestation
of the force, the failure, the reaction against and the reformulation
of that intention. This insight is anticipated in the feuilleton of
: June :8:
Petersburg is both the head and heart of Russia. We began by speaking about the
architecture of the city. Even all this diversity testies to a unity of thought
and a unity of movement. This row of buildings of Dutch architecture
recalls the time of Peter the Great. This building of Rastrelli recalls the
century of Catherine; this one, in the Greek and Roman style, the latest
time; but all together recalls the history of the European life of Petersburg,
of all of Russia. Even up to the present Petersburg is in dust and rubble;
it is still being created, still becoming. Its future is still in an idea.
.
This idea is Peters idea of modernizing Russia in the image of
contemporary Europe and thus the idea of modernity itself, the de-
mandof the present age or of, the times, perhaps evenof time itself,
of becoming. Within such a culture, mirrored in the determinedly
ephemeral literature of the feuilletons, all tradition, objectivity, au-
thority and even the solidity of the citys own bricks, stones and
mortar are volatilized. We have seen how Kierkegaard expressed
this. Here is Dostoevsky in an article from:86:, Petersburg Visions
in Verse and Prose:
When I reached the Neva, I stopped for a minute and through a piercing
glance along the river into the smoky, frostily dim distance, which had
suddenly turned crimson with the last purple of a sunset that was dying
out on the hazy horizon. Night lay over the city, and the whole immense
plainof the Neva, swollenwithfrozensnow, under the last gleamof the sun,
was strewn with innite myriads of sparks and spindly hoar-frost. There
was a twenty-degree frost . . . Frozen steampoured fromtired horses, from
running people. The taut air quivered at the slightest sound, and columns
of smoke like giants rose from all the roofs on both embankments and
rushed upward through the cold sky, twining and untwining on the way,
so that it seemed new buildings were rising above the old ones, a new city
was forming in the air . . . It seemed, nally, that this whole world with all
.
Quoted ibid., p. :. Magarschacks selection omits this article and includes one mistak-
enly attributed to Dostoevsky (see Frank, Seeds of Revolt, p. .:8).
Dostoevsky .oq
its inhabitants, strong and weak, with all their domiciles, the shelters of
the poor or gilded mansions, resembled at this twilight hour a fantastic,
magic vision, a dream which would in its turn vanish immediately and
rise up as steam toward the dark-blue sky.
.
The city is both its real self, but also, and no less really, it is
its own fantasy self, its dream about itself, reected not only in the
reveries of the dreamer-character of several of Dostoevskys stories
and novels, but in the totality of its cultural self-representations.
In quantitative terms this meant its self-congratulation, the
literary applause offered to the times and even the self-styled
criticism was dedicated to furthering the cause of the times.
Dostoevsky, however, was very alert to the underside of the contem-
porary city. If Kierkegaard (in his Works of Love) could still echo the
biblical view that he had never seen the righteous man begging for
bread, Dostoevsky knew from experience of the harrowing reality
of urban deprivation. The death of children from hunger, disease
or abuse, child-prostitution, poverty, alcoholism, violence, sickness
and insanity are recurrent features of his novels, as Dostoevsky
collects for us the stories of the citys losers and cast-offs.
But it would not be true to say that Kierkegaard was entirely
unaware of the darker aspects of society. His later work in particular
is disturbed by a sense of incipient violence. Take his account of the
one whom he calls a genuine Christian witness to the truth, and
whom he describes as
a person who is ogged, mistreated, dragged from one prison to another,
and then nally the last advancement, by which he is admitted to the rst
class in the Christian order of precedence among the authentic witnesses
to the truth then, nally . . . crucied or beheaded or burned or broiled
on a grill, his lifeless body thrown away by the assistant executioner,
into a remote place . . . or burned to ashes and cast to the winds, so that
every trace of this refuse, as the Apostle says he has become, might be
obliterated. (M, p. 6)
Although he himself did not suffer any of the afictions he lists as
characterizing such a witness to the truth, one of the pivotal events
in his life was, as we have seen, his persecution by The Corsair, his
martyrdom of laughter.
.
Quoted in Fanger, Dostoevsky and Romantic Realism, pp. :qo.
.:o Kierkegaard, religion and culture
Inattemptingtorelate Manets image of Jesus Insulted by the Soldiers
to Kierkegaards view of the Christian as one called to share the
rejection of Christ, we saw how the situation of the artist could
itself provide insights into and, at a certain level, repetitions or
analogues of such rejection. But can we go further in trying to
see how the ephemeral culture of the Age could co-exist with
the possibility of such violence? More sharply: is the world of the
feuilletons, with its anecdotes about actresses and its endless stream
of witty bavardage, its news and views, simply one autonomous facet
of the culture of modernity, whilst the cruelty of social exclusion is
another or are these somehow interdependent? Is there a hidden
dynamic betweenthem, suchthat the self-congratulatory life of the
public is not merely something running in parallel with a darker
social reality but is itself implicated in that darkness? And, if so, is
it in any way possible to break the spell of that co-implication?
I I I
A theoretical framework for a preliminary answer to this ques-
tion can, I think, be found in the contemporary French critic and
cultural theorist Ren e Girard. Girard came to prominence in re-
ligious studies as a theorist of violence and the sacred, offering
a profound and many-sided exploration of the common origins
of violence and religion. At the heart of religion and of culture
alike indeed, embedded in the most fundamental evolutionary
processes of hominization Girard sees the problem of violence,
a problem that arises for human beings from their uniquely imita-
tive nature. The imbalance between imitation and instinct brings it
about that human beings can only establish their identity as selves
through imitation. But this means desiring what the other desires,
so that the object of imitation, the one from whom I have learned
my desires, becomes the prime obstacle to my fullling them. The
resultant violence, fuelled by the power of imitation, can then pro-
liferate throughout society until the point is reached at which the
very survival of the community is itself threatened. At this point,
he suggests, the characteristically human response is to channel or
focus the violence arbitrarily onto one individual: the scapegoat,
whose resultant death reunites the community in the complicity of
Dostoevsky .::
blood-guilt. The sacricial representation of such primal murder
is then established as the basis of religion. On the one hand this
solves the problemof violence, but only by perpetuating the mind-
set of violence itself: the culture born of violence must return to
violence, Girard says.
.
Only in the gospels, in the narrative of
the passion, do we nd an adequate critique of such sacricial re-
ligion, for the gospels take the standpoint of the scapegoat himself,
the innocent victim of societys violence who refuses to allow the
justice of his death and who, in that death and against those who
condemn him, is identied as the bearer of Gods cause. Of course,
this means reading the gospels against the grain of those ecclesias-
tical traditions that require a sacricial understanding of Christs
work. For, in Girards view, the passion narrative is essentially anti-
sacricial: indeed, it is the ultimate repudiation of sacrice and of
the social processes that engender sacrice.
Much of Girards work since Violence and the Sacred (:q.) seems to
be drawing on the data of anthropology, psychology and the study
of ancient texts (for example, Sophocles). However, his earlier work
centred on Dostoevsky, in his studies Dostoevsky: From the Double to
Unity and Deceit, Desire and the Novel: Self and Other in Literary Structure.
I wouldsuggest that althoughDostoevsky is rarely (if at all?) referred
to in the presentation of his mature theory of violence, many of the
elements of this theory can be found in the earlier studies.
His Dostoevsky portrays Dostoevsky as undertaking la recherche de
lAbsolu, a quest begun in anguish, doubt and deceit but ending
in certitude and joy. Girards interpretation focusses on the way
in which Dostoevsky depicts human beings as caught in a double-
bind of attraction and repulsion in our relation to the other: The
presence of the rival, the fear of being checked, the obstacle, exer-
cised on Dostoevsky, as on his heroes, an inuence at one and the
same time paralyzing and exciting.
.6
Over against more recent ex-
istentialist thinkers such as Sartre, Dostoevsky understands that In
the world structured by the gospel revelation, individual existence
is essentially imitative, even, indeed especially, perhaps, when it re-
jects the thought of imitation with horror.
.
Dostoevskys ctional
.
R. Girard, Things Hidden from the Foundation of the World, London, Athlone, :q8, p. :8.
.6
R. Girard, Dostoievski: de double ` a lunite, Paris, Plon, :q6, p. ..
.
Ibid., pp. qf.
.:. Kierkegaard, religion and culture
universe is thus peopled by characters whose pride impels them
to assert their own claims to stand at the centre of their universe, to
determine their own values and their own identity and yet who
are unable to break free from their idolized role models or who are
dragged back and down by their abhorred rival.
Most ambivalent of all such rivalrous relationships is that of
father and son; not because (as Freud believed) the son has some
kind of instinctual sexual desire for the mother that condemns
himto being his fathers rival, but because it is fromthe father him-
self that he learns his desires: the father is the supreme example of
the hated rival who is equally the venerated model. The theme of
parricide in Dostoevsky is therefore pre-eminently suited to expose
the mechanisms of mimetic rivalry.
In Deceit, Desire and the Novel, Girard develops further the concept
of what he is now calling the triangular model of desire: triangular
because the subject does not simply relate to the desired object
immediately or instinctually, but because he is directed to the ob-
ject by the mediator: the role model who so easily becomes the
rival and obstacle to the fullment of desire. This relationship is
particularly acute in what Girard further species as internally
mediated desire, when both the subject and the mediator share
the same objects. We are not surprised to read that Dostoevsky is
the one who represents novelistically the highest level of internal
mediation:
in Dostoevsky there is no longer any love without jealousy, any friendship
without envy, any attraction without repulsion . . . [the hatred thus gener-
ated] nally explodes, revealing its double nature, or rather the double
role of model and obstacle played by the mediator. This adoring hatred,
this admiration that insults and even kills its object, are the paroxysms of
the conict caused by internal mediation.
.8
That the revelation of this structure is already latent within
Christian teaching itself and that Christianity implicitly demythol-
ogizes the pretensions of desire is alsoshowninDostoevskys novels,
especially in his later works, which provide a coherent interpreta-
tionof the very strict analogies andof the radical difference between
.8
R. Girard, Deceit, Desire and the Novel, Baltimore, Johns Hopkins University Press, :q6,
pp. :..
Dostoevsky .:
Christianity and imitative desire.
.q
Dostoevsky has learned from
Christianity and now passes on to his readers that the truth of
metaphysical desire is death.
o
For to perceive the metaphysical
structure of desire is to foresee its catastrophic conclusion.
:
Girard sees the event of the Dostoevskian novel as the revelation
and naming of the machinations of desire and, as such, as overcom-
ing the compulsiveness of desire itself, and, therefore, as a triumph
over metaphysical desire. The religious meaning of Dostoevskys
novels is not imposed upon them in the sense that they subscribe
to some externally validated religious doctrine: it is invested in the
very form of the novel, so that the last distinctions between nov-
elistic and religious experience are abolished.
.
The demons are
cast out. Resurrection is attained.
Importantly, and against those who see the Underground Man
as a mouthpiece for Dostoevsky himself, Girard asserts that
Dostoevsky is far removed from the Underground Man and from
the existentialist apotheosis of radical spontaneity and unpre-
dictability, and the cult of freedom, understood as arbitrary and
individualistic caprice. Dostoevsky does not endorse the protest of
the Underground Man: he represents it and in doing so explains
it precisely as a mark of the Underground Mans lack of freedom,
his domination by a structure of mimetic desire that is mechanis-
tic in essence and that effects the frustration of self-attainment.
True freedom is to be found through the transformation of social
experience and not in the mere denial of that experience. The
fundamental problematic of freedom has not merely to do with the
transcendental constitution of the self but with the self in relation
to others: the self in dialogue. Here we might understand Girard
as complementing the dialogical understanding of the person as
formulated by that most inuential of Dostoevsky readers, Mikhail
Bakhtin, for whom dialogue is founded on the situation that I am
conscious of myself and become myself only while revealing myself
for another, through another, and with the help of another and
that A person has no internal sovereign territory, he is wholly and
always on the boundary; looking inside himself, he looks into the
eyes of another or with the eyes of another.

