Kierkegaard, Religion and the Nineteenth-Century Crisis of Culture

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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 significance of the modern age that was taking shape in the flourishing feuilleton literature during the period of his authorship. Through a series of sharply focussed studies, George Pattison contextualizes Kierkegaard’s religious thought in relation to the debates about religion, culture and society carried on in the newspapers and journals read by the whole educated stratum of Danish society. Pattison relates Kierkegaard not only to high art and literature but also to the ephemera of his contemporary culture. This has important implications for our understanding of Kierkegaard’s 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 King’s 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!’ Kierkegaard’s Critique of the Spectacular City and Art, Modernity and Faith.

KIERKEGAARD, RELIGION AND THE NINETEENTH-CENTURY CRISIS OF CULTURE GEORGE PATTISON University of Aarhus

          The Pitt Building, Trumpington Street, Cambridge, United Kingdom    The Edinburgh Building, Cambridge CB2 2RU, UK 40 West 20th Street, New York, NY 10011-4211, USA 477 Williamstown Road, Port Melbourne, VIC 3207, Australia Ruiz de Alarcón 13, 28014 Madrid, Spain Dock House, The Waterfront, Cape Town 8001, South Africa http://www.cambridge.org © George Pattison 2004 First published in printed format 2002 ISBN 0-511-02991-8 eBook (Adobe Reader) ISBN 0-521-81170-8 hardback ISBN 0-521-01042-X paperback

To my mother Jean Pattison

Contents

Preface Acknowledgements List of abbreviations 

page ix xi xiv

The sublime, the city and the present age



 Kierkegaard and the world of the feuilletons



 The present age: the age of the city



 ‘Cosmopolitan faces’







Food for thought

 A literary scandal







The reception of Either/Or

 New Year’s Day



 Kierkegaard and the nineteenth century () Manet



 Kierkegaard and the nineteenth century () Dostoevsky







Learning to read the signs of the times

 

Bibliography Index

vii

Preface

Although the chapters that follow each appeared or was produced 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 appropriation 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’ Kierkegaard’s view of culture in the sense that it is not also ‘about’ his understanding of the religious situation of his time. As I hope the chapters that follow will suggest, these are not finally separable, even if we have to separate them for the purposes of commentary. I am publishing separately a highly focussed study of Kierkegaard’s upbuilding writings. This study, Kierkegaard’s Upbuilding Discourses: Philosophy, Theology, Literature (), 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 finding 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 superficiality, the figure 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. Doesn’t that mean that we would do better simply to abandon the opening moment of this sequence and go straight to the heart of the matter? Why waste our time with Kierkegaard’s involvement in the ephemera of his immediate cultural situation? Why preoccupy ourselves with reconstructing a figure of sheer vacuity? Of course, as I shall acknowledge, there is much in Kierkegaard’s world that has simply faded into history. Yet it is integral to Kierkegaard’s 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-enacting in our own age the double-citizenship of time and eternity. To find out what the temporal dimension of 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 exemplary 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 flow of time is revealed as the fissure 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  are based on essays appearing in the Kierkegaard Studies Yearbooks for ,  and , under the titles ‘Kierkegaard and the Sublime’, ‘The Present Age: The Age of the City’ and ‘New Year’s Day: A Comparative Study of the First of the Eighteen Upbuilding Discourses’ respectively (and pp. –, –, – in the respective volumes), all edited by N.-J. Cappelørn 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. Cappelørn and J. Stewart eds.), Kierkegaard Revisited, Berlin, Walter de Gruyter, , pp. –. 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 (), pp. –; ‘Beyond the Grasp of Irony’, in IKC : The Concept of Irony (); ‘The Initial Reception of Either/Or’, in IKC : Either/Or Part II (), pp. –. 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 Filosofia, No. , . Chapter  is a reworking of the article ‘Friedrich Schlegel’s Lucinde: A Case Study in the Relation of Religion to Romanticism’, published in the Scottish Journal of Theology , , pp. –, by the Scottish Academic Press. The section of Chapter  dealing with the xi

xii

Acknowledgements

comparison between Kierkegaard and Manet repoduces the article ‘Manet’s Christ Mocked: A Kierkegaardian Discussion of Art, Suffering and Christian Discipleship in the 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  overlaps with ‘Freedom’s Dangerous Dialogue: Reading Dostoevsky and Kierkegaard Together’, from G. Pattison and D. Thompson (eds.), Dostoevsky and the Christian Tradition, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, . Over and above such official 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  and , and I am grateful to Niels-Jørgen Cappelørn and to all colleagues at the Centre for everything I gained from those well-spent months. I am also grateful to King’s 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 acknowledge 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 between Kierkegaard and Dostoevsky. The opportunity to respond to Habib C. Malik’s Receiving Søren Kierkegaard at the  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 Grøn, 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 secretarial 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 from whom I 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 provocation 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 reflects my view that the nineteenth century’s 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 Rørbye’s Arrestbygningen ved Domhuset, is reproduced by permission of the Statens Museum for Kunst in Copenhagen. All translations of foreign-language titles not otherwise acknowledged 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 first use. CA CI COR EO EPW EUD FSE/JY FT/R JP M PC PF P/WS SKS SLW TA UDVS

The Concept of Anxiety The Concept of Irony The Corsair Affair Either/Or (followed by volume number) Early Polemical Writings Eighteen Upbuilding Discourses For Self-Examination and Judge for Yourself ! Fear and Trembling and Repetition Søren Kierkegaard’s Journals and Papers (followed by volume and entry (not page) number) The Moment and Late Writings Practice in Christianity Philosophical Fragments Prefaces and A Writing Sampler Søren Kierkegaards Skrifter (followed by volume number) Stages on Life’s Way Two Ages Upbuilding Discourses in Various Spirits

With the exception of JP and SKS these refer to titles in the Princeton University Press edition of Kierkegaard’s 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 concept 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 sublime is what unsettles, what cannot settle or be settled: a realm of experiences, representations and ideas that is turbulent and unmanageable. Such a realm may be figured 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 resonates 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 sublime that developed in the latter part of the eighteenth century. For the city irreversibly redefined the individual’s relation to the environment. This had to do not only with the way in which the new, expanding cities (beginning with London) overran their medieval walls, were reconstructed in an architecture that reflected the scale and style of imperial ambitions, and so overwhelmed the individual by virtue of their size (and magnitude, to anticipate, provided Kant with one of the foci of his discussion of the sublime). It also had to do with the simultaneous expansion and intensification of the individual’s visual interaction with the urban environment, reflected 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 experiences (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 attention in this connection to the diseases of urbanity first 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, someone paralysed by the sublime unmasterability of his environment. If the neurasthenic cannot be regarded as normative, he is none the less symptomatic of the new stresses 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 neurasthenic’s ‘blocked mental circulation’ manifests itself in the continuous destabilization and disorientation of representation resulting from urban culture’s 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 modern 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 simultaneous 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 sufficiently simple not to be overwhelming while, at the same time, experiencing the unrepresentable 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 superficial over-simplification is thus matched by a counter-movement of the sublime, or, more precisely, a counter-movement of resistance and disruption that may 

M. Zerlang, The City Spectacular of the Nineteenth Century, Copenhagen, Center for Urbanitet og Æstetik, Arbejdspapir , , p. . See also M. Zerlang, ‘Aesthetics and the Emergence of the Modern City: On the Sublime and the Spectacular’, in R. 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 reflect the continuous 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 Kierkegaard’s critique of modernity, refining and extending his either/or of the aesthetic or the religious: how, in Kierkegaard’s terms, to distinguish between the merely reactive protest of the Romantic rebel – or the contemporary art of shock for shock’s 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 apparatus, but, as he might say, what matters is how to apply it. Theory is nothing unless actualized in the process of concrete judgement. Kierkegaard’s 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 writings 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 intersection of theory and culture means no longer reading Kierkegaard in the role of philosopher, or as a theologian, or even as a figure 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 Kierkegaard’s age as the age of the modern urban experience, do we have any reason to believe that Kierkegaard himself articulated his own critical



Kierkegaard, religion and culture

question as a question about the sublime? Isn’t the evidence rather the other way? Aren’t Kierkegaard’s own aesthetics determinedly the aesthetics of beauty? Isn’t the sublime singularly lacking from his whole literary output? In any case, won’t 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 view of these questions, shouldn’t 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 philosophy and culture? Aren’t we running the risk of imposing our questions and our theorizing of the sublime onto Kierkegaard’s 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 Kierkegaard’s critique of culture because of the way in which it enables us to draw out the necessary interconnection between, on the one side, his philosophical and religious 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 Kierkegaard’s peculiar philosophical and religious perspectives got worked out as a critical reading of contemporary 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 conflation and a too zealous diremption. The resulting reconfiguration of the aesthetic 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 final chapter. The first 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. Ophøietheden 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



II

Defining ‘the sublime’ could, of course, be the work of an extended philosophical essay in its own right. I shall not attempt such a definition. Whatever its merits or demerits I shall simply take as a starting-point the specific concept of the sublime propounded in Kant’s Critique of Judgement, a concept that therefore belongs to the general horizon of the intellectual world of Kierkegaard’s own time, despite the overlay of subsequent Romantic and Hegelian developments. Kierkegaard himself, as has been hinted, never explicitly discussed this concept. Nevertheless, one of Kierkegaard’s central concepts, the concept of anxiety, has important analogies to the concept of the sublime, which we shall now explore. The first point of analogy concerns the position of the concepts of the sublime and of anxiety in the overall architectonic structures of Kant’s critical philosophy and Kierkegaard’s pseudonymous authorship respectively. Kant’s 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 understanding and the practical or moral reason. Without the mediating function of judgement, these two primary forms of reason would, in Kant’s view, become disconnected and we would be left with a kind of dualism that Kant (for all the jibes about ‘Kantian dualism’) finds unacceptable: a dualism that sets a world of knowable objects irrelevant to human strivings against a world of values undisciplined by the requirement of engaging with empirical reality. If the 



These connections are also noted in Jørgen Dehs, in ‘ “Ikke Phantasiens kunstrige Væven, men tankens Gysen”: Kierkegaard og bruddet med idealismens æstetik’, Slagmark, No. , Spring ; also Jørgen Dehs, ‘Den tabte verden’, in P. E. Tøjner, J. Garff and J. Dehs (eds.), Kierkegaards æstetik, Copenhagen, Gyldendal, , esp. pp. –. They are also discussed in S. Agacinski, ‘We are not Sublime: Love and Sacrifice, Abraham and ourselves’, in Jonathan R´ee and Jane Chamberlain (eds.), Kierkegaard: A Critical Reader, Oxford, Blackwell, . It is also striking that Lyotard’s discussion of Kant’s 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, , pp. , , , . Cf. also John Milbank, ‘The Sublime in Kierkegaard’, in P. Blond (ed.), Post-Secular Philosophy: Between Philosophy and Theology, London and New York, Routledge, , pp. –. The discussion that follows refers to I. Kant, Kritik der Urteilskraft, in Werke, Vol. V, Berlin, Walter de Gruyter, , especially I.ii, §§–.



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 structure 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 field of objects as the understanding, i.e., the form of reason that is concerned 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 mathematical 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 Kant’s 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 can’t ‘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 sensuous representation, our reason is none the less able to grasp them as single phenomena: ‘Look at that fine 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 description of anxiety in Kierkegaard’s 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 definition 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 occasion 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. ), and there can therefore be no adequate form in which anxiety can be ‘seen’ in its essence. Insofar as Kierkegaard’s writings about anxiety, in The Concept of Anxiety and elsewhere (for example, in his upbuilding writings or in aesthetic works such as ‘Quidam’s Diary’ in Stages on Life’s Way ), do provide what has been  

See G. Pattison, Kierkegaard: The Aesthetic and the Religious, London, SCM, . Again, this is something I have argued for in Kierkegaard: The Aesthetic and the Religious: see pp. –.



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 representation, 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 to the 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 fleeing what is revealed in anxiety: its own capacity for freedom and its responsibility towards itself (what Kierkegaard calls ‘grasping at finitude’ (CA, p. , amended) to escape the vertigo of anxiety).  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 Grøn, Subjektivitet og Negativitet: Kierkegaard, Copenhagen, Gyldendal, , pp. ff. See M. Heidegger, Sein und Zeit, T¨ubingen, Niemeyer, , esp. pp. ff. ( pagination as per st edition).

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Taciturnus’ discussion of aesthetic and religious fear in the closing section of Stages on Life’s Way. Religious fear, he says, is to be distinguished from the 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 God’s will. Here, it would seem, fear has acquired an object. Yet this ‘object’ is actually the subject himself in his concern for an eternal 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 borderconcept 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 defined focus: it has no ‘object’ as such. Yet fear is not the only emotive element in the experience of sublimity. As an aesthetic 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 find a form of 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 antipathy and an antipathetic sympathy’ (CA, p.  – Kierkegaard’s 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

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Kierkegaard, religion and culture

worth reflecting that ‘sympathy’ was a key term in Romantic aesthetics: 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 Kant’s technical sense is nevertheless a kind of pleasure. Even when Kierkegaard portrays a character such as the Quidam of Stages on Life’s Way, whose experience of anxiety is depicted as a kind of suffering, anxiety has a mesmerizing quality that entices its victim and makes him consent to his thralldom. Mediating between nature and freedom, bringing representation into crisis and arousing a fear that does not preclude an antipathetic sympathy, the analogies between Kantian sublimity and Kierkegaardian anxiety go to the heart of each concept. Nevertheless, they would also seem to diverge significantly 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 infinite, rational, free activity of the moral subject. In fulfilling the freedom to which the sublime points, such a subject will understand himself as acting in accord with the final teleology of nature and history: acting rationally in a rational universe. Kant specifically and pointedly rejects the view that the religious attitude towards which the sublime points is one in which God is depicted as riding 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 individual’s tranquil sense of moral independence 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 characteristics of the passage to religion; they are abiding characteristics of the religious life. However, it would be a caricature of Kierkegaard’s position to say that he sought to promote fear in the manner of a hell-fire preacher. In a text such as Purity of Heart he is at pains to argue that the good must be done solely because it

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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. 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 difference. Even if it is unjust to accuse Kierkegaard of the kind of sadomasochistic 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. ), his conception of freedom is never simply autonomous but belongs in a two-termed relationship in which God’s 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 God’s 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 sufficient unto itself but that is open to its divine depths ), 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 singular, unique and essentially secret in the life of each individual. Faith therefore sets a limit both to autonomy and to the rational universality of Kant’s practical reason. 



Cf. George Connell, To be One Thing: Personal Unity in Kierkegaard’s Thought, Macon, GA, Mercer University Press, ; Ronald M. Green, Kierkegaard and Kant: The Hidden Debt, Albany, Suny Press, ; Alastair Hannay, Kierkegaard, London, Routledge & Kegan Paul, , especially Chapter . See, for example, P. Tillich, Perspectives on Nineteenth and Twentieth Century Theology, London, SCM, , especially Chapter , ‘The Enlightenment and its Problems’.

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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 Kierkegaard’s 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 Kierkegaard’s thought, although such an expansion is not specifically thematized by Kierkegaard himself. To be more specific: 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 fittingness of an aesthetic term such as the sublime in relation to Kierkegaard receives an indirect and even paradoxical testimony from Hegel. Although it is never safe to assume that Hegel’s 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 seem to 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 such as the sublime that, in Hegel’s 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 Hebrew Bible. Given the awkward marginality of Hebrew religion in Hegel’s overall view of history, this is itself a pointer to the difficulty he has with the concept. The principle of the sublime, he says, is that of God’s transcendence over the world, a transcendence by which the creature is reduced to ‘evanescence and powerlessness’ and God alone accounted just. As opposed to the realm of the beautiful and the world of symbolic art, the external form is little more than accidental 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.

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Following from the absolute transcendence of God, the world is de-divinized and experienced in its finitude. No longer the domain of demi-gods or spirits of innumerable kinds, it has become the stage of human history, ‘finite, 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 finitude 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 appropriate to speak of it as a form of unhappy consciousness. A life lived within these sublime categories demands of the individual a recognition of human finitude and separation from God, 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 sublime with the spirit of the psalms he helps to fill in the 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 representation might mean is suggested by the well-known Kierkegaardian melancholy. The comparison with Kant and Hegel provides us with a first 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 first 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 u¨ ber die Asthetik, in Werke in Zwanzig B¨ande, Vol. XIII, Frankfurt, Suhrkamp, , p. . 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 Kant’s 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.

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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 specific location of Kierkegaard’s 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 conceptual 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. III

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 exemplified 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 assumed that it was possible to correlate spatiality with sensuousness and temporality with spirit, although it 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 fulfils our highest needs, which are better served by thought and reflection. 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 art’s inability to express the truth of temporality is one of the

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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 philosophy’s claims to define and regulate what these boundaries are. As this study is directed towards one aspect of the cultural implications of Kierkegaard’s 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 Kierkegaard’s discussion of the moment of vision (Øieblikket). This moment of vision is intimately bound up with the awakening of anxiety. Also, as Kierkegaard says (perhaps introducing yet another boundary into an already overcrowded map), it marks the intersection and interpenetration of time and eternity. Now, insofar 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 becomes 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 fixed point in relation to which past and future are represented. But such a geometrical projection cannot help us to think time 

For a fine discussion of this see Jan Patocka, ‘Die Lehre von der Vergangenheit der Kunst’, in Kunst und Zeit, Stuttgart, Klett-Cotta, , pp. –.

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Kierkegaard, religion and culture

according to its temporality. To do this we would need to face up to the situation that there are no fixed points in the endless flux of time. No moment is ever really present, because even the present itself is in flux, and without the presence of a present, past and future likewise dissolve into unrepresentable flux. 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 time’s temporality, while allowing time to give itself to representation after a manner. It is important to note that Kierkegaard has been ill-served by translation here – not that anyone can envy the translator’s 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 Heidegger’s translators in their translation of the cognate German term) is the Danish term Øieblikket, 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 figurative 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 first to make it the basis of a verb, since such a usage is only acknowledged by dictionaries of loan-words subsequent to Kierkegaard’s time. The earlier English translation by Lowrie did give ‘glance’ rather than ‘blink’ in explication 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 Æstetik, Arbejdspapir , .

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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 figurative 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 figurative word’ (CA, p. ). Still, we might be uneasy. We might, for instance, recall the constant emphasis on the visual quality of aesthetic existence epitomized in the role of the eye in ‘The Seducer’s Diary’, and the Seducer’s 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 image 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. Like many Christian moralists since Augustine, Kierkegaard readily identifies ‘the glance’ or ‘gaze’ as ‘the lust of the eye’, the epitome of those seductive powers that chain us to the realm of sense. Kierkegaard’s example of Ingeborg’s glance, however, points to another way of understanding things. In the first 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 field 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 various reasons, she cannot communicate to him, i.e., the knowledge that their separation is final and irrevocable. In The Concept of Anxiety Kierkegaard goes on to say that the instant 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  

See, for example, JP V: , IV: . For a further discussion of this aspect of Kierkegaard’s contemporary culture, see Chapter  below. For the interpretation of Ingeborg’s glance that follows I am essentially indebted to N. N. Eriksen, Kierkegaard’s Category of Repetition: A Reconstruction, Kierkegaard Monograph Series , Berlin and New York, Walter de Gruyter, , esp. pp. ff.

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word would be an attempt to articulate what she feels within the relativistic web of language and temporally determined communication. The pure moment of vision, however, is the unqualified, 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 question of what he calls an ‘eternal image’. 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 infinite internal reciprocity between form and content, no matter how insignificant the content might be in itself. (One example he gives is of a man fishing for eels from a boat.) There is no fissure in its internal consistency. The conjunction of eternity and time called ‘the moment of vision’, however, is very different. What the image of Ingeborg’s 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 allow us 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’ conception of time, the conception of 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 figurative figure the unfigurable, and the metaphorical name what withdraws from all expression and 

JP I:  and Pap. VIII  A . See also my article ‘Aesthetics and the Aesthetic’, British Journal of Aesthetics , No. , , pp. –.

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naming. By choosing, with deliberation, precisely this metaphor of ‘the glance of the eye’, Kierkegaard thus lays open the whole field 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. ). 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 momentary, the succession of figured experiences, the moving pictures that make up the content of everyday consciousness. IV

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 Gyllembourg’s 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 reflection’. However, if this critique provides the climax of Kierkegaard’s book, it opens with a consideration of the literary character of the author of Two Ages that is also full of important insights into Kierkegaard’s understanding of modernity. The author is said by Kierkegaard to have contributed faithfully to the Danish literary scene for twenty years and throughout that time to have produced works that reflect a consistent lifeview. 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 confidence in life and in the essential 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,

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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 Øieblikkelige), 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. ). The slogan of the younger generation is ‘What the Age requires’. However, Kierkegaard’s own expression here contains an ambiguity 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 fashion 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 Øinene)’ (TA, p. ), 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 filled by ‘the-time-that-now-is’, the momentary, the shock of the new. It is therefore a culture that systematically excludes the fearful fascination of anxiety and sublimity – yet the temporal structure of even the most fleeting 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 affliction that has insinuated itself deeply into the culture of modernity, permeating the art, literature and music of Romanticism and being raised to a fine art in the ennui of the Baudelairean dandy. Melancholy is the shadow permanently accompanying the forward rush of the age: yet in fleeing this shadow it flees that which would give it the possibility of deeper insight into its own truths, limitations and possibilities. And behind such melancholy lurks the omnipresent but systematically ignored spectre of death – ignored by the dazzling culture of the ephemeral, but the chosen dancing partner of Kierkegaard’s most urbane pseudonym, Johannes Climacus (see PF, p. ). 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 sufficient to add a historical periodization, for modernity has not only a time, but also a quite specific 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 sublime 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 moment 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 

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: Søren Kierkegaard’s Religious Psychology, London, Routledge, . Cf. Julia Kristeva’s study of the place of melancholy in the culture of modernity in her Soleil noir: d´epression et m´elancolie, Paris, Gallimard, .



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 objected that the world of the spectacularized city was alien to Kierkegaard. His Copenhagen was, after all, still a walled city, a ‘market town’ even. Adorno’s 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 Kierkegaard’s Copenhagen was clearly not Baudelaire’s Paris, the same dynamics that created the Paris of the s were already active in the Copenhagen of the s, and were, perhaps, all the clearer because of the smaller scale and relative backwardness of the latter. In Copenhagen’s provincial atmosphere any significant 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 on which the ambiguous drama of the moment was enacted. A quotation from the pamphlets attacking the Church that Kierkegaard published in the last year of his life – pamphlets collectively entitled The Moment of Vision – pulls together the threads we have been attempting to disentangle and demonstrates their interconnectedness 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 

For a full defence of this claim see my study ‘Poor Paris!’ Kierkegaard’s Critique of the Spectacular City, Kierkegaard Monograph Series , Berlin and New York, Walter de Gruyter, , especially Chapter , ‘Kierkegaard Enters the Spectacular City’. For a discussion of Adorno’s 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 handbook that ‘Here is the frightful Wolf Ravine, where one plunges , 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 traveller’s guide-book for the New Testament 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 finds in the surface world of modern urbanity’s ephemeral culture of diversion, spectacularity and commodified exchange a text capable of disclosing a very different field of possibilities – aesthetically: the sublimity of the , fathoms, religiously: the choice of the eternal in the lived singularity of the moment of vision. The vacuity of the present age becomes the figure 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 Kierkegaard’s authorship in which this ambiguous intertwining of seemingly incommensurable discourses comes most clearly to view. It means reading Kierkegaard precisely 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 bustle of weekday life’ (PC, p. , 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

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Kierkegaard, religion and culture

the extraordinary. As another poet of the early modern city put it, every grain of sand can reveal infinity, and every hour eternity (but they don’t 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 dualities. Such dualities include nature and freedom, representation and what eludes representation, the moment of time that is mere flux 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 specifically, 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 eternal’s presence here in Amager Square? Kierkegaard’s 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 possibility of Christian existence in, with and under the conditions of a merely aesthetic urbanized age of reflection. 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 



Kierkegaard, religion and culture

remains significantly under-represented in the secondary literature: its relation to the world of contemporary popular culture, especially as that was mirrored in and shaped by the feuilleton literature that flourished in Kierkegaard’s time. Intriguingly the most striking points of overlap between Kierkegaard’s own authorship 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 affinities and connections 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 figure in Danish literary culture), gives us a preliminary warrant for guessing at the importance of the relationship between Kierkegaard and the feuilleton 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 exactly of the French style but a mixture of Jules Janins and a young, philosophically educated German.’ Hertz’s remark seems almost casual and does not belong to any sustained discussion of Kierkegaard’s literary significance – nor is it even clear what Hertz means by Kierkegaard’s 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 Kierkegaard’s 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 newspapers 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 reflect but also to mould the point of view of a public that wished 

Quoted in Bruce H. Kirmmse (ed.), Søren Kierkegaard truffet: et liv set af hans samtidige, Copenhagen, Reitzel, , p. .

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

to be both fashionable and cultured. As such it was (and is) as profusely varied in its subject-matter as the field of culture itself. The feuilletons of Kierkegaard’s time presented material that ranged from sermons to actresses. The point is nicely illustrated by Figaro’s feuilleton for  September  (Figaro was a Danish periodical to which we shall return). It reports such items of interest as the Vatican’s 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´edieFran¸caise in a provincial town; the issuing of a new medallion depicting Lizst; a children’s concert in Munich; the visit of three English prima donnas to Italy; the launch of a new musical periodical, Le Courier musical, in Paris; news of a production of Giselle (also in Paris); an edition of previously unpublished works 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 reflected in the bookseller P. G. Philipsen’s ‘Announcements’ in Figaro for  October , which, alongside Kierkegaard’s 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. Bakhtin’s 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 authorship at which this proximity comes into view). Bakhtin writes that ‘the newspaper page [is] a living reflection 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



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 Bakhtin’s concept of literary polyphony. Crucial to the point being made is that ‘there is no evolution, no growth in general’ within Dostoevsky’s fictional world, a situation reflecting 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 Philipsen’s book-stock the feuilleton literature brought together the most heterogeneous material within the field 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 field 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 persona was summarized by the Russian critic 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 definitely 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 thinking 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 writer’s style. At the time this article was  



M. M. Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, translated by Caryl Emerson, Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, , pp. –. Ibid., pp. –. 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. –). This and the previous quotation are from J. Frank, Dostoevsky: The Seeds of Revolt  –, Princeton, Princeton University Press, , p. .