But this is precisely

.q
Ibid., p. q.
o
Ibid., p. .8..
:
Ibid., p. .88.
.
Ibid., p. :.

Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevskys Poetics, p. .8.

.: Kierkegaard, religion and culture
the situation that grounds Girards analysis of the subject as deter-
mined by the mimetic relation to the other, that I am what I am
through the desires that I learn from the other. For both, the ques-
tion is whether that situation is capable of issuing in reciprocal
afrmation or whether we abandon the demands of dialogue and
take a route that ends in violence, death and ultimate silence.
Whereas Bakhtin, however, is primarily concerned with rescu-
ing dialogue from subjugation by the monological voice of abso-
lutizing world-views, Girard is acutely concerned with the way
in which dialogue itself always runs the risk of disintegrating into
violence: or, more precisely, the way in which the structure of the
self that grounds the possibility of dialogue is the same structure
that grounds the possibility of violence. In a powerful passage in
Violence and the Sacred Girard discusses how the dialogue in Greek
drama effectively re-enacts the violent exchange of blows between
duelling warriors: words y back and forth like sword blows. The
question that Bakhtin and Girard together confront us with, then,
is this: how can the basic dialogical structure of the human sub-
ject be rescued from the threat of violence and transformed into a
model of mutual afrmation and liberation?
I V
Withthis questionwe canreturntoKierkegaard, where we ndthat
Girards analysis resonates with key elements of Kierkegaardian
thought, beginning with the idea of the scapegoat itself, especially
dominant in the writings of Kierkegaards later years and coming
to expression in such passages as that describing the fate of the
genuine witness to the truth.
But was Kierkegaards sense of the violence lurking under the
surface of society more than that of the morbid attraction of a reli-
gious melancholic to the shadow-side of life? The martyr-complex
of a natural-born victim? Is Kierkegaard himself mystied by the
mechanisms of violence or is he like Dostoevsky able to analyse
and demystify them?
One of the fundamental characteristics that Kierkegaard ob-
served in his contemporaries was the longing to be just like the
others ( JP III: .q), a characteristic that culminates in the triumph
of the numerical that, Kierkegaard says, transfers mankind to an
Dostoevsky .:
exalted state just as opiumdoes so that we are tranquillized by the
trustworthiness of millions ( JP III: .q8o). But what does the ma-
jority mean when all have been degraded to copies of each other
( JP III: .q)? The social conformity of the crowd is a product of
the dialectic of comparison. Unlike the world of nature, where
everything is just what it is and doesnt aspire to be anything else,
the human world is a world of comparisons in which
The human being compares himself with others; the one generation com-
pares itself withthe other andthus the heaped-uppile of comparisons over-
whelms a person. As the ingenuity and busyness increase, there comes to
be more and more in each generation who slavishly work a whole lifetime
far down in the low underground regions of comparison. (UDVS, p. :8q)
These underground regions, in which comparison has gener-
ated a second nature, come to constitute a world of learned and
second-hand desires that come between us and our immediate
selves as we are created by God.
Let us then look more closely at the mechanisms by which
comparison gets hold of us. Kierkegaard describes these mech-
anisms as rooted in the very structure of reection that is foun-
dational for the typically modern person. The reective modern
individual does not simply t in with a given and determinate so-
cial order he does not become a carpenter because his father
and grandfather were carpenters before him and he does not
simply submit to the laws and traditions of the tribe as divinely
established ordinances. Instead he chooses the self he is to become
from amongst the possibilities that reection offers him, possibili-
ties that are given to himas ideals and values, mediated by those he
regards as desirable role models. But at this point we encounter the
human beings inability to stay continuously at peak level and keep
on admiring. This inability is deeply rooted in human nature,
which requires a variation. That is why even the most inspired
age insists on joking enviously about excellence (TA, p. 8.). If the
admired ideals and values are not immediately realized through
action, admiration thus turns into envy:
it relates to events in equivocating cowardice and vacillation and reinter-
prets the same thing in all sorts of ways, wants it to be taken as a joke,
and when that apparently miscarries, wants it to be taken as an insult,
and if that miscarries, claims that nothing was meant at all . . . Envy turns
.:6 Kierkegaard, religion and culture
into the principle of characterlessness, slyly sneaking up out of disrepute
to make something of itself but constantly covering up by conceding that
it is nothing at all. (TA, p. 8)
The envious one is thus unable to enter into a happy passion of
mutual understanding with his role model, but continually vacil-
lates between aggression and submission something Kierkegaard
had experienced in his treatment by the public during the Corsair
crisis. The analogy with Girards account of the ambivalence of the
role model/rival is not difcult to draw.
Another aspect of this complex is fear, which, like envy, is engen-
deredby the pusillanimous small-mindedness of incessant compar-
ison (UDVS, p. .6). The oppression exercised by modern society,
Kierkegaard argues, is not like the oppression exercised by a tyrant,
yet the mere overthrowof tyrants and a commitment to democracy
do not of themselves put an end to fear:
The slavery is not that one person wants to subjugate many (then one
would of course become aware) but that individuals, when they forget
the relation to God, become mutually afraid of one another; the single
individual becomes afraid of the more or of the many, who in turn, each
one out of fear of people and forgetting God, stick together and form the
crowd, which renounces the nobility of eternity that is granted to each
and every one to be an individual. (UDVS, p. .)
The characterlessness of envy gives impetus to levelling, and
although a society in which levelling is the dominant power is more
likely to be characterized by cowardice and indecision than by overt
aggression, levelling itself has many latent possibilities of violence.
The connection between levelling, democracy and violence is in-
dicated when Kierkegaard approvingly cites Schelling: When it
comes to the point where the majority decides what constitutes
truth, it will not be long before they take to deciding it with their
sts ( JP IV: ::.). Nor is this simply a matter of societys internal
dissolution, since, as Kierkegaard sees it, the Danish governments
need of a nationalistic war against Germany is a necessary product
of the same complex ( JP IV: :).
One who takes it upon himself to express in his life the authentic-
ity of a personal faith in God will therefore nd himself drawn into
an inevitable conict with the agents of levelling. Because levelling
Dostoevsky .:
excludes authentic dialogue, because the reign of the crowd is the
reign of a single, monological voice, a direct attack on levelling is
impossible, since it would appear merely as an outburst motivated
by individual hubris. The only critique that is possible is that ex-
ercised by those Kierkegaard calls the unrecognizable ones, and
it is only through a suffering act that the unrecognizable one dare
contribute to levelling and by the same suffering act . . . pass judge-
ment on [it] . . . in suffering he will defeat it and thereby experience
in turn the law of his existence, which is not to rule, to guide, to
lead, but in suffering to serve, to help indirectly (TA, p. :oq).
It is, then, by suffering that the Christian reveals the latent
violence of a society built on levelling, that is, on what Kierkegaard
calls envy and Girard, interpreting Dostoevsky, mimetic rivalry.
The suffering of the witness to the truth is a revelation of the true
nature of the social compact: the compact of sacricial violence.
The believer sees the suffering of Christ as the exemplary in-
stance of such demysticatory suffering, and it is no coincidence
that many of Kierkegaards later religious writings are dominated
by the theme of the imitation of Christs sufferings. Does this mean
that we are back, after all, in the grip of mimesis? Not necessar-
ily, if, as Girard says with regard to Dostoevskys later works, the
analogies between the Christian imitation of Christ and imitative
desire do not mean that there are not also radical differences: the
imitation of man (the kind of imitation that generates envy) is not
the same as the imitation of God, because the imitation of God breaks the
cycle of reciprocity by which one act of envy generates another and one violent act
leads on to another. In this context we might consider Kierkegaards
essay Has a Man the Right to AllowHimself to be Put to Death for
the Truth?, in which it is argued that only the God-man has such
a right, because only He can truly offer forgiveness to his killers
and thereby break the cycle of guilt and retribution. Yet it may also
be possible for the believer, by imitation, to share in that work of
liberation.

But let us go back a step.

Crucial for Kierkegaards analysis is that the prime agents of
levelling are those anonymous powers: the public and the press.

D. McCracken, The Scandal of the Gospels, New York, Oxford University Press, :qq, is
the most complete interpretation of Kierkegaard in the light of Girardian ideas to date.
McCracken also interestingly connects his reading of Kierkegaard/Girard with Bakhtin.
.:8 Kierkegaard, religion and culture
But if we know of many instances of the press running a campaign
of vilication against a group or an individual (as in Kierkegaards
own experience with The Corsair) or of agitating on behalf of some
xenophobic cause, doesnt it seem far-fetched to link that kind of
journalismwith the sort of literary and cultural gossip typical of the
feuilletons? It would be hard to see any useful sense in which Figaro,
for example, could be described as a prime mover in engendering
a culture of violence.
Nevertheless, what we have seen of the popular journalistic lit-
erature to which Kierkegaards authorship can most closely be
related is that it was precisely a sphere in which concepts such as
comparison and envy nd a ready application. The processes of re-
porting and evaluating the ceaseless ow of cultural products that
constitute this literature are premised on the desire of the readers
to admire what everyone of a genuinely fashionable sensibility be-
lieves should be admired, the fear of becoming socially ridiculous
by mistaking a y for an elephant or a bagatelle for a masterpiece,
the envy of Copenhagen for Paris and the aspiration to belong to
a culture that is just as good as that of the nineteenth centurys
most modish capital.
But although this is not obviously true of the kinds of journals
associated with Kierkegaard the feuilleton literature could also
indulge the publics curiosity about all that was excluded from the
sphere of culture proper, about what went on in the dark alleys and
ill-favoured taverns of the citys underbelly, and about the criminal
and political violence harboured (at least in the imaginations of
cultured readers) in such places a feature that was part of the
appeal of Dostoevskys own feuilleton novels. In this way the basic
values of the feuilletons could provide a rich medium for breeding
a kind of mystique of violence, a fearful fascination for revelations
of the evil miasma in which the lower depths of the city were lost
to sight and from which monstrous forces could emerge at any
moment.
The role of the media and of the arts in generating, sustaining
and intensifying violence is, of course, a topic of daily comment
in our own times. The popular journalism of the :8os may seem
mild to the point of blandness by our standards, hardened as we
are by live footage of war zones and by movies that expose every
Dostoevsky .:q
quiver of the murder victims lacerated esh, not to mention every
permutation of sexual pleasure (and pain). If, every few years, we
seem to have reached a ne plus ultra, experience shows that every
new boundary provokes further transgression.