Kierkegaard and the world of the feuilletons



widely attributed to Kierkegaard, although he himself clearly believed that, like some other articles with which he had been linked, it was written by P. V. Christensen (‘my little secretary Christensen’), with whom he had been working on Either/Or and who was therefore 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-fire succession of whimsically articulated thoughts, interspersed with classical references, Latin and French sayings, wilfully over-elaborated or ingeniously misapplied similes, observations of everyday life, plus some vernacular jocularity. In this it intensively mimics the extensive heterogeneity of feuilleton literature, 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 significance for the interpretation of Kierkegaard’s literary persona. The very possibility of such an article being ascribed to him by his contemporaries also testifies to the way in which his writing career and style belong, in one aspect, in the orbit of the feuilletons. In Kierkegaard’s 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’ Kierkegaard’s Either/Or (chiefly 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 lavishly 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. A more intellectual variant of the genre could be illustrated from publications like Heiberg’s own Copenhagen’s Flying Post (Københavns Flyvende Post) and Intelligensblade or their political opposite numbers 

For which he was duly taken to task by Kierkegaard – see Chapter  below.



Kierkegaard, religion and culture

The Copenhagen Post (Københavnsposten) and The Fatherland (Fædrelandet). In these, mixed in with the airing of opinions about culture and the arts, one might also find discussions of political, critical and philosophical principles. Relations between the two types of publication can be gauged by Heiberg’s remarks about Figaro in a review of the responses of contemporary newspapers to a debate about censorship and the theatre. Heiberg begins by deliberately misnaming it Pierrot: ‘Pierrot – no, it’s true, he calls himself Figaro: the representative of stupidity has taken his name from that of wit – so, then: Figaro – Figaro thinks . . . [sic] But who cares what that fool thinks, it’s all the same.’ As a preliminary comment on Kierkegaard’s own links with this literature we note that he himself was first published in Københavns Flyvende Post (in the form of a rather silly piece on women’s emancipation that perfectly exemplifies the feuilletoniste’s penchant for bavardage). Either/Or was reviewed extensively in both the more trivial and the more serious feuilletons. A decade later Kierkegaard published the opening salvoes of his final attack on established Christianity in Fædrelandet (a newspaper that, strangely, generally represented a very different political stance from Kierkegaard’s own), an attack which, despite its serious intent, also displayed Kierkegaard’s talent for the kind of man-about-town raillery and sarcasm typical of the feuilleton writer. And as is well known, perhaps the most bitter experience of his life was his polemical struggle with the satirical periodical The Corsair. We shall return to the specific detail of Kierkegaard’s 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. Heiberg’s sarcasm over Carstensen’s Figaro was by no means arbitrary. 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 Copenhagen’s Rosenborg Gardens, complete with Bengal lights and spectacular firework displays. In  he opened 

In Intelligensblade ,  July , p. .

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 from Danish cultural life and to reform aesthetic and cultural taste. In a series of articles in the Flying Post in the s and s (articles which were collected in  under the title ‘A Contribution to an Aesthetic Morality’) he sought to raise the tone of Danish public life to that exemplified 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 Kierkegaard’s own authorship. I have already claimed that the characteristic moment of modernity brought to expression in Kierkegaard’s writing is that of the early modern city. This too, however, is the very historical moment that (first in London) sees the emergence and definition of the modern press out of a multiplicity of gazettes, advertisement lists, newssheets, political pamphlets and other ephemeral publications and, quite specifically, the kind of journalistic writing characteristic of the feuilletons. The reasons for the city being the specific 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 and immigrants from quite different societies who traded or 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.’ 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 Kierkegaard’s appropriation and critique of Heiberg’s analysis, see Chapter  below. Anthony Smith, The Newspaper: An International History, London, Thames & Hudson, , pp. –.

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Kierkegaard, religion and culture

close connection with the coffee-house society of that period, that the new paradigm of the newspaper became firmly established. Not only did the city provide an appropriately attentive audience for the newspaper, but it also provided a sufficiently large distribution to 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. An anecdote recalls that when M. E. Goldschmidt floated 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 everything 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 nineteenth century’. Paradoxically, Paris was not only the model for the republican Corsair, but also provided the prototype for Carstensen’s Tivoli and for Heiberg’s 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 flˆaneurs, or the Paris that epitomized the most exquisite aesthetic refinement? Here, from another side, we see how the heterogeneous content of such publications reflects, institutionalizes and celebrates the 



See, for example, Michael Harris, London Newspapers in the Age of Walpole, London and Toronto, Associated University Presses, ; Jeremy Black, The English Press in the Eighteenth Century, London, Croom Helm,  (reprinted ). It is perhaps telling that many of the key newspapers originating in this period openly display their affiliation 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 fitting 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. II

Kierkegaard’s ‘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 authorship 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 massproduced, 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: ). A major factor here was undoubtedly the conflict 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 Kierkegaard’s 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 determinate negation: Kierkegaard’s hostility to the press was not that of Olympian detachment or mere aristocratic scorn but precisely the hostility of one who finds 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, Kierkegaard’s 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 first appears, that persists throughout his career and that relates to the most diverse aspects of his own authorship. Following the  article on women’s emancipation alluded to above, Kierkegaard’s next publication (also in Copenhagen’s 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  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 dissociation, however (and the very fact of the article itself ), signal the proximity of Kierkegaard to the world of popular journalistic literature: ‘Many times during the last four months, I have enjoyed 

It is worth noting that Kierkegaard’s first independent publication, a review of Hans Christian Andersen’s novel Only A Fiddler, published as From the Papers of One Still Living, was probably originally conceived for publication in Heiberg’s 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 Hertz’s tragedy Sven Dyring’s House. Kierkegaard’s review, addressing as it does the significance of a recent popular novel, would have belonged to this end of Perseus’s 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 fliers that were fliers only outwardly, since their contents were solid, weighty, and unpadded, assuring them much more than ephemeral significance’ (COR, p. ). This article also suggests – ironically – how the very superficiality of the terms in which contemporary journalism is puffing the importance of the present age makes the question as to the real significance of the moment all the more necessary: Everything indicates that the decisive moment is approaching. There are a yeastiness and ferment that cannot possibly fizzle out. There is a vigorous 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 Heiberg’s importance has dwindled. This is a gallant expression of the momentousness of the age. (COR, pp. –)

Kierkegaard’s passing allusion to the polemics between Carstensen 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 grounded on intellectual ability and artistic 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 Kierkegaard’s subsequent authorship makes it obvious to us that Kierkegaard was from the beginning working 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 him an extraordinarily large sum to write an article against Heiberg ( JP VI: ). That this triangular spat was noticed by others is



Kierkegaard, religion and culture

evidenced by one of The Corsair’s 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 Heiberg’s sudden interest in astronomy and closely mirrors both the tone and the content of one of Kierkegaard’s own unpublished ironic sketches on just this topic, in one of which he specifically conflates Heiberg and Carstensen, reflecting the anger and disappointment he experienced as a result of Heiberg’s incomprehension of Either/Or and, later, Repetition. None of this suggests that Kierkegaard maintained the kind of ironic, aristocratic distance from such literary ephemera that many of his writings about himself might suggest. On its publication in  Either/Or proved to be of interest not simply to a philosophical readership but (as Kierkegaard had intended) to a more general public. It was even a moderate commercial 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 contributing 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 specifically to the fictional 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 reflected 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 regard is the extended review of Scribe’s comedy The First Love, the significance of which will be discussed below. The opening essay (after Victor Eremita’s editorial introduction and the aphoristic Diapsalmata), devoted to Mozart’s Don Giovanni, demonstrates a familiarity with Hegelian aesthetic – but it also deals with a work that is not only ‘classical’ in the specific sense developed in the essay itself but is (and was already in Kierkegaard’s 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 feuilleton section of The Fatherland when he took issue with the interpretation 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 published critique of the age. These two works effectively provide a frame for the entirety of the first phase of Kierkegaard’s pseudonymous authorship, i.e., the so-called aesthetic works spanning the period from Either/Or to Concluding Unscientific Postscript. This structural 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 transient and ephemeral productions. The same pattern of a small literary-critical work originally conceived for periodical publication (in this case The Fatherland’s feuilleton section) only to appear in independent form recurs in relation to one of Kierkegaard’s most purely aesthetic pieces, The Crisis and a Crisis in the Life of an Actress (written in  and published in ). This is a tribute to Johane Luise Heiberg, wife of J. L. Heiberg and one of Denmark’s 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 first emerged as a teenage ‘star’ twenty years previously. Kierkegaard argues not only that the passage of time has not withered 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.

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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 Christendom to Christianity. His journal entries about whether to publish it or not are extensive and amongst his most obsessive. The final 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 Kierkegaard’s last published piece of theatrical 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 innumerable passing references in pseudonymous and signed works alike – Kierkegaard’s presence in the world of popular journalism and, specifically, the world of the feuilleton literature (and therefore by implication its presence within the horizon of his critical concerns), 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 from Carstensen 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 engagement with the very concept of the feuilleton is in a series 

For a fuller discussion of this see my article ‘Søren Kierkegaard: A Theatre Critic of the Heiberg School’, British Journal of Aesthetics, Vol. , No. , Winter .

Kierkegaard and the world of the feuilletons



of sketches for an unfinished work entitled Writing Sampler that Kierkegaard worked on between  and , but never completed. Kierkegaard played with the experimental pseudonym Lt Rosenpind or, alternatively, Rosenblad, possibly a satirical allusion to Rosenhoff, whose ‘review’ of Either/Or he had dismissed with scorn (although the most finished 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 anything 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 payment – 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. ). 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 Shakespeare’s (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 fifth relays anecdotes about an event at a dinner party and a barber who offers his customers the opportunity to be tested with a stethoscope. The sixth section gives a cursory review of the year , while the seventh 



Perhaps this failure to complete what, in its surviving fragments, contains some of Kierkegaard’s most brilliant passages of purely aesthetic writing has to do with the nature of the task itself. Precisely the ceaseless flow of heterogeneous material that constitutes feuilleton literature makes it almost impossible to develop a definitive pastiche within the format of a book – for a book imposes a kind of closure that contradicts the essential fluidity 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 Kierkegaard’s purpose of parody.

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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 arrangements. 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 Kierkegaard’s most delicately romantic pieces of prose writing. But this, as we have repeatedly seen, is once more characteristic of the specific literary situation brought about by the prevalence 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, finally, brought into a single harmonious unity. In its own terms it is a brilliant satire, but the fact that Kierkegaard satirizes the feuilletonistes doesn’t of itself differentiate him from them. Even Tivoli’s newspaper satirized the Theatre Royal’s celebration of Scandinavian brotherhood – so what distinguishes Kierkegaard’s 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 Kierkegaard’s 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 reflective actress. Of course, in the one case (that of anxious sublimity) the question is posed as a matter of how to find 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 timebound cultural products (the latest opera, vaudeville, popular novel, etc.) – but both the paradoxical logic of ‘the moment’ itself and what we find in Kierkegaard’s own authorship suggest that such a

Kierkegaard and the world of the feuilletons



neat distinction scarcely works in practice. The actual unpicking of eternity’s 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 relationship between Kierkegaard, Heiberg and Carstensen. We now look in detail at another case in point that also involves each of these figures and that nicely illustrates just how the eternal and the ephemeral, the sublime and the bathetic become so tightly interlaced in Kierkegaard’s text as to be virtually indistinguishable. III

Again (coincidentally?) there is a link to Henrik Hertz, the dramatist whose comment on Kierkegaard’s style first alerted us to Kierkegaard’s kinship with the world of the feuilletons. In the 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 figure one’ (TA, p. ). 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 Britain’s Royal Navy in  but is now a burlesque drunk, touting a peep show at the Deer Park’s fairground (a local entertainment 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 Carstensen’s Figaro, because it was perceived as being unpatriotic. In Kierkegaard’s 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 Kierkegaard’s writings. Hertz’s 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 first the issue of this ‘mere bagatelle’ merits more immediate attention. In Either/Or Kierkegaard wrote an extended review essay about Augustin Eug`ene Scribe’s 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 Europe’s most successful dramatist. Figaro noted that in one year Scribe had earned more money than all other French dramatists put together. His plays were also an important ingredient in J. L. Heiberg’s campaign to introduce a more Francophile tone into Denmark’s theatrical life: between  and , one hundred and one plays by Scribe were performed in , 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 characters’ emotional involvements, he insists that within the limits of its genre it is a masterwork of irony and reflection, 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’. For his part, Kierkegaard was furious about Heiberg’s review (although it was in fact far more positive than anything in Kierkgaard’s response would suggest), and he filled 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 

In ‘Litterær Vintersæd’, Intelligensblade ,  March , p. .

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.’ Let Figaro take his own advice, then, he suggests, and accept the verdict of the public in this case. Hertz’s 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’ – but, as we have seen, the term did occur elsewhere in Intelligensblade, in Heiberg’s review of Either/Or, and, by a strange twist, Heiberg did, on another occasion, actually call The Peep Show itself a ‘bagatelle’. Kierkegaard’s slip (several years after Heiberg’s review of Either/Or) is indicative of how deeply Heiberg’s words had wounded him. But why should these ‘bagatelles’ be of concern to us? Hertz’s 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 flies 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 flying 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 fly and, to cut a long story short, much ado about nothing. But this in turn highlights a further feature of critical writing in the zone of cultural life traversed both by    



In ‘Kritiken over “Perspektivkassen” ’, Intelligensblade ,  July , pp. –. Ibid., p. . In J. L. Heiberg, Prosaiske Skrifter, Copenhagen, , Vol. IV, p. . The whole theme is also reworked in the famous journal reference where Kierkegaard says ‘After my death no one will find in my papers the slightest information (this is my consolation) about what has really filled my life . . . and that often turns into events of prodigious importance to me that which the world would call bagatelles’ ( JP V: ). In Kirmmse, Søren Kierkegaard, p. .

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Kierkegaard, religion and culture

the feuilleton writers and by critics of a more reflective kind – a feature perhaps not accidentally linked to the title of Hertz’s ‘little piece’ (in Danish Perspektivkassen) – that everything depends on perspective or point of view. The aim of the feuilleton writer is, above all, to direct the reader’s 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 new kind of observer’. New optical technology, simultaneously exploited in the worlds of science and industry, medicine and popular entertainment, gave a hitherto unprecedented importance to the perceiving subject in determining how the world looked, a development reflected in the culture of spectatorship that grew up in the nineteenth century, as evidenced by the rise of museums, 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 previously stated, also the founder of Denmark’s best-known pleasure park, the mould-breaking Tivoli Gardens. Here the public could experience for itself the kind of leisurely spectatorship that had previously 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. In Tivoli’s virtual world the values of classical aesthetics in which beauty is truth and truth beauty in everlasting self-sameness and self-sufficiency are discarded in favour of the simple enjoyment of an experience in which everything has become ephemeral, volatile, infinitely 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 new urban culture is to be defined by the view that 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 qualified critic,

Kierkegaard and the world of the feuilletons



the one who alone knew how to distinguish between masterpieces and bagatelles and between elephants and flies. 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 scattered 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). Kierkegaard’s problem is that the rationalistic taxonomies of Heibergian criticism (taxonomies justified by appeal to Hegelian philosophy) and the self-appointed nature of the great critic make it impossible for criticism to relate to the lived quality of modernity. In a journal entry prompted by Heiberg’s comments on Either/Or in Intelligensblade Kierkegaard likens Heiberg’s 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. ). Against Heiberg’s faith in the ‘view from above’, Kierkegaard himself is too much a child of his, later, generation. For Kierkegaard’s 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 oxyhydrogen microscope and the other magnified on the same scale, so that he perceived everything very relatively’ ( JP V: ). A similar experience underlies this fictional anecdote: Situation: A man standing on a pontoon bridge detects through his field 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 first 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 field-glasses in one hand to keep the creature in his sight, since the movement of the water disturbs a



Kierkegaard, religion and culture

steady view – and finally 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 fines 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 trifling little thing, through the power of a man’s imagination, etc., can come to concern him absolutely. ( JP II: )

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 Kierkegaard’s essential modernity. Its author, Bjarne Troelsen, sees ‘the man on the pontoon bridge’ as a symbol both of Kierkegaard himself and of each human individual 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 superiority of the telescope over natural vision), only serve to increase his loss of a coherent and balanced vision. In the figure 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, Kierkegaard’s 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 artificial, too much of a selfconscious pose, really to be able to resist the destabilizing forces 

See Bjarne Troelsen, Manden p˚a Flydebroen, Copenhagen, Anis, .

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 fighting. That Kierkegaard’s final ‘Attack on “Christendom” ’ should have been launched in a popular newspaper, The Fatherland, is then no surprise, for it is precisely in this attack that Kierkegaard finally tears up the tourist guide and points to the vertiginous infinity 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 Søren 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 Kierkegaard’s links to the world of the feuilletons and his involvement in the debate concerning the identity of his contemporary urban culture have implications for the philosophical reading of Kierkegaard. It is customary to argue for Kierkegaard’s place in the history of ideas in terms of his affiliation 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 influence upon the further development of that tradition (or, should we say, Tradition?) in Nietzsche, 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 bequeathed to him by these classical philosophical texts. No less



Kierkegaard, religion and culture

frequently he took his material from the ephemeral world of popular culture, the world reflected in the pages of the feuilleton literature. 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 authorship and the world of the feuilleton writers have, in the nature of the case, vanished into obscurity. A critical discussion of Hegel’s category of transition, conducted with the help of Aristotle and Trendelenburg, will intrinsically have a perennial quality that a debate about whether a one-act comedy sketch (not even included in standard editions of its author’s 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 narrow interests. Of what interest to the history of ideas are squabbles over an impresario’s hair-style? What is ephemeral vanishes with the passing of its day, and the day of the popular culture of the s 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 Kierkegaard’s critique of the Great Tradition is not merely internal. It is a critique 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 preference for the popular over the scholarly approach to philosophy.

Kierkegaard and the world of the feuilletons



Rather, it is rooted in a sense that the tradition itself has entered into a critical and potentially terminal phase in the situation of modernity, a situation of which the rise of popular culture, an essential and paradigmatic phenomenon of modern urbanity, is a powerfully expressive symptom. But – and it is a big but – Kierkegaard’s 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 first 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. Carstensen’s hair-style and Heiberg’s 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 differences between them. This is the situation that a renewed search for values and for religious orientation must accept as its startingpoint. The first 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 view in order to retrieve from the 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 Kierkegaard’s 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 counterweight to the insidious undermining of everything good, true and beautiful by the spirit of reflection 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 significant in that it is precisely her qualities of dependability and consistency over the years that are central to Kierkegaard’s admiration for her – in contrast to the utter absorption of the cultural innovators in the moment and in ‘what the age requires’: a slogan in which time itself in its most empty, ephemeral flux 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 s with the revolutionary period of the s 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 Gyllembourg’s novel itself. Whilst I do not wish to argue that this omission is fatal to our understanding of Kierkegaard’s own appraisal of the present age, the novel does help us to enlarge and to firm up our picture of just what it is 

The present age: the age of the city



Kierkegaard is reacting to, and how his critique of the age belongs 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 Kierkegaard’s mature authorship. But how do these connections emerge from Two Ages itself ? The novel opens in the summer of , when Charles Lusard is returning after many years to Copenhagen in order to find 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 first 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 Tivoli’s illuminated alleyways and gondolas that greeted him, put him in the gayest of moods and filled his heart with joyful expectation. (TT, p. )

Tivoli is thus introduced in the opening lines of the novel as epitomizing the changes that are transforming Copenhagen from a provincial, almost feudal ‘market-town’ into a modern, cosmopolitan 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 reflect 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, , p. . Further references are given to T T in the text.

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Kierkegaard, religion and culture

between the spirit of modernity and the phenomenon of the modern city itself. ‘Modernity’, I suggest, is not just a term we use to denote a certain period of history, a segment of the time-scale on which we locate ourselves. It also invokes a whole complex of ideas, cultural values and forms of social organization that constitute a social and cultural ‘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 them as 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 city’s ‘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  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



significance for our experience and understanding of contemporary modernity? We cannot hope to answer such global questions in the context of a literary review of a minor popular novel in which the only city that features is Copenhagen, one of modern Europe’s smaller capital cities, and, as Kierkegaard and many of his contemporaries 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 Kierkegaard’s lifetime and that are reflected both in Mme Gyllembourg’s novel and in Kierkegaard’s review reveal in miniature something of the larger picture. This generates a twofold possibility for enriching our interpretation of this text. Firstly, it means that the dynamics of modern urbanity provide a context in which to bring to the fore previously unremarked depths, resonances and allusions in Kierkegaard’s 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 Kierkegaard’s 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 s. 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 Gyllembourg’s 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 occasion for moral choice, Kierkegaard sees only the irresistible encroachment of moral sclerosis. A similar difference comes to view when we glance, as we shall very



Kierkegaard, religion and culture

briefly, at the role of the relationship between city and country in the novel and the disappearance of this theme in Kierkegaard’s 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 Kierkegaard’s sense of ‘the public’ is enriched by considering it as a characteristically urban phenomenon I shall look at how Kierkegaard’s 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 Kierkegaard’s authorship, Kierkegaard’s highly ambivalent relationship 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 modern public, he nevertheless 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 fils, on the other, since it is precisely this difference that best enables us to identify what is most characteristic of Kierkegaard’s singular intellectual and spiritual orientation. II

Bearing these remarks in mind, let us return to the summer of , and to Charles Lusard’s arrival in Copenhagen. It is by no means insignificant that the very first thing that strikes him as he arrives in the city is the sights and sounds of Tivoli. Tivoli’s first summer season had been held in the previous year, but because of construction delays it had not opened until the middle of August, and  was in fact the first full season. Since the population of

The present age: the age of the city



Copenhagen at that time was of the order of ,, the visitor numbers for Tivoli virtually speak for themselves in terms of their impact on the city’s social life. On the first Sunday of the season it welcomed , 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 first-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 from Vesterport to Frederiksberg Gardens also boasted a number of entertainment venues. The style and, to use anachronistic terminology, the corporate professionalism of Tivoli were, however, altogether different from anything previously known. An article in Tivoli-Avisen (Tivoli’s house paper) for  July  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, lacking in sophistication, style and tone. As a character in an  play by Henrik Hertz put it, ‘Here you only get gallery types, no nobili, no grands seigneurs.’ Tivoli, on the other hand, struck a thoroughly contemporary note, with its steam roundabout (one of the earliest commercial applications of steam technology in Denmark), its daguerreotype studio (again, one of the earliest in Denmark), its rollercoaster, pantomime theatre, moving wax figures, panorama, diorama, ‘dissolving views’ (a novelty from London that anticipated moving pictures), oriental buildings and bazaar, illuminations, fireworks and J. H. Lumbye’s music. Nor should we forget the restaurants, where, for perhaps the first 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,  July and  August . H. Hertz, Et Eventyr i Dyrehaven eller Cassanders opdagede Trædskhed, Maske-Comoedier i een Act, Copenhagen, Reitzel, , p. .



Kierkegaard, religion and culture

days as Tivoli-Vauxhall, were taken from London and Paris. Tivoli, then, introduced something of London and Paris to Copenhagen. The panorama on display in  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 underestimating its importance if we think of it merely in terms of providing Sunday afternoon entertainments for the Copenhageners of the s. 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 unyielding objectivities of geography, distance and spatial location dissolve into a shifting network of points of view. The image of the Parisian flˆaneur of a generation later and our own technology of virtual reality (not to mention Disneyworld) are possibilities already latent within the kind of development seen in early Tivoli. The physical location of Tivoli is also significant. In this period Copenhagen was still a walled city, the defensive function of its ramparts being still a factor in living memory after two separate assaults by Britain’s 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 hierarchical 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 seasons was leased from the army on a temporary basis. Perhaps there 

P. R. Jørgensen, Bonden i Tivoli, published by the author, Copenhagen, .

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 first time the area beyond the walls was being colonized in a sustained and directed 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 reflect the new urban order as to bring that order itself into existence. 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 negative view was represented by one J. Christensen’s privately printed Tivoli Scenes and Fairy-Tale or Tivoli as it is, and – drinks, makes noise, gets up to tomfoolery and produces devastation. Christensen’s Introduction (Forerindring) follows in the tone struck by his sub-title: That every Tivoli is ruinous for many of the town’s tradesmen . . . is a truth which, unfortunately, can also be experienced in Copenhagen, occasioning the publisher to have these simple pages put in print. Naturally he respects the integrity of the Copenhagen Tivoli’s chief entrepreneur, and he has nothing in particular against the many who have contributed to its establishment in the hope of profit; but it nevertheless is and will be always a question as to whether this manner of making a profit, i.e., by ruining one’s fellow citizens, can truly be called an act of good citizenship.

Christensen puts forward the case that as well as taking away business from others, Tivoli encouraged excessive drinking, imprudent 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’. In a passage that nicely emphasizes Tivoli’s 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, , p. . Ibid., p. .