Yet the distance

between our time and the :8os should not be exaggerated. This
study has shown that currently topical themes of obscenity in litera-
ture, of violence and exclusion, of communal identity and the other
(or Other), of bourgeois values and of revolutionary protest against
those values were amongst the issues that shaped Kierkegaards in-
volvement with popular journalismas, in another context, can also
be said of Dostoevsky. However, we seem to have shifted the terms
of Kierkegaards protest against the prevailing spirit of his times. In
the rst chapter of this study I spoke of anxious sublimity, of a kind
of counter-movement to the supercial culture of early modernity
that was somehow invisibly enfolded into that surface itself. In this
chapter and the last, as we have brought Kierkegaard into relation
to the wider currents of European modernism, a far more con-
frontational model has emerged. In this model the protest against
the surface-world of the city and its self-reection in the supercial-
ity of its popular journalism is no longer hidden but takes the form
of an open protest, a readiness for suffering and martyrdom for the
sake of truth, a recall to Christian paradigms of radical opposition
to the prevailing culture, a re-enactment of biblical prophecy in
the context of modern mass culture. What Kierkegaard seems to
be offering now is no longer the unnameable mystery of a sublime
void at the heart of the city, but the prospect of exodus and a call
to counter-culture.
To a certain extent this reects a tension in Kierkegaards own
thought, a tension between the hidden inwardness of religious
existence as propounded in the Postscript and the radical disciple-
ship more characteristic of his later writings. Yet we should note
that Kierkegaard always maintained a certain reserve in relation
to the confrontational model, even in his most radically Christian
works. The question contained in the title of the essay Has a Man

According to Bataille, this dynamic is intrinsic to the human beings need to dene himself
in terms of his separation from nature: when the laws or customs of society have become
a second nature, we can only preserve the sense of our essentially human freedom by
transgressing these human laws.
..o Kierkegaard, religion and culture
the Right to Allow Himself to be put to Death for the Truth?
is essentially answered in the negative; Kierkegaard speaks of his
own martyrdom at the hands of The Corsair as a martyrdom of
laughter; and even in his nal attack on the established Church,
he insists that the only real prototype for his action is Socrates
i.e., that he, Kierkegaard, is no man of action, no reformer, no new
Luther, but is simply seeking ironically and humorously to tease out
what the so-called Christians of Copenhagen really believe (and,
we may add, is thereby in essential continuity with Heibergs satire
on conventional Christianity in A Soul after Death).
6
Between
the teasingly sublime intuition of a robbers cave lurking behind
the fa cade of the metropolitan caf e

and the Christian condemna-

tion of the popular culture of coffee houses and pleasure gardens as
no more than robbers caves there is no absolute gap. The sublime
intuition opens up and keeps alive the possibility of the Christian
(or perhaps of some other decisively religious) gesture of opposition
(though it by no means necessitates this). This both means that the
Christian critique of modernity may readily nd a point of contact
within the culture of modernity itself by deepening, broadening,
and re-evaluating the moments of indeterminacy occurring within
the ow of culture and also hints at how the merely aesthetic
surface of cultural life may appropriate for its own purposes of
entertainment, distraction and self-aggrandizement the images,
words and symbols of religion. And, as we saw in the previous
chapter, the task of distinguishing between these is one for which
there can be no ready-made rules. It is precisely a matter of dis-
cerning, judging and evaluating. Are Andy Warhols images of car
crashes and electric chairs a sublime gesture in the direction of
the religious or the mere banalization of modern death? And how
could such a question ever be decided once and for all?
Nevertheless, something still seems to be missing. In this in-
terweaving of the sublime and the religious we have achieved
a rapprochement between the aesthetic and the Christian poles
of Kierkegaards authorship, but what of its unifying middle: the
6
It should be added that this latter claim, especially as focussed in Kierkegaards assertion
that all he wanted from the clergy was the concession that they were not living out New
Testament Christianity, has been the object of extensive critical debate.

See Chapter : above.

Dostoevsky ..:
ethical? The ethical, as Kierkegaard and his pseudonyms present
it, both sets a limit to the aesthetic (without, according to Assessor
Vilhelm at least, rejecting it) and is integral to any religious under-
standing of life. Is there, then, in Kierkegaards work the possibility
of an ethical response to the culture of modernity that allows for the
formation of a reasoned critique of that culture and, at the same
time, points towards possibilities of creative action? If this were so,
then Kierkegaards ultimate extremism (if that is what it is) might
not seem (as it easily can seem) a merely oppositional reaction,
the ressentiment of a conservative rebel, but a position for which and
against which we can argue. Such a position would have more force
than a mystical sublimation of the problems of modernity, on the
one hand, and be more relevant to the cultural context than the
simple dualities of the religious rejection of culture, on the other.
It is with this question, then, that we turn to our nal chapter,
Learning to Read the Signs of the Times.
CHAPTER ::
Learning to read the signs of the times
I
We have been exploring some of the aspects of Kierkegaards
authorship that show him in his role of critic of the Age. These
have led us from the feuilleton world of Figaro, through, amongst
other stopping-points, Madame Gyllembourgs novel Two Ages,
Schlegels Lucinde and Schleiermachers Condential Letters on Friedrich
Schlegels Lucinde, Manets portrayal of Jesus Insulted by the Soldiers
and Dostoevskys exploration of such urban neurasthenics as the
Underground Man. But what is the distinctively Kierkegaardian
element in the course we have been following? What is it about
Kierkegaards response to the emergent culture of nineteenth-
century modernity that is most his own? After all, many aspects
of his analysis of that culture were shared by many others. His
polemic against the public is essentially that of Heiberg, whilst his
promotion of the model of Christian martyrdom is plainly derived
from a broad current within the Christian tradition itself. Not that
we should value Kierkegaard only if or solely on the basis of some
purported originality: many of the gures of the modern tradi-
tion are not of interest because of their originality in any absolute
sense, but rather because of the way in which they combine and
re-present themes, images and ideas that belong to our common
cultural world.
Let us put it like this: we are not going to learn any new facts
about the nineteenth century from Kierkegaard, or even any new
methodology for interpreting those facts. What he does, perhaps,
help us to do is to develop, to rene and to sharpen the way in which
we read our cultural situation, the way in which we read the signs of
...
Learning to read the signs of the times ..
the times. Kierkegaard, as is well known, wrote voluminously about
writing and, especially, his own writing. But writing is indissociable
fromreading, and there is a sense in which every word Kierkegaard
wrote about writing is also a word about reading. Reading, in this
context, must in the rst instance be taken in a quite everyday sense:
what I do when I sit down with a book. In terms of the overall
bearing of this study, however, we might extend the meaning of
reading to embrace our relation to the totality of cultural texts
and to the culture of modernity itself as the master-text informing
each of its manifold and innitely varied products remembering
that, as with Dostoevskys Petersburg, this master-text is itself still in
a process of endless becoming. What, then, woulda Kierkegaardian
theory of reading look like, and how might it apply to our reading
of the culture of modernity?
One view of Kierkegaard prevalent in the rst half of the twen-
tieth century would brush such a question aside. Kierkegaards
position, it was claimed, was precisely one that rejected anything
as bourgeois as reading. Kierkegaards singular merit was that be-
ing faced with the burgeoning self-indulgence and aestheticism of
the culture of the nineteenth century and the paralysis induced by
the surplus of theory over reality, he issued a clarion-call to action.
If Kierkegaard had a philosophy it was a philosophy of action or
the deed, a Philosophie der Tat, as the title of one German anthology
of his works had it. Throwaway the book and plunge into existence!
In terms of where this study has arrived at that would mean: break
the aesthetic spell of the culture of mere spectatorship and oppose
it with your will to suffering martyrdom! A similar view lies behind
the description of Kierkegaard as the anti-hermeneutical thinker
par excellence, in the sense that Kierkegaard allows for no reec-
tion on what it is to understand a cultural text but simply throws
us back on our own subjective response and responsibility.
:
:
This view was brilliantly presented at the :qq. Kierkegaard Conference in Budapest
by the Hungarian scholar G abor Kardos, who expounded Kierkegaard as the anti-
hermeneutical thinker par excellence. Yet, in attempting to develop what I believe to
be a Kierkegaardian hermeneutic (or, to speak more simply, a Kierkegaardian theory of
writing and reading) that does not do violence to the spirit of Kierkegaards work, I suspect
that the point at which I arrive is not so different from that of Kardos, who concluded his
paper by contrasting what he called the last word of the monologue of interpretation (or
hermeneutics) with the rst word of dialogue. It is in the direction of dialogue that this
.. Kierkegaard, religion and culture
If this seems a one-sided reading of what Kierkegaard has to
say about reading, it would be easy to think of passages that might
support it. Yet there are equally important passages where he seems
to offer instruction in how best to read both literary and other
kinds of texts that constitute our culture. In seeking to interpret
these passages we are, of course, not just searching for rules or
principles of interpretation that can arbitrarily be singled out from
the authorship. We are not just after a what but a how. For, like
many great works of literature, Kierkegaards writings themselves
construct the role (or roles) that their readers are obliged to assume
in the course of their reading if they are to read well. In order to
discover what Kierkegaard regards as good reading, then, we must
learn to reect on how we ourselves are addressed as readers by his
works: how we are seduced, how we are abandoned, how we are
provoked. To anticipate: if Kierkegaard has important things to
teach us about reading, those things cannot be learned otherwise
than in and through the very process of reading by which he trains
us up as good readers who know how much to read into and how
much to read out of his writings and as readers who, above all,
know when it is the right time to put down the book whether in
order to plunge into the foaming oceans of existence or to put off
the light and go to sleep.
Here as elsewhere, Kierkegaards procedure is characteristically
negative. That is to say, he expends considerable effort ( perhaps, it
might seem, all his efforts or even his best efforts) on teaching us
how not to read.
If we want a name for the rst group of bad reading practices we
need look no further than to that well-tried Kierkegaardian term:
aesthetic. There is, however, not one simple form of aesthetic
reading, but rather a variety of such forms. Following Kierkegaards
own practice (in, for example, Either/Or) this variety of aesthetic
readings can be calibrated on a scale running from immediacy to
reection.
An example of an immediate aesthetic reading can be found in
the early journals.
chapter also is moving, but it does not see the same either/or between hermeneutics and
dialogue that Kardos postulates. See G abor Kardos, Az onmag at ertelmez o m u . . . , in
Nagy Andr as, Kierkegaard Budapesten, Budapest, Fekete sas Kiad o, :qq.
Learning to read the signs of the times ..
When I am weary of everything and full of days, fairy tales are always
a refreshing, renewing bath for me. There all earthly, nite cares vanish;
joy, yes, even sorrow is innite . . . one completely forgets the particular,
private sorrows which every man can have, in order to plunge into the
deep-seated sorrow common to all. ( JP V: .8)
It may be objected that this is not a good example with which
to begin, because on a scale of immediacy and reection it already
registers a sophisticated reexivity regarding the willed suspension
of disbelief onthe part of the reader. Althoughthe texts themselves
fairy stories are naive, the reader is clearly someone for whomthe
reading of such stories is a deliberate regression from the troubled
complexity of his usual state of mind to a more primitive state.
For him, such reading is a willed naivety, a deliberate momentary
restitution of a lost innocence in the midst of reection. However, as
will become clear, far fromconstituting anobjectionto my example,
the presence of a certain duplicity signals an important aspect of
Kierkegaards critique of aesthetic reading.
To read inthis way is to be takenout of myself: it is to lose myself
in what I am reading. I surrender myself to the text, completely
absorbed in it and given over to the idea that governs it. This idea
is the shaping spirit of the authorial imagination. In that moment
of communion my consciousness is entirely receptive: as the word
of the text penetrates my entire being, I yield myself to it without
reserve. Precisely this self-loss, the loss of everything that makes
the reader feel full of days, is what enables his reading to be
liberative.
An important dimension of this self-loss is brought out in a
journal entry closely linked by date and content to the foregoing.
In this entry Kierkegaard discusses an old folk song he has just read
which tells of a girl who waited for her lover one Saturday evening,
but he did not come and she went to bed and wept so bitterly;
she got up again and wept so bitterly. Then, Kierkegaard tells
us, I saw the Jutland heath with its indescribable solitude and its
lonely lark and now one generation after another arose before
me, and the girls all sang for me and wept so bitterly and sank into
their graves again, and I wept with them ( JP V: .88).
This entry brings into clear focus the time-dimension of the
kind of reading it discusses: the past-ness of the world of sorrow
..6 Kierkegaard, religion and culture
into which the reader is plunged is especially emphasized, as is the
pasts intrinsic afnity with sorrow. Precisely in its contemporaneity
it is the revelation of a history that, as the world understands it, is
literally dead and buried: the world of all those nameless, unlettered
village Juliets who died of broken hearts and whose voices live only
in the words of a folk song and yet they really do live when these
words are read by one whose imagination is attuned to the sorrow
that gave them birth. Such reading gives an ear to the voices of
the nameless dead and by so doing recalls them to the world of the
living in the mode of recollection. But can it really bring themback
to life?
Let us move onto another example, to the young poet of Repetition
nding solace in the biblical Book of Job.
I do not read him as one reads another book, with the eyes, but I lay the
book, as it were, on my heart and read it with the eyes of the heart, in
a clairvoyance interpreting the specic points in the most diverse ways . . .
Now a word by him arouses me from my lethargy and awakens new rest-
lessness; now it calms the sterile raging within me, stops the dreadfulness
in the mute nausea of my passion . . . (FT/R, p. .o)
Here too the elimination of the readers own self is striking:
quote him that I cannot do. That would be wanting to put in my own
pittance, wanting to make his words my own in the presence of another.
When I am alone, I do it, I appropriate everything, but as soon as anyone
comes, I know very well what a young man is supposed to do when the
elderly are speaking. (FT/R, p. .o)
And
Although I have read the book again and again, each word remains new
to me. Every time I come to it, it is born anew as something original or
becomes new and original in my soul. Like an inebriate, I imbibe all the
intoxication of passion little by little, until by this prolonged sipping I be-
come almost unconscious indrunkenness. But at the same time, I hastento
it with indescribable impatience. Half a word and my soul rushes into his
thought, into his outcry; more swiftly than the sounding-line sinker seeks
the bottom of the sea, more swiftly than lightning seeks the conductor
does my soul glide therein and remain there. (FT/R, pp. .o)
Again, it may be objected that I have chosen my example
badly. For here we are no longer dealing with fairy stories: we are
Learning to read the signs of the times ..
dealing with a book that belongs to the Bible, the Book, the Word
(capital W!) of God. Furthermore, the reader concerned, the
young man, is someone caught in the midst of a dramatic and
overwhelming life-crisis, a crisis that is pointing him ever more
rmly in the direction of the religious.
The Bible is, of course, a very special book for Kierkegaard as
for Western culture generally. Here too, however and at least
at this moment in his journey of self-discovery the young mans
passion for Job is indeed a passio, a suffering, a surrender and a
self-loss. It is a complete giving over of the self to the text and to
the idea that holds sway in the text. Now, this may seem to be
precisely what Kierkegaard requires of us as readers especially as
readers of the biblical Word and to answer to the requirements
laid down in For Self-Examination that we should read scripture with
the passion of a lover reading a letter from the beloved. And to
discover what that means, of course, we can do no better than to
turn to that most consummate writer of love-letters, Johannes the
Seducer, who makes much (by making little) of the epistolary form
itself:
My Cordelia,
My Your those words, like parentheses, enclose the paltry content
of my letters. Have you noticed that the distance between its arms is
becoming shorter? O my Cordelia! It is nevertheless beautiful that the
emptier the parenthesis becomes the more momentous it is,
Your JOHANNES (EO I, p. :q)
According to the philosophy implied by this, an exchange of
letters is neither more nor less than the expression of a mutual
surrender inwhichMy becomes Your andYour becomes My
a conceit that Kierkegaard himself deployed in his correspondence
with Regine.
But to return to Repetition and to the nameless poet who is its hero.
Surely his surrender to the text is precisely what we should expect
of a truly religious reader of scripture? Should we not be essentially
passive before the Word of God? That, famously, was the view of
Neo-Orthodoxy, as Karl Barth, its leading representative, made
very clear: [W]hat makes [theology] theology is not its own word
or response but the Word which it hears and to which it responds.
..8 Kierkegaard, religion and culture
Theology stands and falls with the Word of God, for the Word
of God precedes all theological words by creating, arousing, and
challenging them. . . Without the precedence of the creative Word,
there can be . . . no evangelical theology at all!
.
Now, it may be that the young man is on a road that could lead
him to faith, but whether or not he gets there is not something we
learn from the text of Repetition itself. As far as Repetition goes and as
we see him in this particular moment he is still within the connes
of the aesthetic. Amoment of self-loss, of surrender to the text, may
well prove to be a part of an authentically religious hermeneutic
(and here as elsewhere we may recognize the enigmatic afnity be-
tween aesthetic and radically religious categories in Kierkegaard).

But unless it is extensively contextualized in terms of the other

relevant dimensions of our facticity, such passivity limits the possi-
bilities of reading to the level of aesthetic absorption in fairy tales.
At this level the decisive moment is not the return to self in the
sobriety of ethico-religious resolve, but the loss of self in aesthetic
intoxication.
Once more the element of time is crucial to a full understand-
ing of the readerly situation of Repetitions hero. Early on in the
novel Constantin illustrated the poetic nature of the young lover by
describing how he experiences being in love as if it were an event
long past, a tendency highlighted by the young mans quoting a
poem by Poul Martin Mller that speaks in the voice of an old
man looking back on a long lost love, a dream from my youth.
Even as a lover he relates to existence in the mode of recollection
and it is precisely this that enables Constantin to predict that all
will end badly. Recollection, Constantin comments wryly, has
the great advantage that it begins with the loss. I suggest that this
rubric applies also to the young mans reading of Job: that it is a
re-enactment of his own loss under the gure of the biblical hero:
Just as the joyful person seeks rejoicing, shares in it, even if what
makes him most joyful is the joy residing within himself, so the
sorrowing person seeks out sorrow. I have not owned the world,
.
K. Barth, Evangelical Theology: An Introduction, London, Fontana, :q6, pp. .o..

As a counter-example we might allude to Kierkegaards thesis (self-critically propounded,

perhaps?) that great geniuses are essentially unable to read a book. While they are reading,
their own development will always be greater than their understanding of the author
( JP II: :.88).
Learning to read the signs of the times ..q
have not had seven sons and three daughters. But one who owned
very little may indeed also have lost everything (FT/R, p. :q8). The
situation is exactly analogous to that of the :8 diarist reading his
fairy stories and folk songs in order to lose himself in the deep,
ancient sorrow of others. In each case the act of reading serves as
the self-concealment of a loss of self that, seen fromanother aspect,
is a failure to choose to be the self I am.
These examples may be taken as exemplifying the immediate
pole of aesthetic reading, and the element in such reading that
serves to conceal the lack at the heart of the immediate self for
which the voluntary (and self-deceiving) self-loss of the reader in
the imagined loss of others serves as a consolatory substitution, a
strategy that works only for as long as the reader suppresses his
awareness in the moment of reading that the answer it offers is
only transient and therefore unable to rescue what has been lost
from itself slipping back out of recollection into forgetfulness, a
forgetfulness of which the nal term is death itself, i.e., the total
and nal loss of all that I am and that, from its ineluctable future,
determines who I am in the present.
We nowturn to examples of the contrary pole of reection but,
it should be emphasized, of reection within the overall immediacy
of the aesthetic point of view.
Here we may begin with perhaps the greatest of all religious
poets: King David himself. Who better than such a poet to tell
us what it takes to read well? Davids court prophet, Nathan, has
related to him the parable of the rich man with many herds who
plundered the single ewe of his poor neighbour.
I imagine that David listened attentively and thereupon declared his
judgement, did not, of course, intrude his personality (subjectivity) but
impersonally (objectively) evaluated this charming little work. Perhaps
there had been a detail he thought could be different; he perhaps sug-
gested a more felicitously chosen phrase, perhaps also pointed out a little
fault in the structure, praised the prophets masterly presentation of the
story, his voice, gestures in short, expressed his opinion the way we cul-
tured people of today tend to judge a sermon for the cultured that is, a
sermon that is itself also objective. (FSE/JY, p. 8)
Leaving to one side the question of sermons, I take this descrip-
tion to correspond closely to the model of the critic, the r eecteur,
.o Kierkegaard, religion and culture
who knows how form must be manipulated to do justice to content
and how content itself must wait upon the generation of just the
right form. Perhaps King David reminds us in this respect of a
critic whom Kierkegaard likened to another king: Xerxes. Prof.
Heiberg is alsointhe habit of holding judgement day inliterature.
Have you forgotten what happened to Xerxes? He had even taken
scribes along todescribe his victory over little Greece (EO II, p. o.).
David, Xerxes and Heiberg constitute an unlikely trio, of course,
and one that raises Professor Heiberg to a world-historical rank that
not even an admirer would perhaps claim for him. But what they
collectively point to is the characteristic pose of the critical reader,
the reader who believes himself able to pass a nal judgement onthe
text before him. And what happens to these critics? David nds the
tables turned when Nathan confronts him with the rebuke, Thou
art the man. Xerxes sees his navy destroyed by little Greece, and
Heiberg, the presiding gure of Danish literature, nds himself
(in Kierkegaards journals at least) reduced to a fancy parade horse
with none of the ery breathing of the young wild horse whose
Either/Or signals the imminent demise of the Pax Heibergiensa.
In each case, the judgement is overtaken by unforeseen events,
and the illusion of being at the end, of being able to look back
upon the work as a part of a nished totality, is rudely shattered.
For like their immediate counterparts, such reective aesthetes
are also conned to the mode of recollection.
What, then, is the difference between the immediate and the
reective readers? Perhaps it is this: that the reective aesthetic
reader does not surrender himself to the text or to the idea that
moves in the text because he believes himself to know always al-
ready in advance the end towards which the text moves: he knows,
even as he opens the book and begins to read, what it will take for
him to be able to judge the book as good. In comparison with
the immediate aesthetic reader he has absolutized his own read-
erly standpoint to the extent that he is incapable of losing himself
in the text, incapable of being opened by the text to signicant
otherness, incapable of anything new or surprising. Let us put it
like this: if the mode of recollection characteristic of the immediate
aesthetic reader is self-surrender to an imagined past, that which
Learning to read the signs of the times .:
characterizes the reective aesthetic reader is the recollection of
the past as a subordinate moment of the present. Such a reader
has reied the present as the absolute measure of time and thereby
occluded the possibility of the moment becoming the moment of
vision. The immediate aesthetic reader has in some respects there-
fore a better chance of gaining insight into his situation because
his being-as-lack lies on the surface of his readerly practice even
if it is not appropriated in ethical seriousness. By way of contrast,
the reective aesthetic reader has made his present such that the
possibility of loss is altogether concealed in it. He has banished the
spectres of death and melancholia to the dark ages of Romanticism.
He is not and cannot be personally called into question by his read-
ing. The same may be said of the historical-critical or philological
approaches to reading. By reifying the standpoint of the present,
they not only secure the reader against any subjective engagement
with the text but, above all, secure him against the possibility that
the text articulates the loss of that very present in which he believes
himself to stand. The historical-critical reader cannot be concerned
with the fact that his text concerns him as a nite existing individ-
ual who, precisely as such, must be ultimately concerned that his
very being is exposed to utter relativization and loss with regard
both to its past and to its future aspects. Thus, he cannot even
arrive at the fruitful insecurity that drives the immediate aesthetic
reader to plunge into the world of the text and submit himself to
the word of another. Having quoted the Seducer with regard to
the mutual self-surrender of true lovers, I should, of course, add at
this point that his testimony is profoundly duplicitous and that his
whole project may well be read precisely as an attempt to suppress
the realization of radical insecurity and to avoid the claims of the
other.
I suggest that in these examples chosen from different ends
of the spectrum of aestheticizing reading practices we can see
what Kierkegaard regards as bad reading practice. I suggest,
further, that such bad practice is not merely characteristic of a
random number of individuals (such as the young man himself
or J. L. Heiberg) but reveals a danger implicit in the very act of
reading.
.. Kierkegaard, religion and culture
I I
If Kierkegaard can assist us in exposing habits of reading that pre-
vent us from gaining insight into our actual existential condition,
can he help us in learning how we might read well? If so, where
in his works might we look to nd such instruction? What, for
example, of the upbuilding discourses that Kierkegaard published
under his own name? Can we look to these to rescue reading from
its aesthetic deformations?
I think that we can and that the discourses perform this task in
a number of ways. One of these is to do with the way in which
they deploy the dialectic of guration and temporalization. I have
discussed this elsewhere and shall for now only summarize that
argument.