Kierkegaard, religion and culture

[W]e are not without public places of entertainment where one can take pleasure in the creator’s works in the midst of the freedom and glories of nature and cheer one’s spirit much better than in the dusty, confined 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 highlighted by Christensen. After arriving in Copenhagen, Lusard makes himself known to his relative, Commercial Counsellor Christian Waller, who presides over a business and a family that have both seen better days. After being widowed, Waller has remarried, having one daughter, Mariane, by his first 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 daughter is a good little girl, who looks after the domestic side of things and also reads to her younger sisters when my wife doesn’t have time. (T T, 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’, although her husband seems to accept this situation with equanimity. We know also that she doesn’t attend to her own daughters’ education 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 him that 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



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 finds 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 reproaches 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.’ ‘You’ll have to get used to hearing it. I call her Maren. It’s 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 Waller’s own daughters are cheeky and impertinent. Nor is it long before we are initiated further into Mrs Waller’s 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 fine.’ ‘I’d completely forgotten.’ ‘But we poor things, we haven’t forgotten’, burst out little Ida. ‘We’ve 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



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, because 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. (T T, p. )

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. ). When Lusard is finally received properly, the conversation turns to the nature of modern society, and, once again, Tivoli is an unavoidable 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. –)

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



I cannot refuse to call it a good thing that those who have worked all day can find a place where, for a couple of hours, they can be enlivened 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 gentleman who had appeared in the first part of the novel and thus represents 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”. You’re quite right to put it like that. The person who wants to do that can generally find 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 finery – 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 one’s pleasure outside the home, feeds the prevailing passion for display, which is certainly laughable and demoralising.’ (TT, pp. –)

Dalund’s words here echo the critique of contemporary trends made some years previously by the author’s son, J. L. Heiberg, in an 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 from Copenhagen merely to ‘see and be seen’, something they could perfectly well do in the 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 modern public. In this respect, at least, Heiberg shares a common cause with Carstensen and with the Tivoli-Avisen’s campaign against the Deer Park: the issue between them concerns the kind of pleasures, the kind of refinement, that should be cultivated by the new urban populace as it distances itself from its coarse, provincial, rural past. Tivoli, then, had become for Kierkegaard’s contemporaries, such as the characters of Two Ages, the epitome of contemporary



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 latest 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 Kierkegaard’s view that she, more than anyone, is the moral representative 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 momentary mirror of reflection’ (TA, p. ), he reverses a quotation of Pliny and applies it to her – ‘everything for ostentation, nothing for conscience’s 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 children’s 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 Kierkegaard’s 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 engulfing 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

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

elder Lusard’s acquisition of a country estate that makes it possible 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 circumstances of the Waller household, to marry Ferdinand Bergland and go with Charles Lusard to the country as his heir. This removal is both a means of positing an ideological ‘other’ to the city and also, of course, an invocation of aristocratic values and possibilities. Both these factors colour the closing conversation ‘in the splendid garden of the beautiful manor house’ in which Charles Lusard, Mariane and her husband affirm an optimistic view of social progress. The absence of an aristocratic, rural perspective in Kierkegaard’s interpretation of Two Ages is reflected 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 Kierkegaard’s world-view more generally from that of ‘the men of ’, the optimistic Romantic writers such as F. C. Sibbern, P. M. Møller and Adam Oehlenschl¨ager, for whom nature provided a positive context for the reading of contemporary human possibilities. It may be objected that Kierkegaard’s 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 figures, 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 disappearance of this ‘other’ is one element in his refusal of what could be called the complacency of Mme Gyllembourg’s life-view. I shall offer 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



Kierkegaard, religion and culture

in the novel. The difference is not a difference of conceptualization but a matter of judgement. III

One of the phenomena of modernity that Tivoli brought into view in the Copenhagen of the s 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 Kierkegaard’s Literary Review, the public. The public, as Kierkegaard describes it in our text, is an abstraction, a ‘phantom’ (TA, p. ), 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 figured 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. –). In the collectivity of the public, participants have become spectators (TA, p. ). It is striking how far Kierkegaard’s account of the public resembles that of Heiberg, but whereas the Kierkegaardian text we are examining was to become one of the twentieth century’s seminal texts, Heiberg’s 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

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

National Amusements’ previously alluded to and in his vaudeville Christmas Fun and New Year Frolics (in which the public is personified 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  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 theatrical 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 speaking, 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.’ He goes on to speak of the people’s 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.

Heiberg describes the whole process as a form of ‘disorganization’, and elsewhere comments that it is authority itself that is the chief target of this ‘subjectivizing’ tendency. Heiberg’s 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 find 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 Life’s 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 figures, Seducers and Symparanekromenoi (a fictional  

J. L. Heiberg, ‘Folk og Publicum’, Intelligensblade ,  June , pp. –.  J. L. Heiberg,‘Theatret’, Intelligensblade ,  May , p. . Ibid., p. .



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 flˆaneur leads, the family follows. To return to our main thread. The public, as understood by both Heiberg and Kierkegaard, is a historically conditioned phenomenon and, as such, belongs to a specific 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 influence 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 phenomenon of urbanity? At its simplest, it is because the numerical increase in population and the correlative complexification of the urban mass provides the necessary social context for the rise of the public in this period. Heiberg’s 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. –.

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

that the people could be identified 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 e´ lite, the more problematic such representation 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 specifically involved . . . The public is a corps, outnumbering 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. )

These words recall Aristotle’s stipulation that one of the conditions of true democracy is the possibility of convening the people as a single gathering, where the common will of the body politic can be collectively affirmed 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 first outgrew the possibility of bringing all its citizens together in one place. In the condition of modern urbanity, however, the public comes to exist as the substitute (in Kierkegaard’s view the grossly inadequate and false substitute) for this lost immediacy of corporate presence. The point is, perhaps, 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 Kierkegaard’s view, by means of the press: press and public are, on his analysis, interdependent: ‘the abstraction “the press” (for a newspaper, a periodical, is not a political concretion and is an individual only in an abstract sense) gives rise to the abstraction’s phantom, “the public”’ (TA, p. ).



Kierkegaard, religion and culture

The relationship between public and press is also central to Heiberg’s concerns – and as we have seen, he launched a series of periodicals, from Copenhagen’s Flying Post to Perseus: A Journal for the Speculative Idea. These were conceived by Heiberg as playing a very specific 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 contempt by honourable persons’, although it becomes ever harder to distinguish between the justifiable 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 reformation remains. Thus Heiberg declares in the opening editorial of Intelligensblade that its publication is aimed at leading the public ‘back from the byways upon which it enters when it is left to its own devices’, and Heiberg’s whole project hinges upon the possibility 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. IV

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 , pp. –. J. L. Heiberg, Intelligensblade ,  March , p. .

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

with which he explores the processes whereby society has come to be as it is. Where Kierkegaard differs from Mme 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 consider 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 unrecognizable 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 defined and more disturbing than a simply sublime indeterminacy opposing 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 Kierkegaard’s 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 hagiography 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 fulfils 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 spirit’s 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



Kierkegaard, religion and culture

the public wants is an interesting spectacle, it will sooner or later be satisfied by nothing less than the spectacle of death and destruction. In seeing this as the outcome of the dynamics of urbanity, Kierkegaard is, of course, not only thinking of first-century Rome. Behind Rome stands Jerusalem, the city that did not know the hour of its visitation, and behind Jerusalem stands Babylon, the city of the captivity, and behind Babylon stands the first city, founded not coincidentally by Cain, the first murderer. Kierkegaard’s judgement on the present age as an aesthetic age that identifies 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 cultural identity reflected in the s debate over Tivoli, but it is not so. For this whole analysis is, of course, reinscribed into the contemporary reality of Copenhagen, so that Kierkegaard’s mistreatment 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 writer’s reputation as ‘a mere bagatelle’ and an entertaining distraction. It would seem, then, that neither Kierkegaard’s conceptualization 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 view on the grounds of its novelty. His originality is in the judgement itself, in which the typology of Christian theology is applied to the material of contemporary cultural analysis. Such an application inevitably raises familiar problems 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! ’.

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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 familiar across the whole range of cultural life and analysis. Driving many of these was a deep anxiety about cultural identity itself, expressed 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 Kierkegaard’s account of levelling, the public 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 Denmark’s 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 Heiberg’s programme of cultural reformation through to Carstensen’s inauguration of Tivoli as a thoroughly modern, stylish and urbane alternative to the traditional ‘country-fair’ entertainments on offer at the Deer Park. For those who felt the advent of ‘the new Age’ or the unsettling conditions of what Heiberg called an ‘age of transition’ as threatening, it was appealing to contrast the old sense of national, communitarian 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,  vols., Copenhagen, Gyldendal, –, gives  as the first 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 defined national homeland, but which, while preserving a sense of common identity amongst its members, was dispersed throughout Europe: the Jews. By this route, then, ‘cosmopolitan’ and ‘cosmopolitanism’ became key code words in the vocabulary of European anti-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 identified Judaism with the spirit of free-thinking enlightenment in his Golgotha and Scheblimini. Kierkegaard, as we have been seeing, occupied a characteristically ambivalent place with regard to ‘the Age’. On the one hand, he lived in the new world as one of its own, a flˆaneur-like figure who wrote for the feuilletons and, with his spectacles, cigars and umbrella, struck the pose of a man-about-town. On the other hand, his appreciation of the glitteringly ephemeral dazzle of contemporary 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 cruelty – 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 r´egime, for all its faults, had held in check. It is this conservative Kierkegaard who seems to speak in the opening pages of his first 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. ) as a refusal to accept the



seems first to have become common in the second quarter of the nineteenth century. The possibilities of a negative sense are epitomized in Carlyle’s () 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,  vols., Berlin, –, Vol. VII, pp. –.

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Kierkegaard, religion and culture

legacy of history, and to ‘forget the actual’ (EPW, p. ). He figures 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. ). 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 select abstract Cosmopolit-Gesichter [cosmopolitan faces]’ (EPW, p. ). Clearly Kierkegaard entirely excludes the issue of racial corruption through what used to be called miscegenation (even the ‘pure’ people can produce ‘cosmopolitan’ offspring), but his strongly negative way of invoking the motif of cosmopolitanism as emblematic 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 Kierkegaard’s intellectual development. In his early journals and papers, Kierkegaard spends considerable time researching what he calls the three great representative figures 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 various contexts in the published works, the Wandering Jew seems to have vanished from Kierkegaard’s field of interest. Why should that be? Or is he perhaps present after all, masked by the ‘cosmopolitan face’ of contemporary nihilism? At which point we might also recall that the figure 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 Kierkegaard’s published authorship and upon how, despite his proximity to what were to become dominant tropes

‘Cosmopolitan faces’

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of anti-Semitism, Kierkegaard made a very different use of the anti-Semite’s materials. This, in turn, both enlarges and clarifies our picture of the scope and thrust of Kierkegaard’s own critique of ‘the Age’. We begin by examining Kierkegaard’s 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 itself and its significance for Kierkegaard’s time. We shall then see how this complex of ideas relates both to Andersen’s novel and to Kierkegaard’s review of it, before drawing some general conclusions regarding Kierkegaard’s Zeitkritik. II

In the early journals the figure of the Wandering Jew occurs chiefly in association with the complementary figures of Don Juan and of Faust, a trio defined by Kierkegaard as ‘three great ideas’ ‘representing life in its three tendencies, as it were, outside of religion’ ( JP I: ). These are discussed chiefly 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: ; JP I: ). Of the three figures the Jew is dealt with least extensively. Although 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 reworkings. His own understanding of the Jew’s significance is well illustrated by some critical remarks made in one of the lengthiest entries   

See, for example, JP II: , , , , , ; JP IV: ; JP V: . For a fuller justification of this reading see my Kierkegaard: The Aesthetic and the Religious, pp. –. JP I: ; JP II: , ; JP V: , , , , , , , , , . Also, in the Danish edition, I C  ( a quotation from E. T. A. Hoffmann which describes the Jew as 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’).

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Kierkegaard, religion and culture

dealing with the subject, an entry relating to a late-eighteenthcentury 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 (ˆlazne©a), characteristic of an adventurer. ( JP V: )

The definition 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  and  respectively) we may establish a correlation between the figure of the Jew and the concept of despair in a form specific 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 Fædrelandet and in his  address to the Student Association. It is this political manifestation of modernity (‘the whole newer development’ (EPW, p. )) 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. n.). To summarize: the Wandering Jew symbolizes for Kierkegaard the despair of the present age, a despair rooted in its separation from the substantial ground of religion and manifesting itself in both political reform movements 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 defined 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 figure of Poul Martin Møller with a view to examining his significance both for Kierkegaard’s understanding of the Wandering Jew (as reflected in the early journals) and for the question of literature and the philosophy of the life-view as that is raised in the early journals and papers. Møller, Professor of Philosophy at Copenhagen University and a celebrated poet, was clearly a teacher to whom Kierkegaard had both intellectual and personal ties. Møller died in , but the extent of Kierkegaard’s sense of indebtedness shines through the dedication of The Concept of Anxiety to him, and in the references to Møller’s essay on immortality in Concluding Unscientific Postscript. Central to Møller’s philosophy was the concept of ‘the life-’ or ‘world-view’, a concept also central to Kierkegaard’s critique of Andersen. For Møller, as later for Kierkegaard, this concept performed a synthesizing role in bringing together a whole range of concerns: philosophical, moral, cultural and aesthetic. Although idealistically grounded, Møller’s thought was characterized by a degree of empiricism and a strong sense of the inviolable integrity of the personality that made him an early critic of Hegel in Denmark. For Møller, as for contemporaries like the evangelical poet B. S. Ingemann and, mutatis mutandis, Kierkegaard, the issue crystallized around the question of immortality. In Møller’s 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. 

For the relationship between Kierkegaard and Møller, see, for example, W. Glyn Jones, ‘S¨oren Kierkegaard and Poul Martin Møller’, Modern Language Review , , pp. –; Gregor Malantschuk, ‘Søren Kierkegaard og Poul M. Møller’, Kierkegaardiana , , pp. –; G. Pattison, ‘Nihilism and the Novel: Kierkegaard’s Literary Reviews’, in British Journal of Aesthetics, Vol. , No. , , pp. –; Pattison, Kierkegaard: The Aesthetic and the Religious, pp. –. See also the references in A. Hannay, Kierkegaard: A Biography, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, .



Kierkegaard, religion and culture

Purely on his own, as a single individual, no one would come to consciousness 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 nevertheless . . . always received a significant 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 firmly indicated in the following passage: The Christian tradition, empirical experience, as well as the higher experience in which the supersensuous encounters us in a real form at particular times and places give the discrete points which must have their place in a proper world-view, and the systematic, philosophic exposition only expresses with formal perfection that knowledge which is first present in an immediate way and in an inarticulate form.

The literary scholar Uffe Andreasen has shown that Møller was preoccupied with the phenomenon of nihilism over many years. He saw manifestations of nihilism in aspects of Romanticism and, philosophically, in Schopenhauer, 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 specifically removes one of the main buttresses of the world-view. Anticipating Kierkegaard’s critique of the Romantic appropriation of Fichtean irony, Møller wrote, ‘irony is a consequent development 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.’ 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 ] negation 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 Møller, ‘Om Udødeligheden’, in Efterladte Skrifter, rd edn,  vols., Copenhagen, Reitzel, , Vol. V, p. . Ibid., pp. –. See Uffe Andreasen, Poul Møller og Romantismen, Copenhagen, Gyldendal, . Møller, ‘Om Begrebet Ironie’, in Efterladte Skrifter, Vol. III, p. . ‘Om Udødeligheden’, p. .

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

This nihilism has, for Møller, 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 ringing 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. Møller 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, Møller provided the philosophical framework that Kierkegaard was to put to use in the Andersen review. Kierkegaard’s definition of the lifeview as ‘the transubstantiation of experience . . . an unshakeable certainty in oneself won from all experience’ (EPW, p. ) and his subsequent lambasting of Andersen for lack of such a starting-point echo the spirit of Møller’s personalistic philosophy. Yet there is far more to the Kierkegaard–Møller axis than that. It is not the case that Kierkegaard simply ‘lifted’ his interpretation of nihilism from Møller. It is more accurate to see both Kierkegaard and Møller recognizing the political, intellectual and cultural power of contemporary nihilism and spelling out the problems that the situation of nihilism raises for those whose instincts are more conservative and traditionalist. If Kierkegaard criticizes the disintegration of the elements of the life-view as that disintegration is manifested in Andersen’s novel, it is clear that this is not merely an individual failing on Andersen’s part. It is rather that Andersen represents one point at which the general destiny of the age becomes manifest. This destiny – we might say doom – lay upon the age as a whole. Kierkegaard’s 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 . Kierkegaard’s identification of the Wandering Jew as a symbolic representative of the despair of the present age also links him to Møller. Between  and  (a time when Kierkegaard was closely associated with the older philosopher), Møller too wrote a series of fragments, entitled Ahasverus, which took the Jew as a representative of moral nihilism. Frithiof Brandt suggested that these  

Møller, ‘Kunstneren mellem Oprørerne’, in Efterladte Skrifter, Vol. I, p. . Møller, ‘Recension af Extremerne’, in Efterladte Skrifter, Vol. VI, pp. –.



Kierkegaard, religion and culture

aphorisms constitute an intellectual portrait of Kierkegaard himself during his own ‘nihilistic’ phase, but whatever truth there may be in such a speculation, the intellectual proximity of these aphorisms 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 zeropoint on life’s 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 from smarminess through to self-satisfied 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 Medusa’s head I had showed them . . . ’ Ahasverus wills nothing. He regards himself as infinitely 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 from that 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 can see in it important anticipations of Kierkegaard’s depiction of contemporary nihilism: the drawing of cynical conclusions affecting both morals and knowledge from a relativistic philosophy, the problem of boredom as symptomatic of a rootless society, the displacement of natural immediacy by contrivance and deception. If Møller’s 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, , p. . Møller, ‘Ahasverus’, in Efterladte Skrifter, Vol. III, pp. –.

‘Cosmopolitan faces’



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 making this judgement, neither Møller 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. III

The legend of the Wandering Jew seems to have originated in the period of the crusades. 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 Priest’s servant whose ear was cut off by Peter), Cartaphilus and Jean Boutedieu, who, though a contemporary of the Christ, was believed 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 find hidden treasures; despite his appearance as a poor pilgrim he 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 significant development and popularization of the legend (as was also the case with Faust). Matthieu Paris’s account, translated into German in –, became the basis for the virtually definitive account published in  under the title Kurtze Beschreibung und Erzehlung von einem Juden mith Namen Ahasverus welcher bey der Creutzigung Christi selber Pers¨onlich gewesen auch das Crucifige u¨ ber Christum habe helfen schreyen (A Short Description and Narration of a Jew called Ahasverus who was Personally Present at the Crucifixion 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 

For the material in this section I am particularly indebted to Edgar Knecht, Le mythe du Juif errant: essai de mythologie litt´eraire et de sociologie religieuse, Grenoble, Presses Universitaires, . See also G. K. Anderson, The Legend of the Wandering Jew, Providence: Brown University Press, .



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 flavour (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 Christ’s crucifixion, 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 historicism 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 Girard’s 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 figure, 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 undergoes 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 critique 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 .

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

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 establish the poet’s credentials as a Romantic ‘hero’ and role model. The theme of longing for death is recurrent in Schubart’s work. It is often treated in the language and in the tone of pietistic devotion, but in ‘Der Ewige Jude’ it is powerfully dramatized in Ahasverus’ passionate complaint. 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 ‘Death’s sweet comfort, the comfort of the grave’s 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 flow at Golgotha;/ And He will forgive even you.’ (It is an indication of Schubart’s 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 figure of the Jew to explore the ‘anguished problem of human impotence in the face of destiny’ 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.  

In Gesammelte Schriften und Schicksale, Hildesheim and New York, Olms, , Vol. pp. ff. Knecht, Le mythe du Juif errant, pp. –.

IV,



Kierkegaard, religion and culture

In Britain, Schubart’s poem, in a ‘dirty and torn’ copy, was picked up by Shelley from a bookstall in Lincoln’s Inn Fields and inspired him to use Ahasverus as a prototypical Promethean figure in ‘Queen Mab’, giving the Jew the 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 Schubart’s poem, even Christ is implicated by Shelley in the terrible wrath of God’s ‘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 flames 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 o’er 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 Hell’s freedom to the servitude of heaven. 

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, , pp. –.

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

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. A Danish Ahasverus appeared from the hand of B. S. Ingemann, whose Leaves from the Pocket Book of Jerusalem’s Shoemaker appeared in  and was noted by Kierkegaard. Ingemann’s pious work, which consists of a sequence of short poems, has little of Shelley’s tone of rebellion. His Ahasverus is more an ‘Everyman’ who is confronted with the riddle of a temporal existence in a finite 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 Jacob’s 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 finds some comfort in the continuity and companionship of nature. In ‘My Mother’s House’ Ahasverus proclaims ‘Abandoned no longer, no more do I go alone:/ Here stirs a spirit which understands me./ I talk to the flower of the field, to wood and lake,/And a thousand voices answering bring comfort to my soul.’ Nor is he without final hope. The concluding poem, ‘Redemption’s Word’, looks to the day when Ahasverus, with all of Israel, shall hear God’s 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 Quinet’s poetic drama Ahasv´erus (), written in the form of a mystery play. Best remembered as a precursor of Flaubert’s The Temptation of Saint Anthony, it inaugurated in its own time a flood of ‘Wandering Jew’ literature, comprising plays and even an opera in France in the s and s. The genre included 

B. S. Ingemann, Blade af Jerusalems Skomagers Lommebog, Copenhagen, Andreas Seidelin, . See JP V: .



Kierkegaard, religion and culture

Eug`ene Sue’s enormously successful novel of  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. Constant’s Trois harmonies of ) the Jew champions the values of the common man and of the masses – ‘the people’ – a tendency that, ultimately, facilitated the appropriation of the Jew by those who saw the perceived triumph of such values as symptomatic of the levelling forces of cosmopolitanism. Quinet’s chef d’œuvre remains one of the supreme examples of this literature and is representative of the cultural profile 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 significance 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 Quinet’s 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. Quinet’s 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, ‘A long story by which even I am oppressed’. 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,  (German title: Ahasver, ). 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, Ahasv´erus in Oeuvres compl`etes,  vols., Paris, , Vol. VII, p. . Further references are to act and scene numbers.

‘Cosmopolitan faces’



chalice filled 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 infant to bear. Returning, the Kings find their former realms devalued and worthless. Day Two deals with the passion and depicts the decisive encounter 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 help in carrying the cross and Ahasverus refuses; Christ asks to sit down on the 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 figure 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 that’s all there is’, she says (Day : ). ‘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 [n´eant], dust, /And, finally, in every case, I am NOTHING ’ [le R I E N ] (: ). 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 Christ’s cup of sorrows will finally have been drained.



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 immense 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, following scenes of cataclysmic judgement that offer a recapitulation of world-history, there is a final reconciliation between Ahasverus and Christ. Christ: have you drunk all that remains of the world’s 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 don’t 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 confides to Christ, ‘the everlasting man’. Yet this is not the last word. The Epilogue finds 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 firmament. 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 fig-tree [shakes off ] its leaves.

Christ now doubts himself.

‘Cosmopolitan faces’

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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, from the dust of which a new heaven and a new Adam might be created. 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 final absolute, eternal but without quality, thought or feeling in the face of which even love and even the personal divinity of Christian theology come to an end. If Quinet’s 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 world’s various religions, empires, and philosophies, the problem of 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 firmly 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 significant for what we have seen of Kierkegaard’s exploration of the Jew, as also for his reading of Andersen’s novel. It is to this that we now turn.



Kierkegaard, religion and culture IV

If it is accepted that the figure of Ahasverus belongs somewhere in the young Kierkegaard’s intellectual background, there may still be some question as to how directly relevant he is to the specific case of ‘Andersen as novelist’, and more particularly, of Andersen as author of Only a Fiddler. Andersen himself appears in the review as a very different figure from the Jew. For if Ahasverus is identified in texts from Shelley to Quinet and Møller (not to mention Kierkegaard’s own early journals) as representing the dynamic forces of contemporary relativism and nihilism, Andersen is represented by Kierkegaard as a victim rather than as an agent of this tendency. To be sure, by producing literature devoid of a properly synthesized life-view, Andersen also participates in the further propagation of the age’s 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 specific justification for relating Ahasverus to this review in particular, other than in the light thrown by the theme on Kierkegaard’s general concerns at this point in his authorship? To answer this question we must pay closer attention than most commentators have done to Andersen’s novel itself. The novel opens in the little Fyn town of Svendborg, home to Christian, the novel’s ‘hero’ and the eponymous fiddler. Christian’s 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 reflections 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 Jew’s garden, where he meets Naomi. Everything about her and about the garden has an overwhelming effect on him. It is as if

‘Cosmopolitan faces’



a new and exotic world has opened up. ‘He stood in a land of dreams, losing himself in the sight.’ Naomi’s ‘gazelle-eyes’ evoke her ‘Asiatic race’. The flowers, the scents, the garden-house and the game invented by Naomi (money-lending!) transport Christian into a new ‘hesperidean world, which seemed far removed from his 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 grandfather’s house catches fire and is burnt to the ground. The old man himself dies and Christian’s parents take Naomi in. The old man’s remains are taken away by boat to be buried in a Jewish cemetery in Fredericia. In Christian’s imagination the journey is one to ‘a far, far-off land of fantasy, perhaps not far distant from Jerusalem, the Jews’ royal city’. Maria, Christian’s mother, comments, ‘The poor people. They don’t even find 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 first of many wanderings for her, wanderings which include Vienna, Italy and Paris (portrayed as the city of atheism par excellence (EPW, p. n)) and an escapade with a band of gypsy circus-riders. From the very beginning Naomi, the Jewess, stands for the exotic, for all that lies beyond the frontiers – intellectual, moral and geographical – of ‘little Denmark’. The novel ends with Christian’s humble funeral procession, comprising a handful of local peasantfolk, 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 know that 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 Kierkegaard’s review (EPW, p. n), 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 Litteraturselskab, , p. . Ibid., p. .

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Kierkegaard, religion and culture

identified with what Kierkegaard and Møller regarded as nihilism. The fact that Young Germany itself was shortly to be outstripped in political radicalism by the Vorm¨arz movement of the s would scarcely have surprised these Danish critics, who (as the opening pages of The Papers make clear) regarded them as only the vanguard, only harbingers, of worse to come. The relationship is very much like that between the older and the younger Verkhovensky in Dostoevsky’s 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’. Andersen’s novel, then, puts into play a sequence of clearly structured dualities between the safe world of homely Danish traditions and peasant life that define 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 significance of Christian’s failure to achieve a life-view is best appreciated. As we reflect 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 first seem. The philosophical and political polemics of the opening pages, the celebration of the philosophy of the lifeview as exemplified by Madame Gyllembourg and the critique of Andersen’s understanding of selfhood all reflect the situation of a society suddenly caught up into a process of rapid transition and modernization, a situation reflected equally in other early polemical 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 infinity, of experience and of history without goal, purpose or end. If, as has been suggested, Andersen is a reactive rather than an active figure 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’

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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 new world of ‘cosmopolitan faces’. As we have seen, Kierkegaard had from early on linked Jews with political and cultural reforming tendencies and with the consequent despair of the present age ( JP I: ). In , many years later, writing in the journals about the public – and we have seen something 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 Møller was well aware of without explaining it, however. The Jew generally lacks imagination and sensibility, 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: )

The reference back to Møller indicates that Kierkegaard is thinking of his and Møller’s interest in the figure of Ahasverus as a symbol 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 reflected in any of Kierkegaard’s 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 difficult question raised for the contemporary interpretation of Kierkegaard by his readiness to make these kinds of connections. For, as we have noted, the figure 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 Jew was indeed the title of the most notorious of all Nazi propaganda films, whilst ‘cosmopolitanism’ became a key term in Soviet anti-Jewish ideology. It is at the very least

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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 horrific of all the twentieth century’s horrific crimes against humanity. When, in his influential biography Kierkegaard, Walter Lowrie remarks that ‘In [Kierkegaard’s] day the Jews (men without political attachments) were prominent as instigators of liberal reform in Denmark, as they were also in other lands, and as they are today [!]’, 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 Kierkegaard’s 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 s and s 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: Kierkegaard’s 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 articulating a condition that belongs to the inner destiny of all who inhabit the condition of modernity. Indeed, Kierkegaard’s critique of Andersen implies that it is precisely by depicting the Jew (Naomi) as the other and projecting onto this other the responsibility for Christian’s 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. In the last resort, corruption cannot come from  

Lowrie, Kierkegaard, p. . 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 him to fulfil 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 mother’s 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.

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without, but only from within. 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. 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 acceptance of this fate – a recognition that each of us is, in a sense, Ahasverus (understood in the spirit of Kierkegaard’s own later formulation that the single most efficacious because most radical remedy for despair is: despair) – may even be a necessary first step in the rebirth of religious faith beyond the wasteland. 

For a fuller discussion of the question of anti-Semitism in relation to Kierkegaard’s portrayal of the Wandering Jew, see H˚akon Harket, ‘Kierkegaards evige jøde’, in J. Garff, H. Harket, P. E. Tøjner and E. Tjønneland, Innøvelse i Kierkegaard: fire Essays, Oslo, Cappelen, . Harket also concludes that the charge of anti-Semitism is misplaced. Strangely, the first issue of Kierkegaardiana included an article addressing the question as to whether Kierkegaard was anti-Jewish, specifically in connection with a rather bizarre and possibly apocryphal biographical anecdote. See K. Bruun Andersen, ‘Kierkegaard og jøderne’, Kierkegaardiana I, , pp. –.

CHAPTER



Food for thought

I

After From the Papers of One Still Living Kierkegaard’s next published work was his magister’s dissertation of , On the Concept of Irony. Despite being advertised, along with Philipsen’s 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 dissertation’s centrepiece, Kierkgaard certainly goes a long way towards playing the academic game, citing and debating the contrasting interpretations of such leading contemporary scholarly figures 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 substantive juxtapositions of apparently heterogeneous material, that we have encountered as characteristic of Kierkegaard’s feuilletonistic style show themselves in the thesis to a surprising degree. It was still unusual – Kierkegaard’s was only the third case – for a thesis to be presented in Danish rather than Latin, and Kierkegaard was obliged to petition the King in order to get permission for this. Strikingly 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, Kierkegaard’s style was sufficiently 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. ). P. O. Brøndsted, 

Food for thought

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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 demands of this nature. Certainly the text as it stands often shows a remarkable freedom of analogy, metaphor, comment and application. 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 Master’s commission to go forth and crack the whip over the nihilistic swarm of political subversives, emancipators of the flesh 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 necessarily self-ironizing character of any and every attempt to master irony escaped the notice of all Kierkegaard’s own contemporaries? When Kierkegaard subsequently referred to himself – with an allusion 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 on the bavardage of a feuilleton writer. Addressing the Hegelian claim that philosophy is now able 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-knight’s spurs or the raising of his masculine ‘master’s 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. Kierkegaard’s 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.

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Kierkegaard, religion and culture

(CI, p. ). The concept (i.e., ‘grasping’ or ‘mastery’), he insists, is not to be imposed on the phenomenon from without but must accompany the phenomenon’s own coming to appearance: to elicit its true form the 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 from the phenomenon 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 Møller, Kierkegaard takes such exponents 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 narrow 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 emphasis 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 lesson 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-fire succession of programmatic assertions that beg just about all the difficult 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 irony’s ‘eternal

Food for thought

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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 finitude, humour relates to sin, and does so, moreover, on the grounds of a ‘deeper positivity’ that has to do with its ‘theanthropological’ presuppositions, i.e., its concern with humanity’s destiny of future transformation into ‘the God-man’. The style continues to be tersely programmatic and, in any case, as Kierkegaard finally confesses, ‘all this lies beyond the scope of this study’. However, he also adds one final recommendation: that if anyone should want food for further thought – ‘Stof til Eftertanke’ – he would recommend him to read Professor Martensen’s review of Heiberg’s new poems (CI, p. ). If this remark was sufficiently 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 presentday Danish readers, the reference is almost entirely opaque. Kierkegaard’s 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 Kierkegaard’s topic. From this point of view alone it is worth while reconstructing the background of the reference. Given the centrality 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 Kierkegaard’s relation 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 should not lose sight of Kierkegaard’s own intimation to 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 Kierkegaard’s simultaneously magnifying and diminishing binoculars, and to see how these three words – ‘food for thought’ – can reveal something of the larger critical strategy underlying the dissertation as a whole.

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Kierkegaard, religion and culture II

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 apostle of Hegelianism in Denmark, being the author of a Hegelianinfluenced course in logic as well as of a number of popularizing treatises aimed at promoting the new philosophy. Heiberg applied the principles of Hegelianism to his own practice as a literary critic, developing a complex hierarchy of genres involving the subordination of the ‘merely’ immediate Romantic school to the more reflective, 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? Wasn’t Heiberg in danger of doing just what Hegel had criticized the early Romantic ‘acolytes of Sa¨ıs’ 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 infinite 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 knowing philosophically what art is.’ This limitation of art in relation to philosophy – and, indeed, within the larger compass of Hegel’s system in relation also to religion – does not register to anything like the same degree in Heiberg’s writings. As a man of the theatre, Heiberg was not about subordinating art to philosophy, but subordinating 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, , p. .

Food for thought

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development speculative’. In keeping with this principle, Heiberg himself attempted to create genuinely speculative poetic works, an ambition reflected 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 theologian, Hans Lassen Martensen. In  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 Kierkegaard’s own intense preoccupation with the three representative figures, including Faust, and his journal entry noting the appearance of Martensen’s article bears an unmistakable tone of irritation at having been pre-empted in the field 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 trying 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 Goethe’s 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 find in Kierkegaard’s 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, , p. . This should not be understood as simple naivety on Heiberg’s 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 Heiberg’s 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 reflect, but also to instruct and to elevate the public in the understanding of life that most truthfully reflected 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 first time in ) after Heiberg’s death.



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 good Christians slaying evil heathens) in the Reformation, so that the Faust-idea could only find 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 in the 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’. Poetically, Faust belongs within a type of speculative poetry that Martensen categorizes as ‘apocalyptic’, of which, after the Book of Revelation and Dante’s Commedia it is the third great example. These works are all linked by a historically determined level of everincreasing inwardness. Thus, the Book of Revelation ‘poetically’ (sic!) portrays Christianity’s triumph over Judaism and Paganism, whereas Dante’s 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 content; 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.

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 , p. .  Ibid., p. .  Ibid., p. . Ibid., p. .



Food for thought

from faith to doubt, and through doubt – which has become the principle of thinking – is brought to despair’. The moment of doubt, then, is crucial. ‘Doubt’, says Martensen, ‘is thus the medium through which the believing intellect must pass in order to give foundation to its freedom’ ; 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 specific ‘counter-image’ to Luther. Faust resists the first 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 intellectuality free from gross externality and materialism, but unable 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 first be able to be produced when the impetus to this higher union of religion and art emerges more clearly in the consciousness 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 art’s universality.

Six months later, in January , on the occasion of the King’s birthday – a fact entirely relevant to Heiberg’s belief in the necessarily public office of art and in the artist’s duty to give expression to 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 Martensen’s challenge to the poet of Protestantism? 

Ibid., p. .



Ibid., p. .



Ibid., p. .



Ibid., pp. –.



Kierkegaard, religion and culture

The story concerns a prince, Clotaldo, brought up as a humble fisherman’s son, who falls in love with Margarita, daughter of Dionision, Duke of Palermo, in whose lands the fisher-folk’s 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 flesh, nor blood, neither marrow, nor bone, but is the light thought of the heavy world, dark actuality’s 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 deepest wish. Clotaldo sees a vision of Margarita. But whereas Fata Morgana’s plan was for this vision to bind him yet faster to his fantasy world, the plan backfires 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 illusion’s 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 fisherman’s son. By way of a diversion, Heiberg introduces two burlesque characters, 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, .

Food for thought



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: With pleasure! Let ideality kiss reality. Now we are the absolute. Pierrot: One moment, Signor Harlequin! Do not let your fantasy overshoot your understanding! The absolute can never be realized by finite, 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 figure, despite the fact that you are black and I am white. (III, )

But, for Hegelianism and for Heiberg, there is such a position, philosophy’s ‘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’ poet’s 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 figures 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 Morgana’s palace in the clouds (where Margarita is imprisoned) by Troche, Iamb and Molossos, the personified spirits of poetic technique (the ironic command of poetic form necessarily



Kierkegaard, religion and culture

supplementing his Romantic inspiration), he finally 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 actuality, where love conquers all. It is easy to see that many of the crucial themes of The Concept of Irony are adumbrated in Heiberg’s play, especially the role of formal mastery in relation to the conflict 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, saw it 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 consciousness 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 transfiguration of actuality into ideality, precisely because it always stands one degree higher than the consciousness of actuality, 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 conflicting 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 , , p. . Ibid., p. .



Food for thought

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 poetry’s highest task. Only speculative poetry can be the poetry in which we would be able to find a total and not merely a partial satisfaction, because it is not only a mirror which reflects the diverse ideal strivings and expressions of the human race, as all poetry is, but it also reflects 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 infinity of bright points in the soul, which form themselves into one harmonious transparent image and transfigure the darkness of life.

Speculative poetry of this kind is not merely allegorical but symbolic, 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.’ 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.’ III

Heiberg did not attempt to repeat the venture of a speculative comedy on stage, but in  he published a collection of poetical works entitled New Poems, comprising ‘Divine Service: A Springtime Fantasy’, ‘A Soul 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 final 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 

Ibid., pp. –.



Ibid., p. .



Ibid., p. .



Ibid., p. .



Kierkegaard, religion and culture

comedy’ and, in these terms, was very much the focus of discussion in Martensen’s 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 heaven’s 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 he’d prefer America and, anyway, he can’t 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 conflict’. 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, God’s abode. 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 

J. L. Heiberg, Nye Digte, Copenhagen, Gyldendal, , pp. –.

Food for thought



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 reflection 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 don’t 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 definition of hell, then in terms of what actually goes on there. Can one go about one’s business in the stock exchange, go to one’s 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 one’s 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 Heiberg’s judgement, reflected and reinforced the low standard of Danish public life. In fact, these have an additional advantage over their equivalents on earth: the aim of such ephemeral publications being to get the news out as quickly as possible, hell’s 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, there’s that too – but purely for entertainment, only ‘dancers and horses’ and a ‘flea circus’. The nearest there is to serious drama is H. C. Andersen’s The Mulatto and the Moorish Maid – an inclusion that demonstrates Heiberg’s damning verdict on the artistic merit of Andersen’s 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 first critics of Hegelianism in Denmark) and 

Ibid., p. .



Ibid., p. .



Kierkegaard, religion and culture

the journalist Claud Rosenhoff, who, as we have seen, was also to be the butt of Kierkegaard’s 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. Don’t ask about such things, he advises; it’s 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 flabby phlegmatic earthly existence which puts all its trust in reality and doesn’t 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 ‘Protestantism in Nature’ also raise issues that will prove relevant to the future philosophical confrontation between Kierkegaard and Heiberg, a confrontation largely confined to Kierkegaard’s journals and his angry response to Heiberg’s critical comments about Repetition (). There, Heiberg was to say, Kierkegaard had confused repetition as a phenomenon of the natural world (as in the cycle of seasonal change) with the movement properly characteristic of freedom. Kierkegaard – correctly – saw this comment as a complete failure to attend to what was in the text, since Repetition is precisely about the way in which freedom cannot 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 spiritual 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 transcendent view of freedom. The Spirit that is ‘in’ nature, Heiberg asserts, will only reveal itself to one who finds its law in the world of thought: ‘Turn your gaze within!/ What was subject to transience in your world,/ you will find [again] in thought./ In that inner world everything that has passed away/ Will find life and existence.’ It is thought – not, as Kierkegaard would argue, a divine ‘thunderstorm’ – that will liberate temporal existence from its subjection to time’s sheer transience. These, however, were to be issues for another day. Let us remain, for now, in . Martensen was favourably impressed by New Poems. In the review to 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 guidance 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.’ 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 finding 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 Kierkegaard’s response to Heiberg’s remarks about Repetition see FT/R, pp. –. This and following references are to H. L. Martensen, ‘Nye Digte af J. L. Heiberg’, in The Fatherland,  January . 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 won’t find 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 phenomena of their temporal consciousness which, in all the detail of its empirical reality, in all its infirmity and transience, they will have with them in heaven, because it must serve them as poetic material . . . 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 affirm 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 speculative comedy, which relates itself to irony as profundity is related to sharp-mindedness. The ‘humorous’ which belongs exclusively to Christianity 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 from this the extent to which Kierkegaard’s concerns in The Concept of Irony are extraordinarily topical, embracing issues in literature and aesthetics that were being discussed in journalistic literature in the year that saw the dissertation itself presented and defended () and that marked the high point of Heiberg’s ambition to create a new paradigm of cultural Protestantism. The project of speculative comedy that culminated in the New Poems and Martensen’s review broached issues of essence and phenomenon, truth and appearance, Romanticism and speculation, art and philosophy, irony and humour that also run through Kierkegaard’s dissertation and that are therefore appropriately concentrated in its closing section and, indeed, in its closing line. At the same time, Heiberg’s project was not set up simply in philosophical or theoretical terms, but as an extension of his long-term ambition 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. Kierkegaard’s allusion to New Poems suggests that from the beginning and even in his most ‘academic’ work he too

Food for thought



shared Heiberg’s 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 first glance, and just as Heiberg’s apocalyptic comedy itself would have contained much that would appeal to Kierkegaard’s own satirical view of his contemporaries, Martensen’s comments on Christianity and humour might look as if they had come from Kierkegaard’s 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 – 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 positive 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 carried through to its maximum oscillations’ ( JP II: ), 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: ). 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: ) or like Robinson Crusoe – even when in the midst of life ( JP II: ). The humorist’s laughter is a ‘son of pain’, his smile like the dead man’s grin ‘which is explained as the muscle twitch of rigor mortis, the eternally humorous smile over human wretchedness’ ( JP II: ). The Christian humorist is like a plant whose roots alone are visible on earth, but whose flower unfolds for a higher, invisible sun ( JP II: ). Insofar as it is poetic at all it is ‘profound poetry’, beyond form, ‘and therefore crystallizes in baroque forms’ ( JP II: ). The humorous nature of Christianity is testified 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: ). 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 figure 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: ). None of these or any of the other entries relating to humour in the 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 Kierkegaard’s eyes, J. G. Hamann, whose idiosyncratic, exaggerated and polemical style and tendency were an affront to Hegelian ideals of lucidity in thought and exposition. If, then, precisely at the point where Kierkegaard seems closest 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 final position arrived at in the dissertation? The question seems especially 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 individual’s life’ (CI, pp. –). But is aesthetic irony really transferable in that way? Unfortunately these closing pages are fearfully condensed 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 Martensen’s and Heiberg’s concept of speculative comedy, is ironically punctured. Strikingly, the journals say of humour itself (with specific reference, once more, to Hamann) that it ‘is not an aesthetic concept but life, not a hero in a controlled drama’ ( JP II: ), and this is precisely the problem. The issue is not whether Kierkegaard is or isn’t sincere in commending Heiberg’s 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 possible 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: ), 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. Kierkegaard’s 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 one’s self and accepting, instead, one’s utter dependence on God’s creating 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 exposition of the way of religious suffering. And that, of course, is a task for life. The consequences of this ironic refusal of Heiberg’s programme of aesthetic morality, it will emerge, include not only the theoretical rejection of Hegelianism, but also the final damning verdict on Danish cultural Protestantism that Kierkegaard will make in his ‘Attack upon “Christendom” ’.

CHAPTER



A literary scandal

I

In  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 Chatterley’s Lover was to a more recent age: the quintessential embodiment of an obscene book. The author’s 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 important topic in the relationship between Romantic literature and religion because of the response it provoked from two of the leading religious thinkers of the nineteenth century, Friedrich Schleiermacher and Søren Kierkegaard, and, once again, Kierkegaard’s interest in this shows something of the extraordinary internal heterogeneity of his work, its simultaneous projection along a spectrum 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 programmatic assertion of the unconventional life-style of that circle 

Quoted in Ludwig Marcuse, Obscene: The History of an Indignation, London, McGibbon and Kee, , p. .



A literary scandal



of Fr¨uhromantik writers and thinkers of which Schlegel was a leading figure. A key element of this life-style was a relaxed attitude to conventional 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 figures 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 provoked that it forced its readers to think about the sort of thing that was actually going on in the private lives of some of Germany’s 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 difficult to summarize, not least because it deliberately eschews the narrative form that is popularly associated with the novel. There are some narrative sections which enable us, more or less, to reconstruct the history of Julius (Schlegel’s 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 reflection, 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, , p. . An English translation of Lucinde is available: Friedrich Schlegel’s Lucinde and the Fragments, ed. P. Firchow, Minneapolis,University of Minnesota Press, . This includes fragments from the Romantic journal the Athenaeum, including some by Schleiermacher. Firchow’s introductory essay is also excellent.



Kierkegaard, religion and culture

What, then, is this ideal reality? It is, prosaically stated, the idea that human fulfilment is achieved through the passionate love of man and woman. This is Schlegel’s 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 find 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 embody 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, infinite Being with the forms of this transitory, finite 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 book’s first readers, hard as it is for us to see why. The first 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 ardour of the man or I in acquiring the attractive submissiveness of the woman’. What Schlegel is concerned with is not the exigencies of love-making in the narrow sense but rather the significance 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 significant 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

I can no longer say ‘my love’ or ‘your love’; both are the same and completely 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, infinite 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 flowers of the one plant, or petals of one flower, and with smiles we shall then know that what we now call hope was essentially recollection.

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, organization, work and goal-directed activity. Instead of these Schlegel praises sensuousness, anarchy and idleness. This inversion of values 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 finds unspeakable 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 often 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 without shame, which most shocked Lucinde’s readers. 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 

Lucinde, pp. –.



Ibid., p. .



Obscene, p. .



Kierkegaard, religion and culture

that this sensual element is as innocent and as harmless as a child’s frolics. It has already been suggested that, at one level, this was Schlegel’s answer to Kant’s dilemma regarding the polarities of human personhood. This was not, of course, merely a philosophical dilemma in a narrow, technical sense. It was, ultimately, a moral and a religious question arising out of the critical self-consciousness of the Enlightenment. Schlegel’s ‘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.’

In such expressions Schlegel is making plain his intention of exalting 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 flesh. It is a new age, a new religion he wishes to proclaim – ‘The time has come, the inner Being of the Godhead can be revealed and represented, all mysteries can be disclosed and fear shall end.’ The way to the primal garden is once again open and the way is simply the freedom of sensuous innocence and delight. II

One of the few people to come to Schlegel’s defence was, at first 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  and the level of their intimacy can be gauged from a comment Schleiermacher made in a letter to his sister: ‘Our friends amuse themselves by describing our life together as a marriage, and they all agree that I must be the wife, and the jokes 

Lucinde, pp. –.



Ibid., p. .

A literary scandal



and more serious comments made about this are quite sufficient.’ Schlegel encouraged his theologian friend to develop the more literary 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 commandments, specially compiled for emancipated women. The seventh of these new commandments read ‘Thou shalt not contract a marriage 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 sympathizing with the theme of Lucinde. Like his friend, although probably without his friend’s 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 ), resolved to submit to her situation and remain with her husband. Schleiermacher’s 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, Confidential Letters on Friedrich Schlegel’s Lucinde. This takes the form of a series of fictional 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 significance 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, , p. . I am indebted to this book for other biographical data about Schleiermacher. Ibid., p. . Friedrich Schleiermacher, Vertraute Briefe u¨ ber Friedrich Schlegels Lucinde, in S¨amtliche Werke, Vol. III/i, Berlin, , 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 from which it can look over life to the Infinite; 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.

In Lucinde Schleiermacher finds corroboration for a point he himself makes in the Speeches on Religion (also published in ), 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 first 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 first time, living and spiritual tones stirred within him; now, for the first time, the world rose before his eyes. In the flesh 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 transgression 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 first, through love, find humanity. ‘Each person embraces most ardently the one in whom the world is reflected 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.’ Heterosexual love is thus seen not merely as the satisfaction of a biological drive and still less in terms of fulfilling a social obligation but as a way of achieving wholeness. Yet, as opposed to Schlegel, such love is not itself the final step for Schleiermacher. It is the presupposition, not the fulfilment, of religion. We can pursue this subtle but unmistakable difference further by looking at what, at first sight, seems to be a purely literary   

Wilhelm Dilthey (ed.), Schleiermachers Leben in Briefen, Vol. IV, Berlin, , p. . F. D. E. Schleiermacher, On Religion: Speeches to its Cultured Despisers, translated by R. Crouter, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, , p. . Ibid., p. .

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 form of 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 men’s 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.’ The synthesis to which Schleiermacher refers is the synthesis of the central idea being expressed in the work of art and the particular 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 particular 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 unified 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 Schleiermacher’s 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 unqualified. 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 figures are emphasized in such a way and in so great a measure that behind them and around them 

Dilthey, p. .



Vertraute Briefe, p. .



Kierkegaard, religion and culture

you see nothing else, and, when you come to reflect on this, you find nothing lacking.

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.

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 connection, between the ideal vision of the novel and the way in which this vision is externally expressed. Friedrich’s response to Ernestine is not entirely unambiguous. He argues that the absence of ‘real life’ in the novel is justified 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 comparison with Schlegel’s 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 demoted 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 

Ibid., p. .



Ibid., p. .



Ibid., p. .



Ibid., p. .

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 organize 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 prefigure a new and better world as a concrete, real possibility, even its illusory ideal is able to show up 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 find themselves defending 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.’   



Hans Dierkes, Friedrich Schlegels Lucinde, Schleiermacher und Kierkegaard in Deutsche Vierteljahrsschrift f¨ur Literaturewissenschaft und Geistesgeschichte, Vol. , No. , , pp. f. Vertraute Briefe, pp. ff. 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. Vertraute Briefe, p. .



Kierkegaard, religion and culture

By extending the definition of modesty in this way Schleiermacher 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 immodest, 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 infinitely sensitive that at the slightest disturbance from without passionate impulses stir within them, and who believe themselves to be the more modest the more they find 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.

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 raw sensuality that lies behind its ‘modest’ fa¸cade. Such prudery is essentially no different from unbridled 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 somewhat lively representation will immediately be transformed by the imagination 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 transition 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. .



Ibid., p. .

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.

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 final fulfilment 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 fulfilment and so learn in what direction it lies. III

Forty years later another theological voice took up the Lucinde theme, the voice of Søren 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 powers at the service of the Establishment. Although writing a whole generation later, Kierkegaard did not see the Lucinde affair as being of merely historical interest. After Schleiermacher’s death in  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 Kierkegaard’s hostile reaction to them, and the sort of reputation they had in society at large may be judged from the fact that in , the year he published the Letters, Gutzkow was 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 authorship, engaged in a critical confrontation with just this tendency. 

Ibid., p. .



Kierkegaard, religion and culture

He described Lucinde as ‘the gospel of Young Germany and the system for its Rehabilitation des Fleisches [rehabilitation of the flesh]’ (CI, p. ). Before proceeding to Kierkegaard’s own critical response to the Lucinde debate, then, it will be worth getting a flavour of Gutzkow’s advocacy of Schleiermacher’s review to see just what Kierkegaard was engaging with. Gutzkow begins by reflecting on how this publication, his own tribute to the deceased Schleiermacher, relates to the other offerings being placed on the great man’s 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’. These were the most unhappy at Schleiermacher’s death, because this man alone amongst the clergy and theologians offered them some kind of positive vision of heavenly things. All contemporary theologians (including the ‘Jericho-storming Strauss’) are, in comparison, ‘square, trivial, bourgeois and unrefined’. The maidens are followed by a succession 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 Schleiermacher’s academic colleagues, who will not wish their complacency to be disturbed by the memory of the master’s 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, God’s 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 know that 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 holyseeming eyelids, throw away your clerical robes and collars, this priestly coquettishness, forget the proofs for the divinity of a man still crucified  

Karl Gutzkow, Preface to Schleiermachers Vertraute Briefe u¨ ber die Lucinde, Hamburg, , p. v.  Ibid., p. ix. Ibid., p. 