In this dialectic, imaginative and poetic imagery are

used in order to lure the reader into that mediumof suspended dis-
belief that is the milieupar excellence of the aesthetic consciousness,
inviting the kind of self-loss that we have seen to be an aspect of pure
aesthetic immediacy. In a dialectical counter-movement, however,
the discourses then counteract their own aesthetic tendencies by
drawing attention to the limitations and to the provisional nature
of the images they employ. They require the exercise of patience
on the part of the reader and stretch out a temporal projection
that exhausts the immediate efcacy of gurative representation.
Repeatedly they defer resolution and recall the reader in his own
real time to the task of responsible decision and self-appropriation.
Let us take a specic example, the discourse Strengthening in
the Inner Being fromthe Three Upbuilding Discourses of October :8
( published on the same day as Fear and Trembling and Repetition).
The discourse is striking in the boldness of its gurative appeal,
opening with an evocation of the situation of St Paul during his
imprisonment in Rome. Rome is described as a stage to which
everyone who in any way believed himself able to capture public
attention hastened (EUD, p. 8o), the epitome of a city given over
to spectacle (and, we might take Kierkegaard as implying, there-
fore the prototype for the contemporary culture of the spectacular).
Although Paul, by way of contrast, seeks only a quiet and unobtru-
sive life, he is effectively portrayed in the text in an almost aesthetic

See my Kierkegaard: The Aesthetic and the Religious, Chapter 6.

Learning to read the signs of the times .
way, as one paradoxically, perhaps the greatest of all the gures
on this stage, the man most worth seeing amongst all of Romes
alluring spectacles. As the discourse continues it appears that Paul
is followed by a whole series of characters whom we are repeatedly
called to Behold: the lucky one, the favoured one, the person
who is intimate with adversity, the concerned one, the person
who was wronged and the person who was tried, tested in the dis-
tress of spiritual trial. The discourse constructs itself as a moving
gallery of spiritual types or existential possibilities that we enter as
we might enter a theatre, suspending our disbelief and losing our-
selves in the interplay amongst them, critically observing them as
objects of our contemplative gaze and reective judgement. Thus
far, the venture of reading may seemto be no more than a foray into
the magic theatre of Sren Kierkegaards pseudonymous puppet-
show.

But then, suddenly, in the very nal paragraph of the text

everything changes in a manner analogous to the turn in Nathans
parable when he rounds on David and declares, Thou art the
Man! Now, at this point, the discourse draws our attention back
to ourselves. How is it with you? we are asked. Second-person
pronouns ood the surface of the text. Even at arms length they
leap from the page, clamouring for our attention.
The text has called us out of the self-loss of aesthetic contem-
plation in order to return us to ourselves in a radical and heartfelt
manner. The types we have been reviewing are not just spiritual
possibilities out there in some ethically neutral dimension: they
have become possibilities for our own existence. We, the readers,
are the ones whose lives may be judged in the judgement we pass
on the lucky ones and the unfortunate ones; we, the readers, are
the ones who may be matured by self-concern (or not) and who
may be tried and tested in suffering (and, thereby, vindicated or
condemned). As we weigh the possibilities open to us and consider
their application, the work of edication begins and we are moved
to consider these and all our possibilities, our ultimate concerns,
before God. This movement will in due course bring us as it
does at the very close of this discourse and at many other points in
the others in this collection to become aware of our dependence

See ibid., especially Chapter .

. Kierkegaard, religion and culture
on God, to learn that we are as nothing before Him and that we
must bear and bear with the burden of our temporality until the
time not our time, but His, the time of the eternal when it will
be shown who in truth we shall have been. In all the neediness
of my temporal, mortal existence, His eternity is for me the one
possibility of fullled time. But that future is always, for now, out-
standing. It is not at our disposal. The text works upon us, then,
to build us up, but to do so precisely in the sense of Kierkegaards
category of the dialectic of inversion, that is, by a careful and slow
deconstruction of all our pretensions to be that which, till now, we
believed or claimed ourselves to be.
Yet this would not seem to help us a great deal in rebutting the
charge that Kierkegaard is the anti-hermeneutical thinker par ex-
cellence. For isnt this existential hermeneutic of self-appropriation
inthe mode of inwardness andself-understanding itself condemned
in the nal development of the authorship with its stark contrast
between private reading and public testimony and its call to a rad-
ical discipleship of suffering witness? Nothing that we have heard
thus far goes beyond the kind of hermeneutic appropriate to quiet
hours spent meditating on the sermons of Bishop Mynster. Indeed,
the very recourse to an inward encounter with the eternal as a so-
lution to the conicts of existence is problematized by Kierkegaard
himself as suspiciously akin to the aesthetic retreat fromreality into
an imaginary world of inner experiences. It cannot, it seems, of-
fer much to one who is in the situation of active suffering witness
in the face of a hostile or uncomprehending world. We are thus
back at one of the most persistent conundrums of Kierkegaard
interpretation, a conundrum that can be put in the form of the
following question: doesnt there come a point precisely the point
at which we have truly understood Kierkegaard when we have
to leave off all this concern for texts and interpretations and act ?
Isnt Kierkegaards philosophy, after all, a philosophy of action,
a Philosophie der Tat ? Even the most heartfelt conviction of my
nothingness before God that a slow and careful reading of even
the most penetrating devotional works is able to induce in me
still leaves me as a hearer of the word and not a doer. If I am
to be really faithful to Kierkegaard, dont I have to step out of
the interiority of the confessional into the arena of public witness
Learning to read the signs of the times .
and to bear the consequences that that entails (i.e., persecution,
etc.)?
Such a contrast between inwardness and action in the world is
readily comprehensible and appealing. Dont those who nd the
age vacuous or (which would be worse) a self-deceiving theatre
of cruelty have a duty to stand up and speak out their word of
condemnation, instead of brooding in melancholy inwardness on
the sublime void at the heart of the city? Nevertheless, whilst such
a way of posing the question might appeal to the would-be prophet
or martyr in each of us, I would wish to maintain that the less
confrontational imagery of reading importantly illuminates what
is involved in becoming an actor, a doer and a witness, in moving
from the standpoint of a mere spectator who has lost himself in
what he sees to that of someone engaged with the concrete reality
of his time. My case would be that, in the rst instance, practice
means the readiness to hold to the self-understanding bestowed by
a truly religious reading of the cultural text and to do so in the
public sphere.
I I I
In order to justify this conation of reading and bearing witness,
I should like to draw on some of the insights to be gleaned from
Bakhtin and especially from his exposition of Dostoevskys poetic
art.
The Dostoevskian novel, according to Bakhtin, is A plurality of
independent and unmerged voices and consciousnesses, a genuine
polyphony of fully valid voices,
6
and Dostoevskys heroes, he main-
tains, are not only objects of authorial discourse but also subjects
of their own directly signifying discourse.

However, as voices
or subjects in this sense, they are not merely expressions of emo-
tional or affective states-of-mindor mood. Building onEngelhardts
analysis of the Dostoevskian character as a person possessed by an
idea
8
and of the Dostoevskian novel as essentially ideological,
Bakhtin goes on to show how each character is the represen-
tative, the bearer, the embodiment of a coherent and particular
6
Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevskys Poetics, p. 6.