A literary scandal

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 affirm humanity. The Romantic period’s 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 dayto-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 realization of the ideal. And if 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 Schlegel’s book challenged (as when he invited speculation on the interchangeability of gender roles). Finally, then, Gutzkow’s 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 illfated engagement to Regine Olsen, a young woman with whom he 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 Kierkegaard’s tale of unhappy love and the whole of his early authorship, in which traces of the broken engagement can be found everywhere. The question of 

Ibid., pp. xii–xiii.



Ibid., p. xxxv.



Ibid., p. xxxvii.



Kierkegaard, religion and culture

Lucinde as to the significance of sexuality for human fulfilment was therefore central to Kierkegaard’s thinking at this time. This makes the question of the precise scope of the influence and presence 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 sufficiently grounded and worked through. Poetry, he argues, is a kind of reconciliation 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 reconciles me with the given actuality by giving me another actuality’ (CI, p. ), or it is ‘an emigration from actuality’ (CI, p. ). The other actuality into which the poetic takes us is nothing other than the fictional reality of the work of art. Kierkegaard thus extends and carries through to a fundamental level Schleiermacher’s hinted reservations about Lucinde. This leads him, ultimately, to a quite different 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 infinite clarity, is absolutely transparent to himself . . . not in finite and egotistical self-satisfaction, but in one’s absolute and eternal validity’ (CI, p. ). In religion life comes to be based on an infinitization of reality that is given rather than on the merely horizontal infinity of the ego’s 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. –)

Because Schlegel does not base himself on such an experience 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 Kierkegaard’s opinion, this means that it is not poetic either. Kierkegaard also questions the ingenuousness that Schlegel claims when he identifies 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 undermine 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 flesh’ (CI, p. ). Schlegel’s 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. –). Schlegel’s claim to be the ingenuous ‘well-beloved son’ of Wit is therefore dismissed by Kierkegaard as a mystification: Schlegel is not a naive sensualist such as Don Juan; he is ‘a personality who is trapped in reflection’ (CI, p. ), a split personality who, even in the midst of his enjoyment, looks at life from a cold, ironic distance. If the image presented by the figure 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 Schleiermacher’s Letters. For what Kierkegaard wrote of the Letters can be applied quite well to Either/Or (as it can to several of his other pseudonymous works), with the proviso that the views which it expressed are reversed in Kierkegaard’s writings. He says of the Letters that: It is probably a model review and also an example of how such 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 final judgement. Thus it is a true masterpiece. ( JP IV: )



Kierkegaard, religion and culture

Kierkegaard’s reinterpretation of the gospel according to Julius is perhaps most vividly expressed in a section of Either/Or entitled ‘The Seducer’s Diary’. Johannes, the Seducer, is an eerie, phantom-like figure who embodies the spirit of cold, cynical reflection. His ‘pleasure’ 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, reflection. In common with the rest of phenomenal nature woman is being-for-another, that is to say she only finds fulfilment through her relation to another (man). As such a being-for-another woman is essentially virginal (we are told), and her being finds 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 do not understand’ (EO I, p. ). Among these ‘consequences’ are marriage and children. As another of Kierkegaard’s pseudonyms puts it: ‘If the girl’s name is Juliane, then her life is as follows: “Formerly empress in love’s far-reaching realm of exorbitant speech, and titular queen of all the exaggerations of tomfoolery – now Mrs Petersen at the corner of Bathhouse Street”’ (SLW, pp. – 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 fictional Assessor William, whom we meet in Volume II of Either/Or. The Assessor is both a married man and a Christian and a prolific writer of letters. In the first of his two extremely lengthy letters, ‘The Aesthetic Validity of Marriage’, he gives us a thorough-going critique of the Seducer’s (and so, in Kierkegaard’s eyes, of Schlegel’s) 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 submission to revealed religion (i.e., by going through the marriage ceremony of the Church). The ontological complementarity of the sexes is not enough to ensure that their comingtogether is ultimate fulfilment 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. ). The fact that humanity is unable, by its own efforts, to find 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. )

It is ‘more aesthetic’ because it is able to give a real form to the ideal, rather than retreating into the false reconciliation of poetic fantasy, which, in Kierkegaard’s eyes, leads to a diminution of concern for external reality.



Kierkegaard, religion and culture

The second of the Assessor’s 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 commitment 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. Kierkegaard’s 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 finitude. He reaches the conclusion that the sort of happiness and fulfilment one might hope to find 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, and which ties us ever more strongly to the animal life of ‘this’ world. Woman is strongly identified 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 personified. This is the ultimate, tragic conclusion of Kierkegaard’s attempt to provide a metaphysical justification 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 find 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 Kierkegaard’s pessimism as a reflection 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 significance, 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 Kierkegaard’s critique of the Romantic cult of the feminine as being an inverted and mystificatory form of male dominance is, despite his own dislike for the movement for the emancipation of women, not far removed from what some modern feminists would wish to say. Kierkegaard was intuitively aware of the phenomenon of projection which psychology has since described more fully and identified as a key mechanism in erotic relationships. It was this awareness which enabled him to ‘see through’ some of the extravaganzas produced by the Romantics. He implicitly makes use of this concept in The Seducer’s Diary, where we are shown how the Seducer uses others simply as foils to his own psychic development, himself projecting onto them the significance they are to have for him. This mechanism 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 barrier 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 functions as a blank screen onto which we project our own fantasies. What we ‘love’ in such a case is nothing more than an externalized reflection 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. Kierkegaard’s 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 justification for precisely this kind of utilitarian relationship. From the man’s point of view woman becomes an object of voyeuristic pleasure; from the woman’s 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 Kierkegaard’s (and, for that matter, of Schleiermacher’s) profound engagement with 

On the question as to if and, if so, how Kierkegaard’s thought might relate to feminism, see, for example, C. L´eon and S. Walsh (eds.), Feminist Interpretations of Søren Kierkegaard, University Park, PA, Pennsylvania University Press, .



Kierkegaard, religion and culture

contemporary culture. Although this has not been emphasized here, it is notable that both Schleiermacher and Kierkegaard established milestones in the literary reception of 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 experience 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 Kierkegaard’s critical judgement of the times in which he lived and, more specifically, of the cultural life of his contemporary 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 particular reference to Either/Or, his third book, but the first of what he was himself to refer to as his ‘authorship’, the sequence of pseudonymous works and their accompanying religious discourses that ran from Either/Or itself through to Concluding Unscientific Postscript. Either/Or was made available to the Danish reading public on  February  by C. A. Reitzel, University bookseller and publisher in Copenhagen, at a cost of four dollars, four marks and eight shillings per copy. Within two years the entire edition of five hundred and twenty-five copies had been sold, making it (by the standards of the day) a literary success. A second edition followed in , and since then it has been translated into a wide variety of languages, riding on and spreading the fame of its now acknowledged author, Søren Kierkegaard. In the beginning, of course, it had appeared under the name of its pseudonymous editor, Victor Eremita, and although there were some of Kierkegaard’s contemporaries who had a good idea of the identity of the ‘real’ author, those first readers were not influenced (for better or for worse) by their preconceptions as to the significance of Kierkegaard’s life and work. This does not, of course, mean that they were without 

On the significance of sales figures see Uffe Andreasen, Romantismen, Copenhagen, Gyldendal, , p. .





Kierkegaard, religion and culture

preconceptions: simply that, inevitably, they were not the preconceptions of all subsequent readers. An examination of the notices and reviews responding to Either/Or at the time of its publication and of Kierkegaard’s 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 Kierkegaard’s own attitude to his contemporaries and on his standing among them, and, in particular, it opens up further dimensions of his characteristically ambivalent relation to the world of the contemporary feuilleton. After  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 configuration. As will become clear, the relationship was never unproblematic, but the tone of these earlier quarrels was noticeably 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 misfortune 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 Kierkegaard’s authorship as a whole. This last point gains in significance for us today insofar as it relates to the vexed issue regarding the religious intentions of that authorship. Kierkegaard himself was, famously, to claim in The Point of View that 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, Joakim Garff. I do not claim that the study of the contemporary reception of Either/Or puts an end to such debates: I do, however, argue that it supports Kierkegaard’s 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 Søvnløse’: Kierkegaard læst æstetisk/biografisk, Copenhagen, Reitzel, .

The reception of ‘Either/Or’



There is, of course, a widely held view that Kierkegaard’s writings 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 accept 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 misunderstood his underlying intent’. With regard to Either/Or itself Vincent McCarthy has written that ‘as contemporary reviews and Kierkegaard’s own annoyance indicate, the effect of Either/Or upon the Danish readers of  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 Seducer’s 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 first reviews, a different picture starts to emerge. For there, alongside those reviews and notices that were indeed superficial and uncomprehending, there were others that devoted considerable time and care to the text, honouring it with substantial, intelligent and relevant comment. Of course, these reviews did not deliver the final word on Either/Or, but it is simply unfair to describe their authors as ‘overwhelmed’, ‘bewildered’ or ‘distracted’ by the book’s superficial novelty. Let us, however, begin with the less perceptive reviews and Kierkegaard’s reaction to them. First in the field 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, , p. . To be fair to Gardiner he seems to acknowledge that this was ‘at least’ Kierkegaard’s view of things. Vincent McCarthy, The Phenomenology of Moods in Kierkegaard, The Hague, Nijhoff, , p. . All references are to Dagen, Vol. , No. ,  February .



Kierkegaard, religion and culture

journalist ponders the implications of the financial cost of producing 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 find 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 attention to the splendid sermon with which the work ends.’ The final 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 sufficient time to read, let alone form a considered opinion of Either/Or, must be a moot point, and there is nothing demonstrating 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 respects . . . 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 testifies to a well-read writer who also knows how to use what he has read.’ 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 Seducer’s Diary recounting Johannes’ adventures with the servant-girls, in addition to a selection of aphorisms from Diapsalmata expressive of post-Romantic despair. With regard to The Seducer’s 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 confiscate the work and burn the unknown [author] in effigy; 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 

All references are to Den Frisindede, Vol. , No. ,  February .



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 , in an article entitled ‘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’. 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 sacrifice will be worth it?” ’ Heiberg does not immediately dispel the doubts of such a hesitant reader but explores them further. ‘One becomes impatient at the way in which the author’s exceptional brilliance, learning and stylistic accomplishments are not united with an organizing capacity that would enable the ideas to leap out in plastic form. It all seems dreamy, indeterminate and evanescent.’ As we saw in a previous chapter, Heiberg rejects altogether the interpretation of Scribe’s 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 sickened, 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 find 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 Kierkegaard’s own later championing of ‘the individual’ or ‘the  

 Ibid. J. L. Heiberg, ‘Litterær Vintersæd’, p. .  Intelligensblade , p. . See Chapter  above.

 

Ibid., p. . Ibid.  Ibid., p. .

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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 volume from first 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 influence of a rare and highly gifted spirit, which brings forth before their eyes the most beautiful ethical 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 book’s title. For by the time it has been read to the end, it is clear that there is actually no ‘either–or’: rather, the position adopted by the second half, the ‘or’, is ‘absolute’. ‘Here’, says Heiberg, ‘there can be no question of an either–or, 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’. 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 author’s 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. –. Ibid., p. . This remark is especially significant 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. ). As for Rosenhoff ’s conclusion that no one will take any harm from the book and that he will defer his final 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 find 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. ). He is moreover incensed that the review was entitled ‘An Episode from the Seducer’s Diary’, thereby giving a totally distorted view of 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. ). As for Heiberg’s review, it threw Kierkegaard 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 chiefly at what Kierkegaard (quite accurately) perceives as Heiberg’s 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. ). 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 safety’s sake he has acquired a new co-worker: “one”, an energetic co-worker who demands no fee and accepts any treatment’ (EO II, p. ). By doing this Heiberg has reduced his perspective to that of the lowest common denominator. Some of these bitter reflections found their way into print in an article published in The Fatherland on  March  by Victor Eremita. The article is entitled ‘A “Thank You” to Herr Professor Heiberg’, but the ‘thanks’ are, inevitably, loaded with sarcasm, especially when the Professor is ‘thanked’ for helping him find out ‘how “one” treats Either/Or’ (COR, p. ). Indeed, the draft of the article in the journal had been headed ‘How Does “One” Treat Either/Or?’ (EO II, p. ). Despite the positive nature of Heiberg’s conclusion, ‘Victor Eremita’ takes his critic to task for giving so

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Kierkegaard, religion and culture

much space to the point of view of ‘one’. ‘That a “one” so numerous 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 Heiberg’s lack of appreciation of Either/Or (as Kierkegaard saw it) marked a deterioration in the relationship between the two men that, exacerbated by Heiberg’s 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 Kierkegaard’s reaction is not entirely justified, 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 finding out. Kierkegaard was, however, to acquire readers who were prepared to do more than merely take a stroll through the text. On  March  the newspaper The Outpost (Forposten) began a fourpart review, entitled ‘Fragments of a Correspondence’, which constituted an extended discussion of Either/Or in epistolary form. 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 finds 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 Kierkegaard’s authorship, a theme which was already present in  

See Chapter  above. The review is to be found in Forposten,  March,  March,  April and  April . 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 final attack on State Protestantism. It is the theme of an empty, nihilistic society that has lost itself in reflection, is incapable of decisive action and is deaf to the requirements of authentic faith. It is, moreover, a theme that contributes significantly to Kierkegaard’s critique of ‘the aesthetic’ as representing the typical mode of consciousness of ‘the present age’ of contemporary European humanity. The Outpost’s reviewer frankly admits that (unlike Heiberg) he particularly enjoys the expression of the aesthetic life-view in the first half of the book, in which he finds 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 book’s 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. ). He defends ‘A’ against Heiberg on the question of The First Love: Heiberg is right as far as Scribe’s 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 significance of the definite article in The Seducer’s 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 reflection 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 Assessor’s ethical life-view presupposes a view of the State that is not made explicit in the text itself which could have been made

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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 reflection in the abstract sphere of philosophy, such ‘solutions’ are limited in scope. In the beginning of his review he 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 edifice 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 reflection 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. ). It is this same conflict between nihilistic reflection and faith that is highlighted in a three-part review by 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 age’s most gifted children?’ 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’ and in writers such as Karl Gutzkow, whose novel Wally – Die Verzweiflerin (Wally: Woman of Despair) dealt with themes of suicide and despair, or Theodor Mundt and his apotheosis of Casanova. 

Fædrelandet,  May , p. . The review continued in the issues for  May and  May . Further references are given in the text as F, followed by page number. Hagen’s question rather nicely – and aptly – anticipates Allen Ginsberg’s 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. ). This conflict, which we see mirrored in Either/Or, is nothing less than the ancient conflict between faith and scepticism: ‘It concerns nothing less than life itself: “To be or not to be” ’ (F, p. ). Again, we may say that the reviewer has caught something of the pulse of Kierkegaard’s 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 Kierkegaard’s own critique of the present age. On the literary front, as we saw in the last chapter, it was precisely Gutzkow’s re-edition of Schleiermacher’s Confidential Letters on Schlegel’s Lucinde which made Lucinde itself of such relevance to Kierkegaard. Moreover, Hagen’s perception that the work concerns the conflict between faith and scepticism indicates that he has identified an element in Either/Or that would be expanded in Kierkegaard’s 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-superfluous left-over from an earlier time, to which one can attach oneself if one wants to, which one can let alone if one does not’. Without the support of objective authority the individual is left to choose for himself between two opposing lifeviews: ‘the aesthetic and the ethical – that of egotism and that of 

All references are to Fyenske Tidsskrift For Literatur og Kritik, Vol. , No. , . Further references are given as FLK in the text, with page number.

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Kierkegaard, religion and culture

humanity, that of self-love and that of love for humanity’ (FLK, p. ). It is, of course, this very conflict which he finds 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 view might 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. ). Much as he admires the ‘Either’, and recognizing 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. ). 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. ). The argument of the Assessor against the aesthetic point of view is well thought out, he adds, since the mere statement that an ethical attitude is morally better would not go far with an aesthetically minded reader. The Assessor’s 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. –).

The reception of ‘Either/Or’



Koefoed-Hansen’s aspersions on the failure of the Church did not go unnoticed. Bishop Mynster himself, writing under the pseudonym Kts, took up the gauntlet in Heiberg’s Intelligensblade on  January . He objects to the reviewer’s belief that only a reformulated Christianity will be able to appeal to the educated classes and accuses him of trivializing the issues. He cites an array of Christian preachers who have combined faith with the highest intellectual standards: Chrysostom, Luther, F´en´elon, Schleiermacher and Marheineke (though this last would not have cut much ice with the radical left – Gutzkow had singled Marheineke out as typical of the dead hand of contemporary theology in his sarcastic comments about the mourners at Schleiermacher’s tomb ). Indeed, Mynster asserts, many of Copenhagen’s churches are full to overflowing, and many of those attending them belong to the educated classes. It is therefore wrong, he suggests, to concede intellectual superiority to the aesthetic point of view. Such ironic aesthetes, he claims, are merely ‘the half-educated, the one-sidedly educated, the miseducated’, and he adds that the preacher must address his words to those who are actually there, in church, and not to such misfits. Mynster is also suspicious of what he sees as Koefoed-Hansen’s implication that there is one gospel for the intellectual e´ lite 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 published work Fear and Trembling, which, he says, has nothing in common with the self-flattery of the moral ‘genius’. He also alludes to the dedication of Søren Kierkegaard’s 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 intemperance and vanity. The author denied that the churches were overflowing on Sundays and, more seriously, suggested that Kts  

See Chapter  above. Kts ( J. P. Mynster), ‘Kirkelig polemik’, Intelligensblade –, p. .

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Kierkegaard, religion and culture

had completely failed to come to terms with the significance of such writers as Heine, Feuerbach and Bruno Bauer. The Fatherland stepped in to give the last word to KoefoedHansen, who stated that he did not himself subscribe to the modern atheistic philosophy, but that it was not sufficient simply to dismiss it in the way that Kts had done. The Protestant Church, he said, was too closely identified with worldly authority and its message was therefore too easily confused with the maintenance of such authority. 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 significance 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 Kierkegaard’s own reaction to these more serious reviewers? He was at least willing to grant them the 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 book’s unknown authors’ (EO II, p. ). 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 him for the courtesy and service shown’ (EO II, pp. -). 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. ). What is this movement? It is, it seems, a movement towards the more radical religious dimension that cannot accommodate itself to  

Anon., ‘Plump Usandhed’, Københavnsposten,  January . K.-H., ‘Replik til Kts’, Fædrelandet,  January .

The reception of ‘Either/Or’



the world in the manner of the Judge. Such a form of religious existence perhaps cannot be encompassed within the scope of a literary work such as Either/Or, lying outside the perimeter, beyond the noman’s-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, reflective, 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-Hansen’s review, further underlined the point at issue in Either/Or itself: what is it to have faith in an age of reflection? How do these contemporary responses to Either/Or help our reading of Kierkegaard? They must, in the first place, weaken the self-propagated image 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 conflict between aesthetic and ethical world-views. This crisis was already on the public agenda when Either/Or was published (after all, Schleiermacher’s Speeches had been published more than forty years previously), and Kierkegaard’s (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 philosophical quality, and even if it struck some contemporary readers (‘one’!) like ‘lightning from a clear sky’ (Heiberg), Either/Or’s 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 significance in this context, anticipating the final polemics of Kierkegaard’s own ‘Attack upon “Christendom” ’. What the reviews and the Kts controversy show is that this debate is already latent in Either/Or itself. This would certainly count against 

See my Kierkegaard: The Aesthetic and the Religious, pp. –.

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Kierkegaard, religion and culture

the view that the ‘Attack’ is radically discontinuous with the rest of Kierkegaard’s 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 responses lend support to Kierkegaard’s own claims in The Point of View regarding the essential unity of his authorship and its fundamental 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 Kierkegaard’s contemporaries’ complete inability to see it, taking 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 Kierkegaard’s audience 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 demand gaining the attention of those who, in the beginning, cannot understand what it is about. When Kierkegaard himself had an article published in The Fatherland under the title ‘Who is the Author of Either/Or?, (COR, pp. –), 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 superficiality 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’, Kierkegaard’s 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 reflection. The three reviewers did, therefore, correctly identify the arena in which, for Kierkegaard, the trial of faith was to be held. This historical specificity is important, not least because our reception of Kierkegaard today will be influenced by the extent to which we believe that the nihilism of what many now see as a post-metaphysical

The reception of ‘Either/Or’



and post-modern intellectual climate is in key respects anticipated by the nihilism of the s. If, as Habermas for one argues, we remain contemporaries of the Young Hegelians, if we are still living within the same cultural, intellectual and spiritual paradigm as that which saw the birth of Kierkegaard’s 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 significance 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. 

Quoted in T. McCarthy, Introduction to J. Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity: Twelve Lectures, Cambridge, Polity Press, , p. vii.

CHAPTER



New Year’s Day

I

Kierkegaard’s edifying or upbuilding writings are often treated as if they belonged to a world apart from the poetically and philosophically genial works of the pseudonymous authorship. They might seem especially remote from the kind of aesthetic and cultural debates that have been reflected 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 important points of thematic contact. It is precisely such points of contact that enable Kierkegaard, through the discourses, to develop 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 Kierkegaard’s age. In their espousal of the values of modernity, the radicals of Kierkegaard’s generation – no less than the promoters of fashionable 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 culture 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 complacent, ‘mummified’ 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 Year’s Day

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modernisms and postmodernisms down to the present, it is equally true that ‘the New’ was already in the s nothing new. This was no sudden vogue, but reflected 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 Goethe’s 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 human hearing of the previously unheard.’ Bloch finds it telling that even the old Goethe could say ‘There is no past which we ought to long to have back, there is only an eternally New which 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 hero’s 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 ossified dogmas and moral codes of society will be swept away by a stream of recreating fire, most immediately and urgently present in the demands and utopias of liberated sexuality. As Julius later declares: The fire 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 them of the ashes of prejudice, and where the flames already burn more brightly, to nourish them with chaste sacrifices . . . It is the oldest, most child-like and simplest religion to which I have returned, for I honour fire as the supreme image of the Godhead, and where is there a more beautiful fire than that which nature has enclosed in the soft bosom of woman?  

Ernst Bloch, The Principle of Hope,  vols., Oxford, Blackwell, , Vol. III, pp. –.  Schlegel, Lucinde, pp. –.  Friedrich Schlegel’s Lucinde, p. . Ibid., pp. –.

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In his Phenomenology of Spirit Hegel too had embraced the spirit of the New: it is not difficult 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 flash, illuminates the features of a new world.

In Sturm und Drang and in Romanticism, however, Hegel sees only the initial form of this new world, as immature as ‘a new-born child’, only the immediate form of what must now be 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., scientific knowledge. Goethe, Early Romanticism and the Phenomenology were all features of Kierkegaard’s 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. Øhlenschlæger hailed the battle of Copenhagen in  as a call to national awakening, and, in , N. F. S. Grundtvig’s poem New Year’s Morning demonstrated how the motif of the New could be taken as the unifying 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 identifies 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’ and of how he reckoned ‘the great,  

G. W. F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, Oxford, Oxford University Press, , pp. –. N. F. S. Grundtvig, Nyaars-Morgen: Et Rim, in Udvalgte Skrifter, Copenhagen, Gyldendal, , Vol. IV, p. .

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reborn hope for the North that sprang up in my heart as the most joyful thing I have experienced on earth’. The very aim of 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’. The pattern of rebirth from spiritual 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 significance. In the poem itself the image of the sea provides a figure of unredeemed 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 Odin’s eight-legged steed Sleipnir (signifying the spirit of poetry) to Valhalla, a place of song and rejoicing: a manner of speaking that reflects how Grundtvig envisages Nordic mythology as ‘a north star pointing to the sun of Christianity’ and poetry as anticipating the true eternity of God’s Word that brings spiritual life. This Word must be freed from book and letter so that it may be fulfilled 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 Father’s realm!’ 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 idealism that it seemed to offer an answer to this question, a way that retained the Enlightenment’s acceptance of Newtonian physics, but also held  

 Ibid., p. . Ibid. Ibid., p.  (verse ). 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 figures the Word as a feminine element (the poet’s mother-tongue) in opposition to the masculinity of heroic action.

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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 supervene upon it and to move it on up to a new and higher level. Crucial in this transformation is the emergence of Spirit or freedom, an emergence that is often described as interdependent with consciousness of the eternal. In J. L. Heiberg’s early work On Human Freedom, he describes this emergence in terms of ‘the Moment’ (Øieblikket). That it is indeed the moment in which, as we have seen, all the contradictions 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 will’s or freedom’s 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.

For H. L. Martensen, writing in Heiberg’s journal Urania in , the emergence of freedom in, through and going beyond time is embodied in the Church’s year, of which he writes that whilst the astronomical year ‘regards the universe in terms of its subordination to the laws of nature and necessity, the Church regards it from the view point of freedom and personality’. However, this is not to be understood dualistically (as, Martensen believed, Kant and Fichte only arrived at a dualistic understanding of freedom), but as the  

J. L. Heiberg, Om den Menneskelige Frihed, Kiel, , p. . H. Martensen, ‘Kirke-Aaret’, in Urania: Aarbog for , Copenhagen, , p. .