Ibid., p. .
8
Ibid., p. ...
.6 Kierkegaard, religion and culture
consciousness of self. The Dostoevskian hero is precisely the self-
understanding that he has of himself, or the self-understanding
towards which he strives. Moreover, because of the interdepen-
dence of self and world, such a hero is not only a discourse about
himself . . . [but] also a discourse about the world; he is not only
cognizant, but an ideologist as well.
q
This, according to Bakhtin,
is what gives Dostoevskys world its peculiar realism, because in
taking the heros own self-understanding and point of view he is
able to show us the living human being who cannot be turned
into the voiceless object of some second-hand, nalizing cognitive
process.
:o
Dostoevskys method, therefore, is the ultimate antidote
to objectication and reication and as such supremely realistic,
although it is not realistic in the sense of offering an empirical de-
scription of the external phenomenality of the characters actions
and words.
Nor is this all. For Dostoevsky goes on to incorporate into this
non-externalizing, non-nalizing, non-reifying way of portraying
character what Bakhtin calls the point of non-coincidence between
a man and himself .
::
Every truthful portrayal of personality must
look on the idea that drives the person not as some sort of nished
whole or result but as the question about meaning that most in-
tensely engages each particular person. We see not who he is, but
how he is conscious of himself.
:.
But the point of non-coincidence
between a man and himself is not simply to be understood in
terms of the problem as to how a spiritual self can reveal itself in
the externality of the object-world. For, as Bakhtin sees it, this non-
coincidence is rooted in the dialogical structure of human existence
and consciousness. Where consciousness begins, there dialogue
begins. There is no moment of consciousness that is not dialogically
structured. Thus the problem of the self and of self-consciousness
cannot be posed simply in terms of how to rescue the self from
its immersion in the external world or how to identify what is self
in opposition to what is world. The problem is not about self and
world but about self and other, and the task is how to be myself in
the face of the other. In Bakhtins words, A person has no inter-
nal sovereign territory, he is wholly and always on the boundary;
q
Ibid., p. 8.
:o
Ibid., p. :8.
::
Ibid., p. q.
:.
Ibid., p. q.
Learning to read the signs of the times .
looking into himself, he looks into the eyes of another or with the
eyes of another.
:
The pre-eminence that Bakhtin ascribes to Dostoevsky therefore
has to do with the extent to which Dostoevsky exploits this insight
in exploring the inner lives of his characters. For Dostoevsky no
monologue is ever really monological. Left alone, each and every
signicant character continues to search for himself in and through
a conict of ideas and self-interpretations that transparently inter-
nalizes a dialogue that is simultaneously revealed as integral to
the dynamic of the social world in which the character is situated.
Every thought of Dostoevskys heroes . . . senses itself to be from
the very beginning a rejoinder in an unnalized dialogue.
:
It is this
situation to which Bakhtin refers when he speaks of the double-
voiced discourse that he regards as characteristic of Dostoevskys
way of writing.
If this is the nature of each individual personality in the novel,
it is also only in a more complex and extroverted manner true
of the novel itself as a whole. A novel composed of the interactions
of internally doubled voices is a polyphony of interacting voices
and points of view. Moreover, since it is an important element of
authentically double-voiced discourse that the question generating
the duality is left unresolved, open-endedness is characteristic of
the novel as a whole. This leaves open the possibility of a kind of
involvement on the part of the reader that would be excluded by a
monological work, for the reader must engage with the process of
question and counter-question and enter the debate of pro and
contra for himself if he is to understand what is going on in the
text before him.
There are many ways in which Bakhtins interpretation of
Dostoevsky could be made fruitful in the reading of Kierkegaard.
:
What I want to focus on here is the interdependence of self and
:
Ibid., p. .8.
:
Ibid., p. ..
:
On the relevance of Bakhtin for the reading of Kierkegaard and for Kierkegaards role in
the development of Bakhtins ownthought see A. Fryszman, KierkegaardandDostoevsky
Seen through Bakhtins Prism, Kierkegaardiana :8, :qq6, pp. :oo.; Fryszman, Teoria
kommiunikatsii Seriona K

erkegora I dialogicheskoe mishlenie Bakhtina, Wiener

Slawistischer Almanach :, :qq, pp. q; Ia I drugoi: kritika romanticheskogo soznania y
Bakhtina I K

erkegor, Russian Literature 8, :qq, pp. .q; also T. V. Shitzova,

K Istokam ekziistentsiial

noi Ontologii: Pascal

, Kiirkegor, Bakhtin, Minsk, Propiilei, :qqq.

.8 Kierkegaard, religion and culture
other, individual and society and how, in seeking its own concrete
and particular self-understanding, the self is also simultaneously
engaged in contesting the self-understanding of its social world
and vice versa. In a Bakhtinian perspective these are simply dif-
ferent aspects of a single situation. My social role is the point of
view on the world that I represent in my dealings with others, and
that point of view is in turn an alternative articulation of my self-
understanding. The application of this to Kierkegaards authorship
and more particularly to the question as to the relationship between
a model of devotional reading in which the individual is concerned
with his self-development and the summons to step out onto the
public stage of active witness should not be far to seek.
Let us begin, however, by retracing in outline how the dialogical
structuring of Kierkegaards work leads us to his point. In doing
so, let me emphasize that this structuring is to a considerable de-
gree formal: in other words, that it is not a matter of reconstruct-
ing an overtly stated doctrine but of looking at how Kierkegaard
goes to work; equally it is not a matter of how we respond to the
texts but of how Kierkegaards literary art directs that response.
Moreover, although we have focussed on the upbuilding discourses
as supplying the key to Kierkegaards understanding of what good
reading practices involve, once we have grasped this we can see
that the pseudonymous works too contribute to the overall edu-
cation in reading constituted by Kierkegaards authorship as,
indeed, Kierkegaards own declared strategy of indirect communi-
cation would seem to require. There is no nal gap between the
pseudonymous writings and the signed religious works.
Amongst the formal devices that most contribute to the emer-
gence of a dialogically structured situation of reading, the following
are amongst the most conspicuous: (:) the juxtapositionof divergent
points of view (Either/Or being perhaps the most striking example
but the same feature occurs withinthe works of a single pseudonym,
for example, in Philosophical Fragments; we might also include here
the commentaries of one pseudonym on others); (.) the diversity
of genres within a work a device borrowed from Romanticism
but exploited with great brilliance by Kierkegaard; () the lack of
a narrative ending; () the disruption of diachronic structure (most
startlingly in Quidams Diary); () the problematizing of the identity
Learning to read the signs of the times .q
of the narrator (meaning not just the fact of pseudonymity but also
the questioning of the integrity or identity of particular pseudony-
mous personae within a given work, for example, the way in which
we are led to speculate as to whether the young man of Repetition
or Quidam are actual characters or merely the inventions of their
pseudonyms); (6) the positioning of the text in relation to genre
boundaries (as in the discussion about psychology and dogmatics in
The Concept of Anxiety); () the surplus of meaning in images and nar-
ratives not exhausted by internal commentary; (8) the pleonastic
hyperbole of the feuilletonistes droit de bavardage that exposes the
impossibility or absurdity of what is being expressed; (q) the dis-
claiming of authority; (:o) the questioning of the reader and the
appeal to the readers own judgement (especially in many of the
upbuilding discourses); (::) the reection of existential conicts that
are in themselves unresolved.
Let us then read the pseudonymous and journalistic works as a
polyphony of voices that are self-standing Is, rst-person voices
that are also as such points of viewon the world points of viewthat
include the aesthetic, the ethical and the religious in the various
forms inwhichwe encounter theminthese works. The pseudonyms
and the characters they portray (whether these are major play-
ers like Johannes the Seducer or Abraham or whether they are
merely the walk-on parts of various gures who appear in the
context of some passing anecdote or illustration) come to con-
stitute a many-sided and developing debate as to the coherence
and sustainability of the points of view they represent or, more
simply, the points of view they are. This debate is complexied
to the point where it becomes impossible to impose a formal or
content-orientated unity on it merely by internal analysis. As the
reader engages ever more deeply with this multiplicity of voices
the exigency of making the transition into another kind of reading
therefore makes itself felt: as I participate more intensely in the
debate between the multiplicity of represented points of view I am
ever more frequently required to take responsibility for judging the
issues in play at ever more serious existential levels if I am to go on
reading.
This involvement on the part of the reader is carried further in
the upbuilding works, where the conict of represented points of
.o Kierkegaard, religion and culture
view is transformed into the question of self-understanding as I
ask: how do I understand myself in relation to these points of view
and how, once I have gained insight into the necessarily dialogical
structure of consciousness, canI rise above irony and grasp that self-
understanding with passion and seriousness? The answer of these
works is that it is only possible if I surrender the illusion of having
disposal over the meaning that I am or, to be more precise, am to
become. What I learn from reading them what I learn in reading
them is how to sustain the question of meaning in the face of its
ultimate unanswerability or howto be content with an understand-
ing that is an ununderstanding. If the pseudonymous works open
up a realm of kaleidoscopic possibilities, inducing a dizzying sense
of the radical ssiparousness of meaning, the edifying works dis-
cipline us in sobriety, so that we learn how to humble ourselves
under the burden of undecidability concerning what concerns
us most ultimately: ourselves.
As we now turn to the programme of radical discipleship we
can see that the works that set out this programme mark a further
step though not, of course, a necessary step: no one has to go
this far in the dialogical process. For radical discipleship is rst
and foremost the public face that is always already implied in the
interior quest for self-understanding, to make explicit the relation
to the other that the interior quest will always have brought to
light. To witness is nothing but the making good before the world
of self-understanding/point of view.
Bakhtin reads Dostoevskys novels as giving ctional expression
to the drama, complexity and violence of what such a making-good
might involve but we should not read Kierkegaard as posing in
the form of a real challenge what Dostoevsky merely represents
in the mode of ction. For Bakhtins whole argument hinges on
the inseparability of the Dostoevskian novel from the conict of
interpretation and self-interpretation that is the social world from
which the novel springs. This is not, of course, to be understood in
a reductionist sense, since the novels do not just mirror society
they project new horizons and new possibilities that move the de-
bate itself on. Nor is it to say that dialogical literature is nothing
but political or engaged literature. It is rather to emphasize how
the dialogical principle cannot be constrained by the distinctions
Learning to read the signs of the times .:
between ction and reality or interiority and exteriority. In a
sense that is not that scorned by Victor Eremita it is indeed true
here that the inner is the outer and the outer is the inner. Realism
is not a question of the faithfulness of the novels representation of
events in the external world. Realismhas to do with the self-critical
commitment of the quest for an authentic life-view.
It follows that what is essential about witnessing does not require
us to reify the oppositionbetweenthe worlds of culture and religion.
Inorder to become a goodreader of religious texts it is not necessary
to have access to a cognitive plane inaccessible to good readers of
writings that are realistic in this Bakhtinian sense.
:6
Whenit comes
to blood-witnessing, the record of the twentieth century shows that
novelists are as likely to end up in prison (or worse) as religious
believers. For all good reading ends in taking responsibility for
the self-understanding at which, in and through its polyphony of
voices, we believe the text to have arrived. As we put our signature
to the work of reading, literature enters the strife of values and
reading becomes one way of learning to be an individual, one way
of being ethical. After a period in the humanities when it has been
bad form to insist on such personal appropriation, I suggest that
rewriting the signature might be worth considering as a project
for contemporary readership.
But what has happened in all this to the dynamics of self-loss
that we saw to be such a powerful element in aesthetic reading?
Can the model of ethically engaged religious reading that we have
been tracing resolve the melancholic consciousness of mortality
that is so integral to aesthetic reading and that lurks behind the
noontide masquerade (Edward Young) of the urban spectacle?
Or is it merely a stoically Kantian posture, based on the principles
of as if and in spite of ?
Here we can do no more than speak enigmatically of what I
believe to be a rst step in addressing such questions in a genuinely
Kierkegaardian way. We may begin by recalling an entry fromthe
early journals. Write said the voice, and the prophet answered
For whom? and the voice said, for the dead, for those whom
:6
This remark may apply also to non-literary works: cf. Deborah Haynes, Bakhtin and the
Visual Arts, New York, Cambridge University Press, :qq.
.. Kierkegaard, religion and culture
thou lovest in the past. Will they read me? Yes, for they return
as the future ( JP V: 6o).
:
Kierkegaards authorship is founded on loss. The failure of aes-
thetic reading is its inability to accomplish a restitution of the self
to the primordial integrity that the experience of loss reveals as
lacking. Indeed, in the case of critical, reective reading ` a la David,
Xerxes or Heiberg it does not even allow for the admission of
such loss. The critical posture of the world of cultural ephemera
represented in the feuilletons does not even invest sufcient moral
energy in its judgements for the question to be intelligible. Now,
it is certainly possible to see the kind of existentially responsible
reading-qua-witnessing towards which the upbuilding works draw
us as similarly overlooking the total catastrophic event in which all
that we claim as value all beauty, truth and goodness will be
extinguished. If so, we must judge it to be an assertion of value
that has no deeper ground than my willing that it should be so, a
gesture of self-afrmation by a lonely traveller on a darkling plain
beneath an empty sky. Sartre, perhaps: Calvinism without God.
And this itself would be a reection, in the individual, of the larger
catastrophe embracing the totality of the culture that should, in
other times, provide a bedrock of values, truths and meanings.
Yet such a conclusion would itself pre-empt possibilities of read-
ing that the last quotation from the journals rather beautifully dis-
closes. When it is said that Kierkegaards authorship is founded on
loss, this is a loss that can be located quite specically by referring
to the two individuals to whom his authorship is simultaneously
dedicated: to the dead father (who is yet a living father in God)
and to the lost love, Regine, surrendered in life to be rediscovered
in eternity (comprising also, perhaps, in her queenly sovereignty of
his heart the loss of the mother).
:8
And it is also focussed by the
loss that Sren anticipates in the anticipation of his own death. For
it is precisely because he exists as a nite, time-bound and mortal
human being that these losses threaten the total loss of meaning in
his life. If everything returned, or if everything moved on to another
plane of existence in the aftermath of our deaths in such a way that
:
A citation from Herder. I have used the translation of Dru (:q8).
:8
See my essay A Drama of Love and Death: Michael Pedersen Kierkegaard and Regine
Olsen Revisited, History of European Ideas, Vol. :., No. :, :qqo, pp. qq:.
Learning to read the signs of the times .
the after-life was an endless procession of pareschata and never an
eschaton, then loss would always be limited, always and only for
the time being but never nal or irrecoverable. By becoming good
readers of Kierkegaards texts, however, we become the posterity
in whom the return of the lost is enacted. In the wager we make
upon the meaning of Kierkegaards having meant it, we reveal the
horizon that makes our reading more than a merely deant gesture
of value-creation. For we show that our meaning is tied up with his
meaning and so with the whole history of his reading and writing
that enabled himto mean it in the way that he did. In our reading of
Kierkegaard, we nd ourselves involved in a history of communi-
cation that, in the Christian Church, has been called tradition and
that is rooted and grounded in the impossible possibility that lies at
the heart of the Churchs life. Poul Martin Mller, Kierkegaards
mentor, could already mourn a breach in the tradition that, in his-
torical time at least, might prove irreparable. But does that mean
the eclipse of tradition as such? Is it not possible that even a frac-
tured tradition can be made to live, if only on the condition of a
re-envisioning of truly human time? I should like to articulate this
by quoting some words of Nicholas Berdyaev, a philosopher whom
I would not claim to be underrated (it is questionable whether he
is a great philosopher) but who is certainly under-read as a signi-
cant religious thinker. Here Berdyaev uses the expression spiritual
memory for what I have just called tradition and which I regard
as being constituted, amongst other ways, by the labour and love
of reading-qua-witnessing. Berdyaevs words make it clear that this
is not at all to be understood as something exclusive to Christianity
or to the Church.
Memory of the past is spiritual; it conquers historical time. This however
is not a conserving, but a creatively transguring memory. It wishes to
carry forward into eternal life not that which is dead in the past but what
is alive, not that which is static in the past but what is dynamic. This
spiritual memory reminds man, engulfed in his historical time, that in the
past there have been great creative movements and that they ought to
inherit eternity. It reminds him also of the fact that in the past there lived
concrete beings, living personalities, with whom we ought in existential
time to have a link no less than with those who are living now. Society
is always a society not only of the living but also of the dead; and this
. Kierkegaard, religion and culture
memory of the dead . . . is a creative dynamic memory. The last word
belongs not to death but to resurrection.
:q
We are participants in this history only on the condition that we
bring to it the utter engagement of our passional selves and make
of it the mutual bestowal of mine and thine, of I and Thou, a
work of love that is the truest form of dialogue and that is our one
hope of retrieving unambiguous meaning from the catastrophic
loss that otherwise threatens to dene us as individuals and as a
culture. If the crisis of culture in the nineteenth century was, as
adumbrated already in Schillers Letters on the Aesthetic Education of
Mankind, a sense of having lost the wholeness of an organically
unied social self , the twentieth century compounded that loss
immeasurably, smashing one after another of the signs of hope to
whichthe nineteenthcentury couldstill cling. At the start of another
century we seem to be wandering ever further into the condition
that Heidegger called planetary homelessness, in the disastrous
condition of being without a guiding star.
.o
In this situation if this
is our situation then Kierkegaards critique of culture might serve
us not so much as a tool with which to castigate the superciality
and emptiness of the present age, but as a means of learning to
reclaim the possibility of a dialogue of persons capable of renewing
meaning, commitment and trust in the social relations that culture
expresses, reects, evaluates and makes into the form of common
life.
:q
N. Berdyaev, Slavery and Freedom, London, :q, p. :::.
.o
The sense of disaster intended here is spelt out in John D. Caputo, Against Ethics,
Bloomington, Indiana University Press, :qq, pp. 6.
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L