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‘innermost kernel of Nature’. In this way the providential ordering of time serves the fulfilment of God’s purposes: ‘The powers of nature and of history must all serve to establish the eternal realm of the personal.’ Heiberg’s discussion – once more – anticipates what will be a key topic in Kierkegaard’s authorship and here, in particular, Kierkegaard’s and his contemporaries’ meditations on the theme of New Year. For the question is whether it is possible for the breakthrough from nature to freedom to acquire concrete and continuing form in the world: whether in the fire of passion, in the rule of Spirit, or in personal and national rededication to Christian worship. II

We have already seen from several angles how From the Papers of One Still Living and Two Ages, two works that ‘frame’ the first pseudonymous authorship, both take issue with the cult of the New. Furthermore, this is in each case precisely the burden of Kierkegaard’s 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 first of the series of religious discourses published under Kierkegaard’s own name that accompanied the pseudonymous works. That ‘New Year’s Day’ provides Kierkegaard with the theme for the first of all the many discourses he was subsequently to publish is by no means accidental or arbitrary. If this is most obviously true in the case of the first discourse, I believe that the theme runs, albeit unevenly, through the whole of the first 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 specific response to a very specific cultural situation. If the pseudonymous works call into question not only the social and erotic utopianism of the Early Romantics and Young Germany but also the cynicism subsequent on the failure of successive revolutionary movements, Kierkegaard’s religious discourses offer a way 

Ibid., p. .



Ibid.

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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, individual 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, finds that which is more-than-temporal: the eternal that gives meaning and value to our being-in-time. Yet Kierkegaard’s 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 Kierkegaard’s ‘novelty’ that a comparison between the first 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 Kierkegaard’s 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 from the products of contemporary 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 isn’t 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 first two discourses with particular reference to the way in which they can be understood as addressed to ‘her’ (i.e., to Kierkegaard’s former fianc´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 Grundtvig’s New Year’s Morning, where the poet conflates his own awakening with that of the nation). Instead, the 

See G. Pattison, ‘A Dialogical Approach to Kierkegaard’s Upbuilding Discourses’, Journal for the History of Modern Theology , , pp. –. See also Chapter  below.

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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 specifically in relation to this question that the task of edification and the expectation of faith, incorporating as these do the question of human being-in-time, are proposed. It is out of the ‘the bewildered man’s’ concern for what he can justifiably 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, first becomes an issue for us on the basis of our concern with and for the human other. In this regard Kierkegaard’s 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 first 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 anthropological 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 crucified one). To sum up: despite being ‘without authority’ and lacking overt Christological content, the discourses, contextualized by the

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Kierkegaard, religion and culture

question of responsibility for the other, are positioned by the first 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. III

I shall now proceed to summarize New Year sermons by Schleiermacher, Mynster and Martensen. I do not claim that Kierkegaard actually read any of these (though it is likely, especially with regard to the first two) before or after writing his own New Year 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 Schleiermacher’s  sermon ‘On the Similarity of the Future to the Past’. Schleiermacher starts by acknowledging that thinking about the future is in a sense unjustifiable, and can easily lead to discouragement, robbing us of the present moment. A pious person, however, does not allow himself to speculate in that way: ‘no feverish activity of the imagination alters the pulse of his temper, no ebb or flow 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’. Schleiermacher – who, as we have seen, was himself a participant in the spirit of the new era – takes as his text Ecclesiastes .– 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, , pp. –. Ibid., p. .

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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 flash of an eye, insights and impressions flow 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 infinite world so arranged as now, never did the light of the sun find our earth so adorned and beautified 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 influence in any human soul, as now stirs within each of you: everywhere infinite multiplicity proclaims itself to be without insignificant 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 reflect that it proceeds from the same reason, will, heart, understanding, imagination, 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 appearances, between great and small. Death snatches away the highest of men, but, conversely, even the one who occupies the lowest place is not insignificant. 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.’ Or a new discovery is announced, but the sudden flame 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. .



Ibid., p. .

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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 else’s lot, for that would be to overlook the divine Spirit that is active in small and seemingly insignificant 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.’ These reflections 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 something better to become of us, then we shall only be disappointed. To recognize that ‘the greatest of God’s 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’. 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’ flow together into a world-view in which inwardness, piety and a sense for the unity of all things condition one another at every point. Also characteristic is the way in which Schleiermacher commends conforming ourselves to the 

Ibid., p. .



Ibid., Predigten, p. .

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world-order rather than invoking any transcendent or otherworldly resolution of this world’s conflicts and apparent contradictions 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. Mynster’s New Year sermon of  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 first 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 kingdom has been established which shall never be overthrown, it signifies 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 confident of this than of the sun returning each morning, or of the spring following on winter – because all of these are part of a finite order that will come to an end, whereas God’s promises concern a new heaven and a new earth that follow upon the end of this finite 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 confidence, to bring our desires before Him.  

J. P. Mynster, ‘Froprædiken paa Nytaarsdag ’, in Prædikener, Vol. II, nd edition, Copenhagen, , p. . Ibid., pp. –.

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Kierkegaard, religion and culture

As he continues, Mynster argues that the contemplation of 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 God’s 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 office, 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 God’s will’ should be our first and last goal in the coming year. 

Ibid., p. .



Ibid., p. .



Ibid., p. .

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In a later collection, Sermons for Every Sunday and Feast-Day in the Year, there are two sermons that relate to our theme. The first of these was for the Sunday between Christmas Day and New Year’s Day ‘On the Passage of Time’. 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’. Mynster’s 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 definite 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, reflection 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 satisfied 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  

J. P. Mynster, ‘Om Tidens Gang’, in Prædikener paa alle Søn- og Hellig-Dage i Aaret, Vol. I, th edition, Copenhagen, , pp. –. Ibid., p. .

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disappeared, to have sunk into nothingness, nevertheless still is, it stands forth in your consciousness, whether in accusation or defence.

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.

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 benefit 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 fulfilment, and therefore we cannot complain about the passage of time, for ‘man’s existence is, or ought to and can be, an eternal progress’. ‘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 fill 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 Mynster’s heart a feeling of expansiveness and warmth, of confidence and peace in facing whatever the year will bring: the conviction that whatever happens will happen according to the will of the one who sent His Son to save the world, and has given victory and honour to His Name, raising it above every other name. In this confidence 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 

Ibid., p. .



Ibid.



Ibid., p. .



Ibid., p. .

New Year’s Day



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 office or low, whether his sphere of action extends widely in society or is limited to the domestic world’. The themes that emerge from Mynster’s sermons are those of the constancy in the midst of change that comes from the soul’s immediate but inward participation in or connectedness to the eternal, the inward equality of all, irrespective of social or personal circumstances, the assuring testimony to the soul’s eternity revealed in the incarnation and focussed in Jesus’ Name (a motif connected with the coincidence of New Year’s Day and the feast of the Circumcision), the need for participation in the life of the community in order to appropriate that assurance and, on that basis, the possibility of both personal and common progress, a progress that reflects God’s providential guiding of the world and the individual. Mynster’s vision relates back to that of Schleiermacher at several points, especially with regard to the immediacy of the soul’s apprehension 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 Kierkegaard’s New Year’s Day discourse than is Mynster. Martensen’s collection of Sermons for every Sunday and Feast-Day of the Year contains two sermons specifically for New Year’s Day. The first is entitled ‘Faith in Providence in Jesus’ Name’. Martensen begins by commenting that although New Year’s Day is not a Christian festival, 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. . H. Martensen, ‘Forsynstroen i Jesu Navn’ in Prædikener paa alle Søn- og Helligdage i Aaret, Copenhagen, , pp. –.



Kierkegaard, religion and culture

thoughts for quiet contemplation, we dwell in memories 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 God’s house there is one holy memory, the memory of God’s 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 individual’s 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 final Why and the final Wherefore of your life’s circumstances.

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 God’s 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’ scriptural 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. . Words that, interestingly, stand at the centre of Luther’s 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. Martensen, Prædikener, p. .



New Year’s Day

testimony that heaven and earth will pass away before His kingdom and His justice will undergo alteration. Martensen’s text for the sermon is Luke .–, 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 in wisdom and in grace. Wisdom is ‘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 field, we grow through conflict and strife, as we strive ‘to preserve and to defend the inner life, the hidden immortal self [Udødelighedsmennesket] 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 confident 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!’ And, he asks rhetorically, ‘Is not the apostolic word hereby confirmed, namely, that if the outward man is consumed away, the inner man is daily renewed?’ Then we know the meaning of Eckhart’s 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 person’s life seems to have been buried in time’s 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.’ Jesus Christ is the same, yesterday, today and for ever: in Him is 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 kingdom shall more and more triumph in us over the old kingdom of sin and worldliness’. 

Ibid., p. .



Ibid., p. .



Ibid., pp. –.



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. Martensen’s addresses are strongly Christocentric, more so than Mynster’s (and it is striking that he addresses his congregation specifically 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 humanity’s 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 significantly permeated by the rhetoric of novelty. IV

What light, then, do these varied treatments by Kierkegaard’s contemporaries of the New Year theme mean for our understanding of his first 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 figure time as a stream or turbulent ocean, an image of ceaseless, ungraspable change lending itself to the sublime metaphorics of storm and stress, of fluidity and flux and converging with a traditional depiction of the passions as tumultuous and insubordinate. Such figuration already dictates the moral and spiritual task to which the sermons and discourses address themselves, namely, finding that which abides in the midst of change, a still point, tranquillity – a quest imaged in the stilling of the turbulent waves of time, passion and the mania of revolutionary novelty, in order that the transfiguring light of God may be the more purely reflected in the transparent depths of the heart. Typically they seek this in inwardness, in the inward relation of the self to the eternal, a relation rooted in conscience, and, in the case of Mynster and Martensen, invoking, whether as ground or as guarantee, the incarnation of Christ. Memory, conscience and faith establish the continuum along which

New Year’s Day



the soul finds its peace. More generally, confidence in God’s providential 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 somehow 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 God’s kingdom, this is qualified 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 external 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 in the face of radical demands for a transformation of 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 Kierkegaard’s 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 finding, establishing and maintaining a coherent and consistent unity for the self through a relation to the eternal, 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 God’s providential guidance of the individual in and through time, i.e., it is not a matter of selfconstruction but of choosing one’s self from the hand of God. Selfhood must be willed, but it can only be willed in response to God’s 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 specific 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 Kierkegaard’s discourses, it is noticeable that several of the discourses do invoke themes or figures that relate to the Christmas cycle, such as John the Baptist (Advent) and Anna (the Presentation; cf. Martensen’s reference to Simeon). The themes of time and of God’s 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 reflected in several of Kierkegaard’s discourses. However – and with one eye on Kierkegaard’s critique of Mynster and Martensen for robbing Christianity of its transcendent authority – the outcome of this incarnational contextualization does not seem to 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 Kierkegaard’s ‘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 individual’s being-in-time in relation to a prior question: that of the individual’s relation to the human other. This, I suggest, relates dialogically both to the crystallizing of Kierkegaard’s thought in the engagement crisis and, refracted through the fiction of preacher and congregation, to his appeal to us as readers. Whereas Mynster speaks of his generalizations needing to be applied individually by his listeners, Kierkegaard speaks of his individual crisis being broadened and generalized by providence to speak to others. Kierkegaard, in

New Year’s 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 specific crisis of meaning in his own singular existence. As the discourse makes clear, however, no individual’s 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 congregation, 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 Kierkegaard’s very starting-point and the very form of his presentation undercut the ecclesiastical and doctrinal 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 relatedness to a no less singular other, that the question of the meaning of time arises. Just as Heidegger was to define his question not as the question of Being, but as the question of the meaning of Being, so too Kierkegaard’s 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 God’s providential ordering of the world, but the question of the meaning of time. The question of meaning, however, becomes urgent precisely in relation to my responsibility to and for the other. It is, in a fundamental sense, a moral question. Kierkegaard’s question is not: how can I, finding my existence to be dispersed and dissipated in the stream of time, find 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,



Kierkegaard, religion and culture

it emerges that the core of Kierkegaard’s challenge to the present age, both to the utopianism of the cult of the New and to the ecclesiastical 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 first 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



Kierkegaard and the nineteenth century ( ) Manet

I

Apart from a couple of minor studies, some reviews and a few passing references, very little was written in English about Kierkegaard until after the First World War, and it was really only from the s onwards that he became anything like well known in the Englishspeaking world as a major figure 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 influence was from the s 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 Søren 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, particularly 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 Kierkegaard’s age. The obverse of acclaiming 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 Kierkegaard? The argument guiding the preceding chapters is that 



Kierkegaard, religion and culture

Kierkegaard’s own authorship was shaped by an extensive and intensive engagement with the cultural questions of his own time: how, then, could his own time fail to notice the originality and significance of his analysis and critique? Or did it? Is the nineteenth century’s 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 Søren Kierkegaard, was alluded to above. Malik’s 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, Malik’s conclusion nevertheless seems to confirm the prevalent view regarding Kierkegaard’s 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 reception of Kierkegaard was also exceptionally ‘colourful’, involving both ‘famous and influential thinkers’ and ‘curiously minor and intellectually peripheral figures’. And Malik has an explanation of sorts for this, an explanation which, he says, belongs to ‘the very nature of Kierkegaard’s 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 Kierkegaard’s 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 Søren Kierkegaard: The Early Impact and Transmission of his Thought, Washington, DC, The Catholic University of America Press, , p. xxi.  Ibid., p. xxii. Ibid., p. xxi.

Manet



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 magnitude with time, is evident among the various early interpreters of Kierkegaard’s thought. Subjectivity is readily transmuted into subjectivism; the rigid limits Kierkegaard set on reason become license for irrationalism and anti-intellectualism; the paradox gives way to absurdism; Kierkegaard’s 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 Kierkegaard’s 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 Kierkegaard’s 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 inflated into a kind of ideology (i.e., existentialism). Malik cannot be faulted on the thoroughness of his research – but are his conclusions justified? 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 Kierkegaard’s 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. . 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 difficult balance.



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. Malik’s 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 defining figures 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 influential literary critic in Europe in the late nineteenth century), J. P. Jacobsen, Harald Høffding, 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 figures who did not, however, become widely known outside Scandinavia itself. Nietzsche, we know, was anticipating reading Kierkegaard (on Brandes’s 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 realism and between artist and society ( J. P. Jacobsen); the situation of the individual in the face of the breakdown of moral and religious 

This is not to say that the influence of Kierkegaard was decisive for each of these figures: simply that they recognized in Kierkegaard a figure 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 influence. However, cultural figures of the stature of those listed rarely depend on any one particular influence. 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 significantly transformed by the way in which it is recontextualized in the work of the recipient.

Manet



consensus (Buber, Luk´acs). In this connection the ‘presence’ of Kierkegaard in Vienna at the turn of the century is especially significant, since this was precisely the time when Vienna was one of the epicentres of European modernism. Kierkegaard was, in terms of Brandes’s 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 defining figure of modernity. But to see Kierkegaard in the nineteenth century is not just a matter of retelling the nineteenth century’s reception of Kierkegaard, i.e., who read him or how, still less how greatly they estimated him or what level of influence 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 Kierkegaard’s authorship is how far Kierkegaard’s theoretical, critical and creative work can be seen to belong together with that of other defining figures of early modernism, whether or not they knew of him or were influenced 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 Kierkegaard’s Zeitkritik, his critique of ‘the present age’ and, by means of that critique, his attempt to open a space within the cultural 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 Kierkegaard’s reading of the age makes sense in terms of the age’s 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 Malik’s study, it does. To pursue this question further, however, I shall look outside the circle of those



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) figures of early modernism: Manet and Dostoevsky. Both belong to countries where the reception of Kierkegaard was more than usually nonexistent, but which both made singular contributions to the history of modernism – Manet’s Paris being, as Benjamin has said, ‘the capital of the nineteenth century’ and the arrival in the West of Dostoevsky’s novels being integral to the extraordinary impact of Russia on the avant-garde of the early s. Neither had any direct or, probably, any indirect knowledge of Kierkegaard. It is, however, precisely the absence of any issue of ‘influence’ that enables us through these comparisons to enlarge our picture of Kierkegaard’s distinctive role within the culture of early modernism. II

Whereas the comparison between Kierkegaard and Dostoevsky has, as we shall see, been made many times (though not always felicitously), the comparison with Manet might seem surprising, not least because we are in this case dealing with painting rather than literature and consequently have to face the problems that necessarily arise in comparing what might appear to be incommensurable bodies of work. Nevertheless, I hope through this comparison to be able to show something of the way in which Kierkegaard’s 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 Manet’s The Execution of Maximilian with Goya’s The Third of May, he wrote that Manet’s 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 first instance the birth of this kind of painting devoid of any signification other than the art of painting itself, which is “modern painting”’. 

G. Bataille, Manet, in Œuvres compl`etes IX, Paris, Gallimard, , p. .

Manet

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Manet, Bataille said, ‘painted the death of the condemned man with the same indifference he would have adopted had he chosen a flower or a fish as the subject of his work . . . this picture is the negation of eloquence, the negation of a kind of painting which expresses, as language expresses, a statement’. On this view, Manet’s art is entirely suited to an age of levelling in which all qualitative differences are flattened out, and culture becomes a pure surface without depth. But is this so? Is there no ‘ontological’ difference between a ‘dead Christ’ and a ‘fish’ in Manet’s art? Is it all just painting and nothing but painting, an artistic programme that would culminate one hundred years later in the pure two-dimensionality of abstract expressionism? I shall therefore begin by challenging this view by looking, briefly, at the painting Dead Christ with Angels, and I shall mention two possible contexts for our reading of it, before turning to the Christ Mocked. The first 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 specific 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 superficial, non-metaphysical contemporaneity of the painting – a world of flˆaneurs 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.’ The second context is that of Dostoevsky’s use of Holbein’s 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. Dostoevsky’s novel thus allows us to name the funeral subliminally 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 Manet’s 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  

Ibid., p. . C. Baudelaire, Selected Writings on Art and Artists, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, , p. .

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Kierkegaard, religion and culture

its inner, violent transfiguring referent. Modernity itself is thereby established as a sustained, pluriform exegesis of the cross. Let us turn to Christ Mocked. It has become a commonplace of art criticism to see the gallery or museum as modernity’s church, as a place set apart for the solemn contemplation of venerated images. That Manet’s Christ Mocked is hung in a room within a room, a holy of holies, in the Art Institute of Chicago certainly enhances the sense of it as a work of potential religious significance. However, just as the analogy between museum and church chiefly 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 significant 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 first 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 expression of the humanizing and demythologizing 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 religion. 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 D´ejeuner sur l’herbe) 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 Manet’s fortunes (in any sense: it remained unsold for almost thirty years!). Under the title J´esus insult´e par les soldats (a title which is, of course, far more neutral with regard to its dogmatic significance than the English Christ Mocked and which possibly alludes to Renan’s Life of Jesus) it was offered to and displayed in the 

Cf. my article ‘Art, Modernity and the Death of God’, The Month, Vol. , No. , October , pp. –. Also Bataille, Manet, pp. –.

Manet

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Salon of , along with the more famous (or infamous) Olympia. It was, of course, this latter work that became the chief butt of Manet’s 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 examples. Paul de Saint Victor, writing in the Presse on  May : ‘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 doesn’t 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 Manet’s characters belong rather to Scarron’s hell than to Dante’s.’ Gautier fils: ‘The Jesus Insulted by the Soldiers cannot be described.’ Charles Cl´ement ( Journal des d´ebats): ‘As to the two canvases contributed by Manet they are beyond words.’ F´elix Jahyes, in an unofficial guide to the Salon, referred to Manet as ‘the apostle of the ugly and repulsive’. Th´eophile Gautier ( in the Moniteur,  June ): ‘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,  May ): ‘The grotesque aspect of his contributions has two causes: first, 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 Titian’s 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, , p. .

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Kierkegaard, religion and culture

Manet of illegitimately introducing comedy and caricature into the serious field of religious painting, while one Bertall, in the Journal amusant, dubbed the work ‘The Foot Bath’ , claiming that it represented 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 Manet’s 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 Locksmith’s’. 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 Christ’s tormentors.’ The verdict of the feuilletonistes, then, was unanimous: Manet’s painting had no place in what the world of cultured Christians cared to see. It is perhaps difficult 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 Manet’s contemporaries have entered the repertoire of modern art and, in any case, have long been overtaken by the virtual infinity 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 fluency in the symbolic language of religious art is so decayed that we are prepared to allow the 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 picture in formal terms and of the ways in which it does indeed subvert received assumptions about the representation of religious subjects. 

Quoted in Anne Coffin Hanson, Manet and the Modern Tradition, Newhaven, University Press, , pp. –.

CT,

Yale

Manet

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First of all, then, let us examine the important discontinuities between Manet’s work and that of previous treatments of the subject. 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 Manet’s 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, Titian’s figure is a muscular, heroic Christ, who seems to be struggling to break his bonds and looks powerful enough to overwhelm his tormentors at any moment. This is different from the figure of Manet’s 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 Manet’s instruction to his models, ‘Ne poitrinez’ (‘Don’t 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 Dyck’s 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 Blanc’s History of Painting, with which Manet was familiar. Although Van Dyck has an additional figure 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 figures are clearly recalled in Manet’s work. Here too, however, there are important changes. Van Dyck’s figures are connected in the dynamic unity of dramatic action: the crown of thorns is even now in the process of being placed on Christ’s head, the crimson robe is even now in the process of being draped around his shoulders – and in his depiction of this action Van Dyck exploits the fluidity, the colour, the feeling of a true baroque master. In Manet’s work, by way of contrast, the figures are disconnected from each

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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 from him. 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 from the hands of the guard holding it, as if he can’t be bothered to finish putting it on. It is no more than a featureless backdrop to the main figure. 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 Dyck’s Christ – who, like Titian’s, is a strong, muscular figure – is only half-naked. His torso is exposed, but his legs are covered by his traditional robe. Manet’s Jesus, however, is almost completely nude, protected only by a loin-cloth – a difference that emphasizes his utter powerlessness and the indignity of his situation. Finally, whereas the engraving (though neither of the paintings) shows the head of Christ surrounded by a nimbus, no such feature appears in Manet’s work. Manet, then, would appear to be systematically negating everything about Van Dyck’s picture that makes his Christ an exemplary figure engaged in a meaningful action, worthy of being called ‘salvific’. One further work is regularly mentioned as a possible source, Velasquez’s Adoration of the Magi. As in Manet’s Jesus the figures 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 Velasquez’s figures are, like Manet’s, 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 Manet’s representation of Jesus, however, is a three-dimensional representation known as Ecce Homo (a title that, as we have seen, some of Manet’s critics spontaneously though mistakenly gave his work), which was frequently reproduced in the fifteenth century. It is an image of which Emile

Manet



Mˆale 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 Mˆale reproduces is from the church at Sommery and shows a Christ whose posture and nakedness immediately connect it with Manet’s Jesus. Mˆale 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, Mˆale understands it to be showing Christ seated on Calvary, awaiting crucifixion. ‘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.’ Bearing in mind that Gothic art was not, of course, fashionable in Manet’s France, I suggest that what we have here is nonetheless an important clue, at least, to Manet’s work, and one to which I shall return. The fact that there are striking models available in the tradition for one or more elements of the painting does not, however, mean that Manet’s 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 disconnected, uninterested figures, accidentally grouped together without any unifying compositional or ideological force. Thus far, at least, Manet’s contemporaries were not reacting altogether inappropriately 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 [Manet’s] paintings. The Italianate composition, the somber Spanish colouring, the theatrical 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 Mˆale, Religious Art from the Twelfth to the Eighteenth Century, London, Routledge & Kegan Paul, , p. . Ibid.: note that this version of the figure does not appear in all editions of Mˆale’s book.  Hamilton, Manet and his Critics, p. . Ibid.

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Kierkegaard, religion and culture

A positive view of this lack of coherence is given by Anne Coffin 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. Manet’s Christ is particular and immediate, recognized as a contemporary Parisian. His flesh 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 identifiable to any particular culture or type. If Christ’s 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 universal 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 vehicle. The modernity in Manet’s 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 fighting 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.

This helps us forward. Hanson is able to recognize – in a way that the vast majority of Manet’s contemporaries were not – that the disorientating eclecticism and modernity of the painting do not count against its religious significance 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 Kierkegaard’s concept of contemporaneity (to which we shall return) – then Manet’s Jesus also locates its subject in a very specific present: a present that is defined – 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. 

Hanson, Manet and the Modern Tradition, pp. –.

Manet

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Yet Hanson’s interpretation is not finally 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 specific 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 Mˆale’s comment that the sitting Christ of the fifteenth century is a figure 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 Manet’s 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 a powerful expression of the midcentury 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 society’s unwanted self-knowledge. That Manet, then, turns to the image of Christ as victim – the ultimate image of victimhood available in the dominant symbolic

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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 ‘fittingness’. But is such a self-representation on the part of the artist justified? Can it ever be ‘fitting’ for the artist to take on such a burden? From the Christian point of view isn’t such a self-imposed task necessarily an example of hubris, a false imitatio Christi, grounded in self-selection rather than divine vocation? Isn’t such a pose symptomatic of the inflation – and therewith the devaluation – of religious language and symbolism? And isn’t it suspicious that in the culture of modernity so many artists have been proclaimed as Christ-figures – either by themselves or their supporters? Doesn’t this exemplify how the death of God leads inevitably to the self-glorification of the manGod (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, hasn’t it become a clich´e in the repertoire of any artist who is not instantly rewarded with international recognition? How are 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 world’s press in the Amsterdam Hilton, given that both Wilde and Lennon also took Christ’s passion as a model for their own suffering as artists? III

With this question I turn to Kierkegaard and, specifically, to Kierkegaard’s treatment of the interface between the crisis of art and artist, on the one hand, and Christ’s sacrificial victimhood on the other. 