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Index
Actuality, q8, :o, :o6, :o, :::,
:o, :
Adorno, T. W., q
Adresseavisen, :oq
Aesthetic, the, aesthetics, , , , :.,
::, :6, :oo:, :., :
passim, :q6, ..:
Agacinski, S.,
Ahasverus see Wandering Jew, the
Andersen, H. C., n., .q
passim, :oq
Andersen, K. B., qn.
Anderson, G. K., 8:n.
Andreasen, U., 8
Anti-Semitism, , , 8.,
q
Anxiety, :, :, 6, ., :6., .:q
Archimedes, ::
Aristotle, q, , 8, 6
Arnim, A. von, 8
Artists, :q:
Ast, F. W., q6
Auden, W. H., :
Augustine, St, :,
Autonomy, ::
Babylon, o
Bagatelle, :, 8, ::, .:8
Bakhtin, M., .8, :8o, .::,
.:n., .:
Baranova-Shestova, N., .o:n.
Barth, K., :qq.o:, .o., ..8
Bataille, G., :8., :q, .:qn.
Baudelaire, C., .:, .., :8
Bauer, B., :o
Baur, F. C., q6
Beautiful, the, beauty, 6, , :o, :
Belinsky, V., .8
Benjamin, W., :8.
Berdyaev, N., .o:, .
Bertall, A., :86
Bible, :., 6qo, :, .., ..qo
Ecclesiastes, :6., :
Galatians, :6
James, 6., :o, :
Job, ..6, ..8
Luke, ::
New Testament, :8, .., 6q
Psalms, :.
Revelation, :o.
Romans, :qq.o:
. Samuel, ..qo, .
Black, J., .n.
Blake, W., .o
Blanc, C., :8
Bloch, E., :, :
Blumhardt, J., .oo
Brandes, G., ::, :8o
Brandt, F., q8o
Bremer, F., :8o
Brndsted, P. O., q6
Buber, M., :8o, :8:, :q8, .o:n.
Bulwer, E., :8
Cain, o
Caligula, 6q
Calvin, J., .oo
Camus, A., .o:
..
Index .
Caputo, J. D., .n.
Carlyle, T., n., :q8
Carstensen, G., .8, .q, o:, ., 6, 8,
:, 6, q, :, .
Chamberlain, J., n.
Chesneau, E., :8
Christensen, J., 8
Christensen, P. V., .q
Christianity, , .., 8, 6, 6q, ::,
:o:, :q., :6, :q,
.:.:, ..o
Chrysostom, John, St, :q
Church, .., :.8, :, :o, :68, ..o, .
City, the, :, :, .:, ., :, 8q,
o:, , :o, :qq, .o:o, .:q
Cl ement, C., :8
Clive, G., :qqn.
Coleridge, S. T., 6
Comedy, :o:o, ::::., ::
Comparison, .::6, .:8
Concern, ..
Connell, G., ::n.
Constant, A.-L., 86
Contemporaneity, :q
Copenhagen, .., ., .q., , :, .,
:6. passim, 66, 6, o, 86, :o8,
:oq:o, :::, :q, :o, .:8, ..o
Corsair, The, o, ., , o, :8, :q, .oq,
.:8, ..o
Country, the, ., 6.
Dagen (The Day), :oq, :qo, ::, :.
Dahlerup, V., .n.
Dante, A., :o., ::.
Death, ..
Deer Park, the, :, , 6:, .
Dehs, J., n.
Descartes, R.,
Desi` ege, F., :8
Despair, :o, :q
Dialogue, dialogical elements in
Kierkegaards writing, :6o, :6:, :6,
.::, .:6:, .:, .
Dierkes, H., :.
Dilthey, W., :..n.
Don Juan, 6, q, ::, :, :
Dostoevsky, F. M., .8, q., :8., :8,
:q8..:, ..., .
Doubt, :o.
Eckhart, Meister, ::
Eitzen, P. de, 8:.
Emerson, R. W., :q8
Empiricism, :o
Engelhardt, B., .
Envy, .::6, .:, .:8
Eriksen, N. N., :n.
Eternal, the, eternity, x, ::q, .o, ., .,
, 8q, q8q, :8q, :6o, :6:, :66,
.
Ethics, the ethical, : passim, ..o:
Fdrelandet (The Fatherland), o, , 6, ,
, 6, :::n., :, :o, :.
Faith, ::, :o., :6:, :6., :68q, :, .o.,
.:6:, ..8
Fanger, D., .o, .o
Faust, 6, q, :o:, :o
Fear, 8q, :o::
Feminism, :, :8o
F en elon, F. de S. de la Mothe, :q
Ferguson, H., .:
Feuerbach, L., 8, :o
Feuilletons, .q, :8, :6o, :qq, .o:o,
.:8:q, ..., .q, ..
Fichte, J. G., q8, :8
Figaro, ., .q, o, , :, ., q6, .:8, ...
Finitude, :
Flaubert, G., 8, :q8
Fondane, B., .o:
For Literatur og Kritik (Fyens Journal for
Literature and Criticism), :8
Forposten, :6
Frank, J., .8n., .on., .o8n.
Frederick VI (King of Denmark), 6
Freedom, x, 6:o, ::, ., :o, :8q, .o,
.:
French Revolution, the, :
Freud, S., .:.
Friedman, M. S., :q8
Frisindede, Den (The Free Enquirer), .q, :oq,
:o:, :., :.
. Index
Fryzsman, A., .
Fynske Tidsskrift for Literatur og Kritik, see For
Literatur og Kritik
Gardiner, P., :q
Garff, J., n., qn., :8
Gautier, T., :8
Gautier, T. ( ls), :8
Girard, R., 8., .:o:
God, ix, :o, ::, :.:, ::., :, :66, .oo,
.o., .::, ..8, .
death of, 8q, :8, :q:, :q.
Goethe, J. W. von, , q8, :o:, ::, :, :6
Goldschmidt, M. E., .
Good, the, :o::
Goya, F. de, :8., :8
Green, R. M., ::n.
Greenway, J. L., :qqn.
Grn, A., 8n.
Grundtvig, N. F. S., :6, :6o
Gr unewald, M., .oo
Grunow, E., :.:
Gutzkow, K., :.q, :6, :, :q
Gyllembourg-Ehrensv ard, T., :q.o, :,
, o6, 68q, q., ...
Habermas, J., :
Hagen, J. F., :6
Hamann, J. G., , ::
Hamilton, G. H., :8n., :8q
Hannay, A., ::n.
Hanson, A. C., :86n., :qo:, :q6
Harket, H., qn.
Harris, M., .n.
Haynes, D., .:n.
Heaven, :o8, ::::.
Hegel, Hegelianism, ix, :.:, ::, ,
8, q, , q6:: passim, :o, :, :6,
:, .o:.
Heiberg, J. L. ( Johanna Louise), :, 8, o
Heiberg, J. L. ( Johann Ludvig), .6, .q, o,
:, ., n., 6, , :, .6, q, :,
, 6:, 6q, ., q6:: passim, ::,
:, :q, :o, ::, :8q, :8:, ..o, ...,
.o, .:, ..
Heidegger, M., 8, :6, :8, , q, :, :qq,
.
Heine, H., :, :o
Hell, :o8:o
Herder, J. G., ..n.
Hertz, H., .6, .q, n., :, , .o
Heterogeneity, .8, ., q, q6, qq
Heteronomy, :o
Heym, S., 86n.
Hffding, H., :8o
Hoffmann, E. T. A., n.
Holbein, H., :8
Homer, :o:
Hong, E. H., :6, q
Hong, H. V., :6, q
Humour, qq, ::., :::
Husserl, E., .o:
Ibsen, H., :, :8o, :q8
Idealism, :o, ::o, :8
Incarnation, :8
Individual, the, ::
Ingemann, B. S., , 8
Intelligentsblade, .q, o, ., 68, ::.,
:qo
Inwardness, .
Irony, ., 6, 8, q6::, ::, :q
Jacobsen, J. P., :8o
Jahyes, F., :8
Janins, J., .6
Jeremiah, .oo
Jerusalem, o, 86
Jesus Christ, 8:8q passim, :6, :68., :,
:8.q., :q6, .oo, .:o, .::, .:
Jews, Judaism, .q passim
Jones, W. G., n.
Jrgensen, P. R., 6
Judgement, act and concept of, 6, ., o:,
o
Kant, I., :, :, , ::8, :.o, :8
Kantzenbach, F. W., :.:n.
Kardos, G., ..n.
Kierkegaard, S.
Attack upon Christendom , , ::,
:, ::., ..o
The Concept of Anxiety, 6::, ::q, ,
.q
Index .
The Concept of Irony, ., q6::, :.8, :.q,
:o:
Concluding Unscientic Postscript, , , :
The Corsair Affair, , , :
The Crisis and a Crisis in the Life of an
Actress, 8
Eighteen Upbuilding Discourses, ix, :q,
:6, .., .qo
Either/Or, :, .8q, o, 6, ., 66,
q8o, :o, ::, :, :6o, :q,
.., .., .8, .:
Fear and Trembling, :q, ..
For Self-Examination and Judge for Yourself !,
.., ..q
From the Papers of One Still Living, , o,
.q, :., :, :q
Journals and Papers, :n., 6, 6, q,
:::, ::, :q, :q, :q, .:, .:,
.:6, .., ..8n., ..
The Moment, .., .oq, ..o
Philosophical Fragments, .:, .8
The Point of View, 6, :8, :.
Prefaces/A Writing Sampler, 8o, :,
.o6
Repetition, 6, ::o, :, ..6q, .., .q
Stages on Lifes Way, , 8q, :o, 6, :.,
.8, .q
Two Ages . . . A Literary Review, :q.o,
, , :, o:, 6.:, :, :q,
.::
The Unchangeableness of God, :
Upbuilding Discourses in Various Spirits,
:o::, .:, .:6
Works of Love, :6:, :, .oq
Kirmmse, B., .6n., n.
Klstrup, P., .
Knecht, E., 8:n., 8., 8n.
Kbenhavns Flyvende Post (Copenhagens Flying
Post), .q, , 68
Kbenhavnsposten ( The Copenhagen Post), o,
, :oq, :qo
Koefoed-Hansen, H. P., :q, :o
Kristeva, J., .:n.
Lenau, N., , 8, :o:
Lennon, J., :q.
L eon, C., :
Le Roy, L., :8
Lessing, G. E., :
Levelling, 6q, ., .::8
Lewis, S., 8
Life-view, philosophy of, 8:, q.,
:8
Linnet, R., .n., :6n.
London, :, o, :., ., , 6, :::
Love, ::66, :, :6:, ..8q
Lowrie, W., :6n., q
Luk acs, G., :8o, :8:, :qqn.
Lumbye, J. H.,
Luther, M., :o, :q, :on., .oo, ..o
Lyotard, J.-F., n.
McCarthy, T., :n.
McCarthy, V., :q
McCracken, D., .:n.
McLachlan, J. M., .o.n.
Magarschak, D., .o6n., .o8n.
Malantschuk, G., n.
M ale, E., :88q, :q:
Malik, H. C., :8.
Manet, E., :8.q, .:o, ...
Marcuse, L., ::6n., ::q
Marheineke, P., :q
Marriage, :.q, :.
Martensen, H. L., qq, :o:, :o6, :o8,
::::, :8q, :6o, :6., :6q, :
Martyrdom, 6q:, :q., .oq, .:q.o,
..., .
Marx, K., .., .
Maturin, C., 8
Melancholy, :, .o:
Memory, .
Mendelssohn, M., ::6
Milbank, J., n.
Miller, H., ::8
Modernity, :. passim, ., 6, oq
passim, :q, :6 passim, :8o,
:qo, :q8, .o, .o, .o8, .oq, .:.:
Mllehave, J., :qqn.
Mller, P. M., 6, 8:, qo, q, q8, ..8q,
.
Moment of vision, ::q, .o, ., ., ,
o:
Mozart, W. A., 6, ,
.6 Index
Mumford, L., ., 6q
Mundt, T., :6
Mynster, J. P., :qo, ::, :6o, :6., :6q,
:., :, :, .
Nagy, A., ..n.
National Socialism, , q
Nature (see also Country, the), 6:o, .,
::o::
Nero, 6q
Neurasthenia, .
Nietzsche, F., , 8, 8q, :8o, :q8, :qq,
.o
Nihilism, 68:, q:, q, :q, ::,
:., .o
Nordic mythology, :
Nothingness, ix, x
Ny Portefeuille, .q
Oehlenschl ager, A., 6, :6
Olsen, R., :.q, :6o:, ..
Ono, Y., :q.
Other, otherness, :6:, :6., :6, .:q,
.68
Outpost, The, see Forposten
Overbeck, F., .oo
Paris, .., ., ., 6, 86, q:, :::, :8., .o:,
.:8
Paris, M., 8:
Pascal, B.,
Patocka, J., :n.
Pattison, G., n., ..n., 8n., n., :6on.,
:8n., ..n.
Paul, St, :qq.oo, ..
Perseus: A Journal for the Speculative Idea, 68
Pesquidoux, D. de, :86
Peter the Great, Czar, .o8
Petersen, F. C., q6
Philip of Navarre, 8:
Philipsen, P. G., ., .8, q6
Philosophy, q, q8, :oo:, :o, :o6,
::., .o
Phister, L. L., 8
Plato, , ::8, :.:
Poetry, :oo:, :o, ::, :o
Pondrom, C., :qqn.
Portefeuille,
Present Age, the, see Modernity
Press, the (see also Feuilletons), :, 68,
o, ., :q, .::8
Protestantism, :o:, ::., ::, :, :o
Prudery, :.
Public, the, :, , , q, ., , 68,
., :, :q, .::8
Quinet, E., 8q, qo
Rappoport, A., :q8
Reading, :, ...
Reason, , q, ::
R ee, J., n.
Reitzel, C. A., :
Religion, the religious, , , , :o::, :., :,
q8q, :.o, :.., :o
Renan, E., :8, :q8
Representation, 6, :o, ::6, .
Resurrection, .
Revelation, ::
Rilke, R. M., :8o
Roger of Wendover, 8:
Romanticism, , :o, .:, ., ., 8, :oo,
:o6, :o, ::o::, ::., ::66, :o,
:, :q
Rome, o
Rosenhoff, C., .q, 8, q, ::o, :o:, :
Rubow, P., :oo:
Saint-Georges, J. H. V. de, 8, 86n.
Saint Victor, P. de, :8
Sartre, J.-P., :6:, :qq, .::, ..
Schelling, F. J. W., ::, .:6
Schiller, F., 8, .
Schlegel, A. W., 8
Schlegel, C., ::n.
Schlegel, F., q8, ::66
Schleiermacher, F. D. E., q6, ::6, :.o,
:.8, :o, ::, :6, :, :q, ::, :6o,
:6., :6q, ...
Schopenhauer, A., 8
Schubart, C. F. D., 8, 8
Scribe, A. E., 6, ., 86n., ::, :
Sexuality, ::66
Shakespeare, W., 8, q, q8, ::
Index .
Shelley, P. B., 8, qo
Shestov, L., .o:., .o
Shitzova, T. V., .
Sibbern, F. C., 6, :oq
Smith, A., :
Socrates, 8, q6, .oo, ..o
Solger, K. W. F., q8
Sophocles, .::
Space, spatiality, ::
Spectacle, spectacularity, ., :, .o, .., .,
, 6, 6, 6q:, , :6o
Spirit, the spiritual, ::, :o, :o6, :o8,
:::, :6, :8q, :6
Strauss, D. F., 8, :.8
Strindberg, A., :
Sturm und Drang, :6, :
Subjectivity,
Sublime, the, sublimity, :. passim, 6, ,
:6., :qq, .:q
Sue, E., 86, :8
Superciality, x, ., ., .:q, .
Swedenborg, I., ::.
Sympathy, q:o
Thomassen, E., :qqn.
Thurneysen, E., .o:n.
Tieck, L., q8
Tillich, P., ::n.
Time, x, :, :.o, ., , o, :6,
..6, ..8, ..q, .o:, .., .,
.
Titian, :8n., :8, :88
Tivoli, ix, .q, :, ., o, , , :6., o,
., :
Tjnneland, E., qn.
Tjner, P., n., qn.
Tradition, .
Tragedy, :o, ::.
Transcendence, :.:
Transition, 8
Troelsen, B., 6
Trendelenburg, A., 8
Unamuno, M. de, :8o
Van Dyck, A., :88
Veit, D., ::6, ::
Velasquez, D., :8, :88
Victimhood, :q:, .oq.:
Victoria, Queen Empress, :.n.
Violence, 6q:, , :q:., .:o.:
Visuality, vision, :, ::q, .o, , 6
Wagner, R., :q8
Walsh, S., :n.
Wandering Jew, the, .q
Warhol, A., ..o
Wilde, O., :q., :q.n.
Wilson, C., .o.
Witnessing, .o.
Wittgenstein, L., :8o
Wolterstorff, N., :q.
Young, Edward, .:
Young Germany, 6, q:., :.8, :6, :,
:6, :q
Zerlang, M., .