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

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What strikes us immediately is that Kierkegaard typically represents the relationship between Christianity and art in negative terms, as a matter of either/or, to allude to the title of his first major book – an either/or specifically 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 satisfied. The poetic life in the personality is the unconscious sacrifice, the molimina of the divine, because it is first in the religious that the sacrifice becomes conscious and the misrelationship is removed. ( JP I: )

There is an extraordinary tension in this passage. On the one hand, the poetic is ‘the highest and the best on earth’: it mediates between 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 himself 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 ‘sacrificed’ to the envy of the crowd, his sacrifice is made unconsciously – 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

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Kierkegaard, religion and culture

find 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 sacrifice is made conscious and the misrelationship is removed’. There is a complex relationship between inner and outer suffering in Kierkegaard’s 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 – significantly – he uses to open the great debate of Either/Or Kierkegaard defines a poet as An unhappy person who conceals profound anguish in his 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 Phalaris’s bronze bull, who were slowly tortured over a slow fire; their screams could not reach the tyrant’s 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. )

The source of the poet’s 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 whom God uses are confined in an even worse way – for all their suffering is always taken by their contemporaries to be arrogance, which means that the contemporaries find joy in bringing more suffering upon them – because of their arrogance. But so it must be, O infinite Love. ( JP VI: )

Manet



Nor can we say that what divides poet and Christian witness is merely the degree or kind of suffering that each respectively endures. 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 first 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. Kierkegaard’s own ‘martyrdom’, for example, was what he himself referred to as his ‘martyrdom of laughter’ at the hands of The Corsair ( JP VI: ): the obverse of the public’s mindless applauding of celebrity is the equally mindless exclusion and vilification it bestows on those who are outside the circle of its approval. On the other hand, the twentieth 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 victim of his own false consciousness and of the envy of his contemporaries. The Christian, on the other hand, has an understanding of life which makes it abundantly 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, follows from this 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 ‘contemporaneity’ 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 regarding His life, nor yet by imaginatively empathizing with the sufferings that He underwent two thousand years ago. Only by suffering as He suffered, now, in the present, and in this way becoming Christ-like, do we become His contemporaries. But, to pick up a



Kierkegaard, religion and culture

phrase quoted at the end of the first 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 artist’s response to such rejection. For, as Kierkegaard understands 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 Manet’s Jesus. Contemporaneity is a matter of taking a decisive stand on the understanding 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 Manet’s 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 Kierkegaard’s sense. Such ‘contemporaneity’ is not, however, a truth for all times and all places, as Hanson put it. It is something which is always specific 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 Kierkegaard’s pejorative sense. Rather, what he is saying to his contemporaries (and, I believe, can say to us) is something like,

Manet



‘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 public’s 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 questioning 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, artificial, contemporary world of the gallery itself, the very modern world for which Manet painted. The background, on the other hand, is plunged in darkness 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 specific 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 seem extraordinary, 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 signification other than the art of painting itself ’ (Bataille). Such a correlation illustrates how the nineteenth century’s 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 crucified.

CHAPTER



Kierkegaard and the nineteenth century () Dostoevsky

I

As an exercise in the history of ideas, the comparison between Kierkegaard and Dostoevsky needs little justification. 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 him in his own way. Flaubert and Renan, Carlyle and Emerson, Kierkegaard and Dostoieffsky, Wagner, Ibsen, and Nietzsche. Only, none of them went so far as the last named. Most of them returned 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 s 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 existentialism (approximately, therefore, from  to ) 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,  September , p. . Quoted in Maurice S. Friedman, Martin Buber: A Life of Dialogue, London, Routledge, , p. .



Dostoevsky



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 identified with the atheism of Nietzsche, Sartre and (many claimed) Heidegger. Nor were they merely thought of as two separate historical sources of subsequent intellectual development. Again and again we find them virtually identified 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 being 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 reflects the themes of urbanity, feuilleton literature, the sublime and the cult of the new that have been central to this study. Karl Barth’s commentary on St Paul’s Letter to the Romans was one of the defining works of European intellectual life in the s. In the Preface to the second edition of this commentary, Barth lists the most significant areas of difference between this and the first edition. Amongst these he mentions the influence 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 first 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 Kierkegaard’s 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 in G. Luk´acs, Dostojewski: Notizen und Entw¨urfe, Budapest, Akademia i Kiado, . The only book-length comparative study of which I know is J. Møllehave, Kaerlighed og Daemoni: hvorfor fejladvikler kaerligheden sig? Copenhagen, Lindhardt og Ringhof, ; Møllehave 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 , , pp. –; John L. Greenway, ‘Kierkegaardian Doubles in Crime and Punishment’, Orbis Litterarum , , pp. –; Cyrena Pondrom, ‘Two Demonic Figures: Kierkegaard’s Merman and Dostoevksy’s Underground Man’, Orbis Litterarum , , pp. –; Einar Thomassen, ‘Kierkegaard og Dostojevskij’, Edda , , pp. –. Karl Barth, The Epistle to the Romans, Oxford, Oxford University Press, , p. .



Kierkegaard, religion and culture

a recognition of what Kierkegaard calls the “infinite 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 occasionally cites them together, as when commenting on Romans ., ‘What shall we say then of Abraham?’: ‘Jesus would not be the Christ if figures like Abraham, Jeremiah, Socrates, Gr¨unewald, Luther, Kierkegaard and Dostoevsky remained, contrasted with Him, merely figures 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.’ These names constitute what Barth calls ‘the crimson thread’ running through history, by virtue of which we can know that the revelation of God in Jesus Christ is not just an arbitrary event, unconnected with anything else in history, but the fulfilment 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 final meaning. Still later, in the discussion of Romans .–, Barth speaks of the ambiguity of humanity’s relation to God’s 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, Overbeck’s sense of awe, Dostoevsky’s hunger for eternity, Blumhardt’s 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 being’s  



Ibid., p. . Ibid., p. . It is highly characteristic of Barth’s 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



inability to stand in the presence of God is revealed without reserve or pretence. 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 (–), the idiosyncratic but influential Russian critic and philosopher, who left Russia in , 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 him on the advice of Husserl, with whom he 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. Shestov’s study Kierkegaard and the Existential Philosophy was to prove highly significant for the French reception of Kierkegaard when it was published in , 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 





It is perhaps relevant to note that Barth mentions his indebtedness to his friend Eduard Thurneysen for his knowledge of Dostoevsky and that Thurneysen’s book on Dostoevsky ( published in ) is prefaced with a motto from Kierkegaard’s journals! Although he first 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 Fondane’s memoir suggests that Shestov discussed Kierkegaard with Berdyaev in the early s. Kierkegaard was known to some in Russia at that time, but it seems more likely that Fondane’s account, based on conversations with Shestov in the s, is not entirely accurate. See n.  below. See N. Baranova-Shestova, Zhiizn ‘L’va Shestova po perepiicke ii vospomiinaniiyam sovremeniikov, Paris, La Presse Libre, , p. .



Kierkegaard, religion and culture

the contingencies and particularities of life, Shestov comments that ‘both Dostoevsky and Kierkegaard (the first without realizing it, the second fully aware of it) saw their life work as a struggle with, and victory over, that system of ideas embodied in Hegelian philosophy’. For both of them ‘Faith is above and beyond 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 humanity’s 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 possibility reveals the way to salvation.’ And, he adds (famously), ‘here [Kierkegaard] comes so close to Dostoevsky that one may say . . . that Dostoevsky is Kierkegaard’s double’. According to Shestov the Underground Man speaks with Dostoevsky’s own voice, entering the lists on behalf of man’s 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 freedom as profoundly elusive with regard to the human being’s 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 Wilson’s The Outsider was one of the most influential works of literary criticism in Britain in the s. Despite its many flaws 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 Dostoevsky’s novella Notes from Underground, whose anti-hero he refers to as the ‘beetle-man’, Wilson remarks that ‘Kierkegaard’s Unscientific Postscript . . . is the beetle-man’s case extended to several 

 

L. Shestov, Kierkegaard and the Existential Philosophy, Athens, Ohio University Press, , p. . For comment on this as an interpretation of Kierkegaard, see J. M. McLachlan, ‘Shestov’s Reading and Misreading of Kierkegaard’, Canadian Slavonic Papers, Vol. , No. , pp. –.  Ibid., p. . Ibid., p. . Shestov, In Job’s Balances, London, J. M. Dent, , p. .

Dostoevsky



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, Dostoevsky’s 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 beetleman becomes a pure representative of ‘the outsider’-type, to whom Wilson’s 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 [I’m not sure if that’s meant to be Blake or Kierkegaard or Dostoevsky!], all beginning 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.

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 humanistically 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 result of an effort that may yet lead to better things. ‘The individual begins the long effort as an Outsider’, he concludes, but ‘he may finish 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 systembuilding 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 flawed and relies on serious misreadings of key texts. It is certainly true that both Dostoevsky  

C. Wilson, The Outsider, new edition, London, Picador, , p. .  Ibid., p. . Ibid., p. .



Kierkegaard, religion and culture

and Kierkegaard participated thoroughly in the culture of modernity 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 individualistic 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 challenging 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 representing a vitally and fundamentally important event in the spiritual, 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, symbiotic life-forms that, in their mutually destructive rivalry, threaten to obliterate altogether the integrity of the human being and destroy the bases of authentic sociality. Nihilism, in short, is not to be identified 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 identity 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 conflict between a conformist public and the outsiders. II

It has been a constant theme of this collection of studies that Kierkegaard participated far more extensively in the popular culture of his day than is usually recognized. If he was scarcely a

Dostoevsky



run-of-the-mill feuilletoniste, his literary world overlapped at many points with that of the feuilletons and the intra-cultural debate represented in and by the feuilletons as to the significance 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 journalism has been a well-known and much-commented-on part of his authorship from the beginning, although the early feuilletons he wrote for the St Petersburg Gazette were not included in early editions of his works. 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 Dostoevsky’s literary symbiosis with St Petersburg is pinpointed by Donald Fanger, who remarks that ‘Petersburg is the most obvious constant in Dostoevsky’s work; it is the setting for his first novel as for his last but one, and it is likely that, had he lived to finish his last one, Alyosha Karamazov’s career as a great sinner would also have led him into its maelstrom.’ 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 characteristic product of this particular phase of urban life, ‘a man of the crowd stripped of his functional normality’, a victim of overexposure to sublime experiences, one in whom the passion of freedom and individuation finds no corresponding objective expression. In Kierkegaard’s idea of a pair of binoculars of which one lens reduced its objects and the other magnified them, in his parable of the man on the pontoon bridge and in Hertz’s remark that the typical feuilletoniste makes flies into elephants and elephants into flies we saw just this crisis of identity, this chronic slippage between inner and outer. In the indeterminate social and cultural space expressed in such ideas and images the question is, continually, how to name and how rightly 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  

See Frank, Seeds of Revolt, Princeton, Princeton University Press, , p. . D. Fanger, Dostoevsky and Romantic Realism: A Study of Dostoevsky in Relation to Balzac, Dickens, and Gogol, Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press, , p. .



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 Kierkegaard’s 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. )

Dostoevsky’s early feuilletons and journalism reveal a similar experience. In one of the feuilletons, Petersburg itself is personified – 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 from head 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 difficult 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 filthy 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, finally, 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.

In connection with the dissolution of firm 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 

D. Magarschack (ed. and tr.), Dostoevsky’s Occasional Writings, London, Vision Press, , p. .

Dostoevsky

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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 another role for Petersburg: I don’t know if I am right, but I always imagined Petersburg (if such a comparison is permissible) as a spoiled younger son of a highly respectable father, a man belonging to a past age, rich, generous, sensible and extremely 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 son’s 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 freethinker 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 flux of the constantly changing roles, values and dramas that make up its life, the com´edie humaine. As has often been noted, many of Dostoevsky’s 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 Dostoevsky’s vision was what Fanger called a ‘myth of the city’ – and it is striking in terms of the present study that Dostoevsky’s 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. – and p. . We may note that Dostoevsky explicitly identifies several of his novels as belonging to the genre of feuilletonromans.

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Kierkegaard, religion and culture

that had grown up through a long, slow process of gradual development, 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 determined 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 : Petersburg is both the head and heart of Russia. We began by speaking about the architecture of the city. Even all this diversity testifies 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 Peter’s idea of modernizing Russia in the image of contemporary Europe and thus the idea of modernity itself, the demand of the present age or of, ‘the times’, perhaps even of time itself, ‘of becoming’. Within such a culture, mirrored in the determinedly ephemeral literature of the feuilletons, all tradition, objectivity, authority and even the solidity of the city’s own bricks, stones and mortar are volatilized. We have seen how Kierkegaard expressed this. Here is Dostoevsky in an article from , ‘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 plain of the Neva, swollen with frozen snow, under the last gleam of the sun, was strewn with infinite myriads of sparks and spindly hoar-frost. There was a twenty-degree frost . . . Frozen steam poured from tired 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, finally, that this whole world with all 

Quoted ibid., p. . Magarschack’s selection omits this article and includes one mistakenly attributed to Dostoevsky (see Frank, Seeds of Revolt, p. ).

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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, reflected not only in the reveries of the dreamer-character of several of Dostoevsky’s 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 contemporary 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 city’s 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 flogged, mistreated, dragged from one prison to another, and then finally – the last advancement, by which he is admitted to the first class in the Christian order of precedence among the authentic witnesses to the truth – then, finally . . . crucified 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. )

Although he himself did not suffer any of the afflictions 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. –.

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Kierkegaard, religion and culture

In attempting to relate Manet’s image of Jesus Insulted by the Soldiers to Kierkegaard’s 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 between them, such that 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? III

A theoretical framework for a preliminary answer to this question can, I think, be found in the contemporary French critic and cultural theorist Ren´e Girard. Girard came to prominence in religious 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 imitative 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 fulfilling them. The resultant violence, fuelled by the power of imitation, can then proliferate 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

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blood-guilt. The sacrificial representation of such primal murder is then established as the basis of religion. On the one hand this ‘solves’ the problem of violence, but only by perpetuating the mindset 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 find an adequate critique of such sacrificial religion, for the gospels take the standpoint of the scapegoat himself, the innocent victim of society’s violence who refuses to allow the justice of his death and who, in that death and against those who condemn him, is identified as the bearer of God’s cause. Of course, this means reading the gospels against the grain of those ecclesiastical traditions that require a sacrificial understanding of Christ’s work. For, in Girard’s view, the passion narrative is essentially antisacrificial: indeed, it is the ultimate repudiation of sacrifice and of the social processes that engender sacrifice. Much of Girard’s work since Violence and the Sacred () 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 would suggest that although Dostoevsky 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 l’Absolu, a quest begun ‘in anguish, doubt and deceit’ but ending ‘in certitude and joy’. Girard’s interpretation focusses on the way in which Dostoevsky depicts human beings as caught in a doublebind of attraction and repulsion in our relation to the other: ‘The presence of the rival, the fear of being checked, the obstacle, exercised on Dostoevsky, as on his heroes, an influence at one and the same time paralyzing and exciting.’ Over against more recent existentialist 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 rejects the thought of imitation with horror.’ Dostoevsky’s fictional   

R. Girard, Things Hidden from the Foundation of the World, London, Athlone, , p. . R. Girard, Dostoievski: de double a` l’unit´e, Paris, Plon, , p. . Ibid., pp. f.

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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 him to being his father’s rival, but because it is from the father himself 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 object by the mediator: the role model who so easily becomes the rival and obstacle to the fulfilment of desire. This relationship is particularly acute in what Girard further specifies 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 generated] finally ‘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 conflict caused by internal mediation.

That the revelation of this structure is already latent within Christian teaching itself and that Christianity implicitly ‘demythologizes’ the pretensions of desire is also shown in Dostoevsky’s novels, especially in his later works, which ‘provide a coherent interpretation of the very strict analogies and of the radical difference between 

R. Girard, Deceit, Desire and the Novel, Baltimore, Johns Hopkins University Press, , pp. –.

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Dostoevsky

Christianity and imitative desire’. Dostoevsky has learned from Christianity and now passes on to his readers that ‘the truth of metaphysical desire is death’. 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 overcoming the compulsiveness of desire itself, and, therefore, as a triumph over metaphysical desire. The religious ‘meaning’ of Dostoevsky’s 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 novelistic 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 unpredictability, 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 Man’s lack of freedom, his domination by a structure of mimetic desire that is mechanistic 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 influential 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  

 Ibid., p. .  Ibid., p. . Ibid., p. . Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, p. .



Ibid., p. .

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Kierkegaard, religion and culture

the situation that grounds Girard’s analysis of the subject as determined 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 question is whether that situation is capable of issuing in reciprocal affirmation 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 rescuing dialogue from subjugation by the monological voice of absolutizing 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 fly 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 subject be rescued from the threat of violence and transformed into a model of mutual affirmation and liberation? IV

With this question we can return to Kierkegaard, where we find that Girard’s analysis resonates with key elements of Kierkegaardian thought, beginning with the idea of the scapegoat itself, especially dominant in the writings of Kierkegaard’s later years and coming to expression in such passages as that describing the fate of the genuine ‘witness to the truth’. But was Kierkegaard’s sense of the violence lurking under the surface of society more than that of the morbid attraction of a religious melancholic to the shadow-side of life? The martyr-complex of a natural-born victim? Is Kierkegaard himself mystified by the mechanisms of violence or is he – like Dostoevsky – able to analyse and demystify them? One of the fundamental characteristics that Kierkegaard observed in his contemporaries was the longing to be just ‘like the others’ ( JP III: ), a characteristic that culminates in the triumph of ‘the numerical’ that, Kierkegaard says, ‘transfers mankind to an

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exalted state just as opium does’ so that we are ‘tranquillized by the trustworthiness of millions’ ( JP III: ). But what does the majority mean when all have been degraded to ‘copies’ of each other ( JP III: )? 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 doesn’t 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 compares itself with the other and thus the heaped-up pile of comparisons overwhelms 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. )

These underground regions, in which ‘comparison’ has generated 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 mechanisms as rooted in the very structure of reflection that is foundational for the typically ‘modern’ person. The reflective modern individual does not simply fit in with a given and determinate social 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 reflection offers him, possibilities that are given to him as ideals and values, mediated by those he regards as desirable role models. But at this point we encounter the human being’s ‘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. ). 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 reinterprets 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

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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. )

The envious one is thus unable to enter into a happy passion of mutual understanding with his role model, but continually vacillates between aggression and submission – something Kierkegaard had experienced in his treatment by the public during the Corsair crisis. The analogy with Girard’s account of the ambivalence of the role model/rival is not difficult to draw. Another aspect of this complex is ‘fear’, which, like envy, is engendered by ‘the pusillanimous small-mindedness of incessant comparison’ (UDVS, p. ). The oppression exercised by modern society, Kierkegaard argues, is not like the oppression exercised by a tyrant, yet the mere overthrow of 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 indicated 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 fists’ ( JP IV: ). Nor is this simply a matter of society’s internal dissolution, since, as Kierkegaard sees it, the Danish government’s ‘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 authenticity of a personal faith in God will therefore find himself drawn into an inevitable conflict with the agents of levelling. Because levelling

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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 exercised 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 judgement 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. ). 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 sacrificial violence. The believer sees the suffering of Christ as the exemplary instance of such demystificatory suffering, and it is no coincidence that many of Kierkegaard’s later religious writings are dominated by the theme of the imitation of Christ’s sufferings. Does this mean that we are back, after all, in the grip of mimesis? Not necessarily, if, as Girard says with regard to Dostoevsky’s 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 Kierkegaard’s essay ‘Has a Man the Right to Allow Himself 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 Kierkegaard’s 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, , 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.

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Kierkegaard, religion and culture

But if we know of many instances of the press running a campaign of vilification against a group or an individual (as in Kierkegaard’s own experience with The Corsair) or of agitating on behalf of some xenophobic cause, doesn’t it seem far-fetched to link that kind of journalism with 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 literature to which Kierkegaard’s authorship can most closely be related is that it was precisely a sphere in which concepts such as comparison and envy find a ready application. The processes of reporting and evaluating the ceaseless flow of cultural products that constitute this literature are premised on the desire of the readers to admire what everyone of a genuinely fashionable sensibility believes should be admired, the fear of becoming socially ridiculous by mistaking a fly 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 century’s 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 public’s 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 city’s 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 Dostoevsky’s 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 s 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

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quiver of the murder victim’s lacerated flesh, 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 s should not be exaggerated. This study has shown that currently topical themes of obscenity in literature, 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 Kierkegaard’s involvement with popular journalism as, in another context, can also be said of Dostoevsky. However, we seem to have shifted the terms of Kierkegaard’s protest against the prevailing spirit of his times. In the first chapter of this study I spoke of anxious sublimity, of a kind of counter-movement to the superficial 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 confrontational model has emerged. In this model the protest against the surface-world of the city and its self-reflection in the superficiality 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 reflects a tension in Kierkegaard’s own thought, a tension between the ‘hidden inwardness’ of religious existence as propounded in the Postscript and the radical discipleship 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 being’s need to define 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.

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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 final 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 Heiberg’s satire on conventional Christianity in ‘A Soul after Death’). Between the teasingly sublime intuition of a robber’s cave lurking behind the fa¸cade of the metropolitan caf´e and the Christian condemnation 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 find a point of contact within the culture of modernity itself by deepening, broadening, and re-evaluating the moments of indeterminacy occurring within the flow 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 discerning, judging and evaluating. Are Andy Warhol’s 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 interweaving of the sublime and the religious we have achieved a rapprochement between the aesthetic and the Christian poles of Kierkegaard’s authorship, but what of its unifying middle: the 



It should be added that this latter claim, especially as focussed in Kierkegaard’s 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

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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 understanding of life. Is there, then, in Kierkegaard’s 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 Kierkegaard’s 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 final 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 Kierkegaard’s 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 Gyllembourg’s novel Two Ages, Schlegel’s Lucinde and Schleiermacher’s Confidential Letters on Friedrich Schlegel’s Lucinde, Manet’s portrayal of Jesus Insulted by the Soldiers and Dostoevsky’s 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 Kierkegaard’s response to the emergent culture of nineteenthcentury 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 figures of the modern tradition 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 refine 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 from reading, 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 first 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 infinitely varied products – remembering that, as with Dostoevsky’s Petersburg, this master-text is itself still in a process of endless becoming. What, then, would a 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 first half of the twentieth century would brush such a question aside. Kierkegaard’s position, it was claimed, was precisely one that rejected anything as bourgeois as ‘reading’. Kierkegaard’s singular merit was that being 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. Throw away 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 reflection 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  Kierkegaard Conference in Budapest by the Hungarian scholar G´abor Kardos, who expounded Kierkegaard as the antihermeneutical 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 Kierkegaard’s 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 first word of dialogue. It is in the direction of dialogue that this

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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, Kierkegaard’s 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 reflect 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, Kierkegaard’s 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 first 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 Kierkegaard’s own practice (in, for example, Either/Or) this variety of aesthetic readings can be calibrated on a scale running from immediacy to reflection. 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 o¨ nmag´at e´ rtelmez¨o m¨u . . . ’, in Nagy Andr´as, Kierkegaard Budapesten, Budapest, Fekete sas Kiad´o, .

Learning to read the signs of the times

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When I am weary of everything and ‘full of days’, fairy tales are always a refreshing, renewing bath for me. There all earthly, finite cares vanish; joy, yes, even sorrow is infinite . . . 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: )

It may be objected that this is not a good example with which to begin, because on a scale of immediacy and reflection it already registers a sophisticated reflexivity regarding the willed suspension of disbelief on the part of the reader. Although the texts themselves – fairy stories – are naive, the reader is clearly someone for whom the 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 reflection. However, as will become clear, far from constituting an objection to my example, the presence of a certain duplicity signals an important aspect of Kierkegaard’s critique of aesthetic reading. To read in this way is to be taken out 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: ). This entry brings into clear focus the time-dimension of the kind of reading it discusses: the past-ness of the world of sorrow

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Kierkegaard, religion and culture

into which the reader is plunged is especially emphasized, as is the past’s intrinsic affinity 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 them back to life? Let us move on to another example, to the young poet of Repetition finding 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 specific points in the most diverse ways . . . Now a word by him arouses me from my lethargy and awakens new restlessness; now it calms the sterile raging within me, stops the dreadfulness in the mute nausea of my passion . . . (FT/R, p. )

Here too the elimination of the reader’s 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. )

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 become almost unconscious in drunkenness. But at the same time, I hasten to 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. –)

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 firmly 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 man’s 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. )

According to the philosophy implied by this, an exchange of letters is neither more nor less than the expression of a mutual surrender in which ‘My’ becomes ‘Your’ and ‘Your’ 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.

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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 confines of the aesthetic. A moment 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 affinity between 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 possibilities 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 understanding of the readerly situation of Repetition’s ‘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 man’s quoting a poem by Poul Martin Møller 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 man’s reading of Job: that it is a re-enactment of his own loss under the figure 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, , pp. –. As a counter-example we might allude to Kierkegaard’s ‘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: ).

Learning to read the signs of the times

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have not had seven sons and three daughters. But one who owned very little may indeed also have lost everything’ (FT/R, p. ). The situation is exactly analogous to that of the  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 from another 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 final term is death itself, i.e., the total and final loss of all that I am and that, from its ineluctable future, determines who I am in the present. We now turn to examples of the contrary pole of reflection – but, it should be emphasized, of reflection 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? David’s 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 suggested a more felicitously chosen phrase, perhaps also pointed out a little fault in the structure, praised the prophet’s masterly presentation of the story, his voice, gestures – in short, expressed his opinion the way we cultured people of today tend to judge a sermon for the cultured – that is, a sermon that is itself also objective. (FSE/JY, p. )

Leaving to one side the question of sermons, I take this description to correspond closely to the model of the critic, the r´eflecteur,

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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 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. ). 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 final judgement on the text before him. And what happens to these critics? David finds 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 figure of Danish literature, finds himself (in Kierkegaard’s journals at least) reduced to a fancy parade horse with none of the ‘fiery 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 finished totality, is rudely shattered. For like their ‘immediate’ counterparts, such reflective aesthetes are also confined to the mode of recollection. What, then, is the difference between the immediate and the reflective readers? Perhaps it is this: that the reflective 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 already 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 readerly standpoint to the extent that he is incapable of losing himself in the text, incapable of being opened by the text to significant 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

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characterizes the reflective aesthetic reader is the recollection of the past as a subordinate moment of the present. Such a reader has reified 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 therefore 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 reflective 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 reading. 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 finite existing individual 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.

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Kierkegaard, religion and culture II

If Kierkegaard can assist us in exposing habits of reading that prevent 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 find 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 figuration 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 medium of suspended disbelief that is the milieu par 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 efficacy of figurative 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 specific example, the discourse ‘Strengthening in the Inner Being’ from the Three Upbuilding Discourses of October  (published on the same day as Fear and Trembling and Repetition). The discourse is striking in the boldness of its figurative 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. ), the epitome of a city given over to spectacle (and, we might take Kierkegaard as implying, therefore the prototype for the contemporary culture of the spectacular). Although Paul, by way of contrast, seeks only a ‘quiet and unobtrusive’ life, he is effectively portrayed in the text in an almost aesthetic 

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

Learning to read the signs of the times

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way, as one – paradoxically, perhaps the greatest – of all the figures on this stage, the man most worth seeing amongst all of Rome’s 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 distress 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 ourselves in the interplay amongst them, critically observing them as objects of our contemplative gaze and reflective judgement. Thus far, the venture of reading may seem to be no more than a foray into the ‘magic theatre’ of Søren Kierkegaard’s pseudonymous puppetshow. But then, suddenly, in the very final paragraph of the text everything changes in a manner analogous to the turn in Nathan’s 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 flood the surface of the text. Even at arm’s length they leap from the page, clamouring for our attention. The text has called us out of the self-loss of aesthetic contemplation 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 edification 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 .

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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 fulfilled time. But that future is always, for now, outstanding. 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 Kierkegaard’s 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 excellence. For isn’t this existential hermeneutic of self-appropriation in the mode of inwardness and self-understanding itself condemned in the final development of the authorship with its stark contrast between private reading and public testimony and its call to a radical 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 solution to the conflicts of existence is problematized by Kierkegaard himself as suspiciously akin to the aesthetic retreat from reality into an imaginary world of ‘inner’ experiences. It cannot, it seems, offer 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: doesn’t 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? Isn’t Kierkegaard’s 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, don’t 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. Don’t those who find 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 first 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. III

In order to justify this conflation 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 Dostoevsky’s 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’, and Dostoevsky’s heroes, he maintains, 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 emotional or affective states-of-mind or mood. Building on Engelhardt’s analysis of the Dostoevskian character as ‘a person possessed by an idea’ and of the Dostoevskian novel as essentially ‘ideological’, Bakhtin goes on to show how each character is the representative, the bearer, the embodiment of a coherent and particular 

Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, p. .



Ibid., p. .



Ibid., p. .



Kierkegaard, religion and culture

consciousness of self. The Dostoevskian hero is precisely the selfunderstanding that he has of himself, or the self-understanding towards which he strives. Moreover, because of the interdependence 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’. This, according to Bakhtin, is what gives Dostoevsky’s world its peculiar realism, because in taking the hero’s 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, finalizing cognitive process’. Dostoevsky’s method, therefore, is the ultimate antidote to objectification and reification and as such supremely realistic, although it is not ‘realistic’ in the sense of offering an empirical description 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-finalizing, 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 finished whole or result but as the question about meaning that most intensely 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 noncoincidence 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 Bakhtin’s words, ‘A person has no internal sovereign territory, he is wholly and always on the boundary; 

Ibid., p. .



Ibid., p. .



Ibid., p. .



Ibid., p. .

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 significant character continues to search for himself in and through a conflict of ideas and self-interpretations that transparently internalizes a dialogue that is simultaneously revealed as integral to the dynamic of the social world in which the character is situated. ‘Every thought of Dostoevsky’s heroes . . . senses itself to be from the very beginning a rejoinder in an unfinalized dialogue.’ It is this situation to which Bakhtin refers when he speaks of the ‘doublevoiced discourse’ that he regards as characteristic of Dostoevsky’s 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 Bakhtin’s 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. . Ibid., p. . On the relevance of Bakhtin for the reading of Kierkegaard and for Kierkegaard’s role in the development of Bakhtin’s own thought see A. Fryszman, ‘Kierkegaard and Dostoevsky Seen through Bakhtin’s Prism’, Kierkegaardiana , , pp. –; Fryszman, ‘ “Teoria kommiunikatsii” Seriona Kerkegora I dialogicheskoe mishlenie Bakhtina’, Wiener Slawistischer Almanach , , pp. –; ‘Ia I drugoi: kritika romanticheskogo soznania y Bakhtina I Kerkegor’, Russian Literature , , pp. –; also T. V. Shitzova, K Istokam ekziistentsiial noi Ontologii: Pascal  , Kiirkegor, Bakhtin, Minsk, Propiilei, .



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 different 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 selfunderstanding. The application of this to Kierkegaard’s 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 Kierkegaard’s work leads us to his point. In doing so, let me emphasize that this structuring is to a considerable degree formal: in other words, that it is not a matter of reconstructing 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 Kierkegaard’s literary art directs that response. Moreover, although we have focussed on the upbuilding discourses as supplying the key to Kierkegaard’s understanding of what good reading practices involve, once we have grasped this we can see that the pseudonymous works too contribute to the overall education in reading constituted by Kierkegaard’s authorship – as, indeed, Kierkegaard’s own declared strategy of indirect communication would seem to require. There is no final gap between the pseudonymous writings and the signed religious works. Amongst the formal devices that most contribute to the emergence of a dialogically structured situation of reading, the following are amongst the most conspicuous: () the juxtaposition of divergent points of view (Either/Or being perhaps the most striking example – but the same feature occurs within the 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 Quidam’s Diary); () the problematizing of the identity

Learning to read the signs of the times



of the narrator (meaning not just the fact of pseudonymity but also the questioning of the integrity or identity of particular pseudonymous 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); () 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 narratives not exhausted by internal commentary; () the pleonastic hyperbole of the feuilletoniste’s droit de bavardage that exposes the impossibility or absurdity of what is being expressed; () the disclaiming of authority; () the questioning of the reader and the appeal to the reader’s own judgement (especially in many of the upbuilding discourses); () the reflection of existential conflicts that are in themselves unresolved. Let us then read the pseudonymous and journalistic works as a polyphony of voices that are self-standing ‘I’s, first-person voices that are also as such points of view on the world – points of view that include the aesthetic, the ethical and the religious in the various forms in which we encounter them in these works. The pseudonyms and the characters they portray (whether these are major players like Johannes the Seducer or Abraham or whether they are merely the walk-on parts of various figures who appear in the context of some passing anecdote or illustration) come to constitute 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 complexified 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 conflict of represented points of



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, can I rise above irony and grasp that selfunderstanding 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 how to be content with an understanding that is an ununderstanding. If the pseudonymous works open up a realm of kaleidoscopic possibilities, inducing a dizzying sense of the radical fissiparousness of meaning, the edifying works discipline 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 first 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 Dostoevsky’s novels as giving fictional 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 fiction. For Bakhtin’s whole argument hinges on the inseparability of the Dostoevskian novel from the conflict 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 debate 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 ‘fiction’ 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 novel’s representation of events in the external world. Realism has 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 opposition between the worlds of culture and religion. In order to become a good reader 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. When it 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 first step in addressing such questions in a genuinely ‘Kierkegaardian’ way. We may begin by recalling an entry from the early journals. ‘“Write” said the voice, and the prophet answered “For whom?” and the voice said, “for the dead, for those whom 

This remark may apply also to non-literary works: cf. Deborah Haynes, Bakhtin and the Visual Arts, New York, Cambridge University Press, .



Kierkegaard, religion and culture

thou lovest in the past”. “Will they read me?” “Yes, for they return as the future”’ ( JP V: ). Kierkegaard’s authorship is founded on loss. The failure of aesthetic 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, reflective 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 sufficient 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-affirmation by a lonely traveller on a darkling plain beneath an empty sky. Sartre, perhaps: Calvinism without God. And this itself would be a reflection, 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 reading that the last quotation from the journals rather beautifully discloses. When it is said that Kierkegaard’s authorship is founded on loss, this is a ‘loss’ that can be located quite specifically 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). And it is also focussed by the loss that Søren anticipates in the anticipation of his own death. For it is precisely because he exists as a finite, 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 (). See my essay ‘A Drama of Love and Death: Michael Pedersen Kierkegaard and Regine Olsen Revisited’, History of European Ideas, Vol. , No. , , pp. –.

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 final or irrecoverable. By becoming good readers of Kierkegaard’s texts, however, we become the posterity in whom the return of the lost is enacted. In the wager we make upon the meaning of Kierkegaard’s having meant it, we reveal the horizon that makes our reading more than a merely defiant 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 him to mean it in the way that he did. In our reading of Kierkegaard, we find ourselves involved in a history of communication 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 Church’s life. Poul Martin Møller, Kierkegaard’s mentor, could already mourn a breach in the tradition that, in historical time at least, might prove irreparable. But does that mean the eclipse of tradition as such? Is it not possible that even a fractured 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 significant 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. Berdyaev’s 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 transfiguring 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.

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 define us as individuals and as a culture. If the crisis of culture in the nineteenth century was, as adumbrated already in Schiller’s Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Mankind, a sense of having lost the wholeness of an organically unified social ‘self ’, the twentieth century compounded that loss immeasurably, smashing one after another of the signs of hope to which the nineteenth century could still 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. In this situation – if this is our situation – then Kierkegaard’s critique of culture might serve us not so much as a tool with which to castigate the superficiality 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, reflects, evaluates and makes into the form of common life.  

N. Berdyaev, Slavery and Freedom, London, , p. . The sense of ‘disaster’ intended here is spelt out in John D. Caputo, Against Ethics, Bloomington, Indiana University Press, , pp. –.

Bibliography

WORKS BY KIERKEGAARD

The Concept of Anxiety, translated by R. Thomte with A. B. Anderson, Princeton, Princeton University Press, . The Concept of Irony, translated by H. V. and E. H. Hong, Princeton, Princeton University Press, . The Corsair Affair and Articles related to the Writings, translated by H. V. and E. H. Hong, Princeton, Princeton University Press, . Early Polemical Writings, translated by J. Watkin, Princeton University Press, . Eighteen Upbuilding Discourses, translated by H. V. and E. H. Kong, Princeton, Princeton University Press, . Either/Or, translated by H. V. and E. H. Hong,  vols., Princeton, Princeton University Press, . Fear and Trembling and Repetition, translated by H. V. and E. H. Hong, Princeton, Princeton University Press, . For Self-Examination and Judge for Yourself!, translated by H. V. and E. H. Hong, Princeton, Princeton University Press, . The Moment and Late Writings, translated by H. V. and E. H. Hong, Princeton, Princeton University Press, . Philosophical Fragments and Johannes Climacus, translated by H. V. and E. H. Hong, Princeton, Princeton University Press, . Practice in Christianity, translated by H. V. and E. H. Hong, Princeton, Princeton University Press, . Prefaces and A Writing Sampler, translated by T. W. Nichol, Princeton, Princeton University Press, . Søren Kierkegaard’s Journals and Papers, translated and edited by H. V. and E. H. Hong,  vols., Bloomington, Indiana University Press, –. Søren Kierkegaards Skrifter, Copenhagen, Gad, – . Stages on Life’s Journey, translated and edited by H. V. and E. H. Hong, Princeton, Princeton University Press, . 



Bibliography

Two Ages. The Age of Revolution and the Present Age: A Literary Review, translated by H. V. and E. H. Hong, Princeton, Princeton University Press, . Upbuilding Discourses in Various Spirits, translated by H. V. and E. H. Hong, Princeton, Princeton University Press, . OTHER WORKS

Agacinski, S., ‘We are not Sublime: Love and Sacrifice, Abraham and Ourselves’, in Jonathan R´ee and Jane Chamberlain (eds.), Kierkegaard: A Critical Reader, Oxford, Blackwell, . Andersen, Hans Christian, Kun En Spillemand, Borgen, Det danske Sprogog Litteraturselskab, . Andersen, K. Bruun , ‘Kierkegaard og jøderne’, Kierkegaardiana I, , pp. –. Anderson, G. K., The Legend of the Wandering Jew, Providence, Brown University Press, . Andreasen, Uffe, Poul Møller og Romantismen, Copenhagen, Gyldendal, . Romantismen, Copenhagen, Gyldendal, . Anon., ‘Plump Usandhed’, Københavnsposten,  January . Bakhtin, M. M., Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, translated by Caryl Emerson, Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, . Baranova-Shestova, N., Zhiizn L va Shestova po perepiicke ii vospomiinaniiyam sovremeniikov, Paris, La Presse Libre, . Barth, Karl, The Epistle to the Romans, Oxford, Oxford University Press, . Evangelical Theology: An Introduction, London, Fontana, . Bataille, G., Manet, in Œuvres compl`etes IX, Paris, Gallimard, . Baudelaire, C., Selected Writings on Art and Artists, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, . Berdyaev, N., Slavery and Freedom, London, . Black, Jeremy, The English Press in the Eighteenth Century, London, Croom Helm,  (reprinted ). Bloch, Ernst, The Principle of Hope,  vols., Oxford, Blackwell, . Caputo, John D., Against Ethics, Bloomington, Indiana University Press, . Christensen, J., Tivoli-Scener- og Eventyr, published by the author, Copenhagen, . Clive, Geoffrey, ‘The Sickness Unto Death in the Underworld’, Harvard Theological Review , , pp. –. Connell, George, To be One Thing: Personal Unity in Kierkegaard’s Thought, Macon, GA, Mercer University Press, .

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Index

Actuality, , , , , –, ,  Adorno, T. W.,  Adresseavisen,  Aesthetic, the, aesthetics, , , , , –, , –, , – passim, , – Agacinski, S.,  Ahasverus see Wandering Jew, the Andersen, H. C., n., – passim,  Andersen, K. B., n. Anderson, G. K., n. Andreasen, U.,  Anti-Semitism, , –, , – Anxiety, –, , , , ,  Archimedes,  Aristotle, , , ,  Arnim, A. von,  Artists, – Ast, F. W.,  Auden, W. H.,  Augustine, St, ,  Autonomy,  Babylon,  Bagatelle, –, , ,  Bakhtin, M., –, , –, n., – Baranova-Shestova, N., n. Barth, K., –, , – Bataille, G., –, , n. Baudelaire, C., , , 

Bauer, B.,  Baur, F. C.,  Beautiful, the, beauty, , , ,  Belinsky, V.,  Benjamin, W.,  Berdyaev, N., , – Bertall, A.,  Bible, , –, , , – Ecclesiastes, –,  Galatians,  James, , ,  Job, –,  Luke,  New Testament, , –,  Psalms, – Revelation,  Romans, –  Samuel, –,  Black, J., n. Blake, W.,  Blanc, C.,  Bloch, E., ,  Blumhardt, J.,  Brandes, G., ,  Brandt, F., – Bremer, F.,  Brøndsted, P. O., – Buber, M., , , , n. Bulwer, E.,  Cain,  Caligula,  Calvin, J.,  Camus, A., 



Index Caputo, J. D., n. Carlyle, T., n.,  Carstensen, G., , , –, , –, , , , , ,  Chamberlain, J., n. Chesneau, E.,  Christensen, J., – Christensen, P. V.,  Christianity, , –, , , , , –, –, –, –, –,  Chrysostom, John, St,  Church, , , , –, , ,  City, the, –, , –, , –, –, –, , , , –,  Cl´ement, C.,  Clive, G., n. Coleridge, S. T.,  Comedy, –, –,  Comparison, –,  Concern, – Connell, G., n. Constant, A.-L.,  Contemporaneity,  Copenhagen, –, , –, , , , – passim, , , , , , –, , , , ,  Corsair, The, , , –, , , , , ,  Country, the, , – Dagen (The Day), , –, ,  Dahlerup, V., n. Dante, A., ,  Death, – Deer Park, the, , , ,  Dehs, J., n. Descartes, R.,  Desi`ege, F.,  Despair, , – Dialogue, dialogical elements in Kierkegaard’s writing, , , –, –, –, –,  Dierkes, H., – Dilthey, W., n. Don Juan, –, , , , 



Dostoevsky, F. M., –, , , , –, , – Doubt, – Eckhart, Meister,  Eitzen, P. de, – Emerson, R. W.,  Empiricism, – Engelhardt, B.,  Envy, –, ,  Eriksen, N. N., n. Eternal, the, eternity, x, –, , , , , , –, –, , , –,  Ethics, the ethical, – passim, – Fædrelandet (The Fatherland ), , –, , , , , n., –, ,  Faith, , –, , , –, , , –,  Fanger, D., ,  Faust, –, , –,  Fear, –, – Feminism, ,  F´en´elon, F. de S. de la Mothe,  Ferguson, H.,  Feuerbach, L., ,  Feuilletons, –, , , , –, –, , ,  Fichte, J. G., ,  Figaro, , , , , , –, , ,  Finitude,  Flaubert, G., ,  Fondane, B.,  For Literatur og Kritik (Fyens Journal for Literature and Criticism), – Forposten, – Frank, J., n., n., n. Frederick VI (King of Denmark),  Freedom, x, –, , , , –, ,  French Revolution, the,  Freud, S.,  Friedman, M. S.,  Frisindede, Den (The Free Enquirer), , , –, –, 



Index

Fryzsman, A.,  Fynske Tidsskrift for Literatur og Kritik, see For Literatur og Kritik Gardiner, P.,  Garff, J., n., n.,  Gautier, T.,  Gautier, T. ( fils),  Girard, R., , – God, ix, , , –, , , –, , , , –, – death of, , –, ,  Goethe, J. W. von, , , , , ,  Goldschmidt, M. E.,  Good, the, – Goya, F. de, ,  Green, R. M., n. Greenway, J. L., n. Grøn, A., n. Grundtvig, N. F. S., –,  Gr¨unewald, M.,  Grunow, E.,  Gutzkow, K., –, , ,  Gyllembourg-Ehrensv¨ard, T., –, , , –, –, ,  Habermas, J.,  Hagen, J. F., – Hamann, J. G., ,  Hamilton, G. H., n.,  Hannay, A., n. Hanson, A. C., n., –,  Harket, H., n. Harris, M., n. Haynes, D., n. Heaven, , – Hegel, Hegelianism, ix, –, –, , , , , – passim, , , , , – Heiberg, J. L. ( Johanna Louise), , –,  Heiberg, J. L. ( Johann Ludvig), , , , , , n., –, , , –, , , , , –, , – passim, –, , , , , –, , , , , ,  Heidegger, M., , , , , , , , 

Heine, H., ,  Hell, – Herder, J. G., n. Hertz, H., , , n., –, ,  Heterogeneity, , –, , ,  Heteronomy,  Heym, S., n. Høffding, H.,  Hoffmann, E. T. A., n. Holbein, H.,  Homer,  Hong, E. H., ,  Hong, H. V., ,  Humour, , , – Husserl, E.,  Ibsen, H., , ,  Idealism, –, , – Incarnation,  Individual, the,  Ingemann, B. S., ,  Intelligentsblade, , , –, , –, – Inwardness, – Irony, , , , –, ,  Jacobsen, J. P.,  Jahyes, F.,  Janins, J.,  Jeremiah,  Jerusalem, ,  Jesus Christ, – passim, , –, , –, –, , , ,  Jews, Judaism, – passim Jones, W. G., n. Jørgensen, P. R.,  Judgement, act and concept of, , , –,  Kant, I., , –, , , ,  Kantzenbach, F. W., n. Kardos, G., n. Kierkegaard, S. ‘Attack upon “Christendom” ’, , , , –,  The Concept of Anxiety, –, –, , 

Index The Concept of Irony, , –, , , – Concluding Unscientific Postscript, , ,  The Corsair Affair, –, –, – The Crisis and a Crisis in the Life of an Actress, – Eighteen Upbuilding Discourses, ix, , –, –, – Either/Or, , –, , –, , –, –, , –, –, , , , , ,  Fear and Trembling, ,  For Self-Examination and Judge for Yourself !, ,  From the Papers of One Still Living, , , –, , ,  Journals and Papers, n., –, –, , –, , , , , , , , –, n.,  The Moment, –, ,  Philosophical Fragments, ,  The Point of View, , ,  Prefaces/A Writing Sampler, –, ,  Repetition, , , , –, ,  Stages on Life’s Way, , –, , , , ,  Two Ages . . . A Literary Review, –, , , , –, –, , , – The Unchangeableness of God,  Upbuilding Discourses in Various Spirits, –, ,  Works of Love, , ,  Kirmmse, B., n., n. Klæstrup, P.,  Knecht, E., n., , n. Københavns Flyvende Post (Copenhagen’s Flying Post), , ,  Københavnsposten ( The Copenhagen Post), , , , – Koefoed-Hansen, H. P., –,  Kristeva, J., n. Lenau, N., , ,  Lennon, J.,  L´eon, C., 



Le Roy, L.,  Lessing, G. E.,  Levelling, , , – Lewis, S.,  Life-view, philosophy of, –, , – Linnet, R., n., n. London, , , –, , , ,  Love, –, , , – Lowrie, W., n.,  Luk´acs, G., , , n. Lumbye, J. H.,  Luther, M., , , n., ,  Lyotard, J.-F., n. McCarthy, T., n. McCarthy, V.,  McCracken, D., n. McLachlan, J. M., n. Magarschak, D., n., n. Malantschuk, G., n. Mˆale, E., –,  Malik, H. C., – Manet, E., –, ,  Marcuse, L., n.,  Marheineke, P.,  Marriage, , – Martensen, H. L., , –, –, , –, –, , , –,  Martyrdom, –, –, , –, ,  Marx, K., ,  Maturin, C.,  Melancholy, , – Memory, – Mendelssohn, M.,  Milbank, J., n. Miller, H.,  Modernity, – passim, –, , – passim, –, – passim, –, , , , , , , – Møllehave, J., n. Møller, P. M., , –, , , , –,  Moment of vision, –, , , , , – Mozart, W. A., , , 



Index

Mumford, L., ,  Mundt, T.,  Mynster, J. P., –, , , , –, , , ,  Nagy, A., n. National Socialism, ,  Nature (see also Country, the), –, , – Nero,  Neurasthenia,  Nietzsche, F., , , , , , ,  Nihilism, –, –, , –, , –,  Nordic mythology, – Nothingness, ix, x Ny Portefeuille,  Oehlenschl¨ager, A., ,  Olsen, R., , –,  Ono, Y.,  Other, otherness, , , –, , – Outpost, The, see Forposten Overbeck, F.,  Paris, , , , , , , , , ,  Paris, M.,  Pascal, B.,  Patocka, J., n. Pattison, G., n., n., n., n., n., n., n. Paul, St, –,  Perseus: A Journal for the Speculative Idea,  Pesquidoux, D. de,  Peter the Great, Czar,  Petersen, F. C.,  Philip of Navarre,  Philipsen, P. G., , ,  Philosophy, –, –, –, , , ,  Phister, L. L.,  Plato, , ,  Poetry, –, –, ,  Pondrom, C., n.

Portefeuille,  Present Age, the, see Modernity Press, the (see also Feuilletons), –, –, , , , – Protestantism, –, , , ,  Prudery, – Public, the, , , , , –, , –, , , , – Quinet, E., –,  Rappoport, A.,  Reading, , – Reason, , ,  R´ee, J., n. Reitzel, C. A.,  Religion, the religious, , , , –, , , –, , ,  Renan, E., ,  Representation, , , –,  Resurrection, – Revelation,  Rilke, R. M.,  Roger of Wendover,  Romanticism, , , , , , –, , –, , –, , –, , –,  Rome,  Rosenhoff, C., , , , , –,  Rubow, P., – Saint-Georges, J. H. V. de, , n. Saint Victor, P. de,  Sartre, J.-P., , , ,  Schelling, F. J. W., –,  Schiller, F., ,  Schlegel, A. W.,  Schlegel, C., n. Schlegel, F., , – Schleiermacher, F. D. E., , , –, , , , –, , , , , –, ,  Schopenhauer, A.,  Schubart, C. F. D., ,  Scribe, A. E., , , n., ,  Sexuality, – Shakespeare, W., –, , , 

Index Shelley, P. B., –,  Shestov, L., –,  Shitzova, T. V.,  Sibbern, F. C., ,  Smith, A.,  Socrates, , , ,  Solger, K. W. F.,  Sophocles,  Space, spatiality, – Spectacle, spectacularity, , , , , , , , , –, ,  Spirit, the spiritual, –, , , , , , –,  Strauss, D. F., ,  Strindberg, A.,  Sturm und Drang, –,  Subjectivity,  Sublime, the, sublimity, – passim, , , , ,  Sue, E., ,  Superficiality, x, –, , ,  Swedenborg, I.,  Sympathy, – Thomassen, E., n. Thurneysen, E., n. Tieck, L.,  Tillich, P., n. Time, x, , –, , , , –, –, , , –, , , – Titian, n., ,  Tivoli, ix, , , , , , , –, , , 



Tjønneland, E., n. Tøjner, P., n., n. Tradition, – Tragedy, ,  Transcendence, – Transition,  Troelsen, B.,  Trendelenburg, A.,  Unamuno, M. de,  Van Dyck, A., – Veit, D., ,  Velasquez, D., ,  Victimhood, –, – Victoria, Queen Empress, n. Violence, –, , –, – Visuality, vision, , –, , , – Wagner, R.,  Walsh, S., n. Wandering Jew, the, – Warhol, A.,  Wilde, O., , n. Wilson, C., – Witnessing, – Wittgenstein, L.,  Wolterstorff, N.,  Young, Edward,  Young Germany, , –, –, , , ,  Zerlang, M., 