Kierkegaard (19 page)

It was this last capitulation, more than the claim of divine revelation in the first place, that particularly drew Søren's criticism. He had met with Adler on a few occasions and found him an intelligent but ridiculous figure. On one memorable meeting, Adler sat Søren down and revealed to him that he, Adler, considered Søren to be a
John the Baptist
figure preparing the way for his new revelation. Adler then proceeded to read out some of the passages that Jesus Christ had supposedly dictated to him. Søren recalled how Adler curiously modulated his voice, alternating between normal speaking and a dramatic stage whisper. When Søren confessed he did not notice anything particularly revelatory in the passages, Adler offered to come back later that evening and read it all again in the special voice. Søren refrained from laughing at the time, but he did later confess to his friend Brøchner that he was quite happy, thank you very much, being John the Baptist as he had no ambitions at all to be a Messiah.

Adler was easy to mock, but Søren was more interested in the serious issues that Adler's case brought up. The bulk of
Adler
considers the “difference between a genius and an apostle” and is in fact an extended reflection on what it means to have and speak with authority. True apostles speak from divine revelation, and thus the quality of their communication is irrelevant. Genius communicators, on the other hand, have to pay attention to form if anything good is to come from their writing. In the end, the main difference between an apostle and a genius is that the genius does not speak with authority but has to rely on skill. The issue was important to Søren's sense of himself and his vocation. The subtitle “without authority” occurs often in the books, becoming a catch-phrase for his entire authorship.

The book on Adler was clearly important to Søren, but there were a
few sensitivities to deal with before it could be published. Søren too was a writer with sense of a divine calling and an axe to grind with Hegel and the Hegelians. He too was dogged by accusations of being mentally unbalanced. Thus Søren was understandably ginger about how to deal with Adler, if at all. In the end he decided not to publish, out of deference to his own case but also with due regard for Adler himself. Søren had no desire to commit character assassination for the sake of a rubber-necking public. As he well knew, “
it is cruel
to slay a person that way.” The 200 pages or so stayed in the desk, but an excerpt, “
The Difference Between a Genius and an Apostle
,” was published, which took out all mention of Adler by name. The essay appeared as one of the
Two Ethical-Religious Essays
, attributed to the pseudonym H. H. in 1849.

The curious case of Pastor Adler was not the only thing occupying Søren's attention during this time. Besides
Two Ages
and various
Discourses
published in 1847, a major book was underway, laying to rest once and for all Søren's idea of retiring from authorship.

Works of Love
came out of an extended reflection on the biblical call to “love one's neighbour” and Søren's renewed appreciation for the “Single Individual.” The category began life as a communication to Regine, but he had come to see it was applicable to any and all of his potential readers. Far from being an isolating philosophy, Søren thought the only way to truly love anyone was
as
and
for
individuals apart from any group or crowd to which they might belong. As a result,
Works of Love
is a deeply subversive book dressed up as an apparently innocuous call for everyone to get along. In Søren's hands, the “love of neighbour” is shown to be a radical position in the world, cutting against prior claims of self, family, and nation. The move to inwardness is also a call to action.
Works of Love
is called a “Christian deliberation,” a subtitle that Søren intended to differentiate from his other “discourses.” The deliberation, he thought, was intended to bring the reader to a point of active decision about controversial ideas rather than reassuring people of established truths.

An upbuilding discourse
about love presupposes that people know essentially what love is and seeks to win them to it, to move them. But this is certainly not the case. Therefore a “deliberation” must first fetch them up out of the cellar, call to them, turn their comfortable way of thinking topsy-turvy.

Works of Love
was published in September 1847. It sold relatively well and was one of the few books
reprinted
in Søren's lifetime. The book was barely reviewed, but Søren did not mind as he was writing for Single Individuals, not reviewers filling newspaper space with their chatter. He considered the book itself to be his “work” of love. One section was written for his crippled cousin Hans Peter. Another was written in memory of his dead parents. Brother Peter's ailing wife, Jette, was sent a copy to rally her spirits, accompanied by a sensitive and encouraging letter.

Two high-profile fans were King Christian VIII and his second wife,
Queen
Caroline Amalie. Søren delivered a copy of
Works of Love
to them in person after its publication. The king had asked Søren to visit him on a few occasions during the writing of the book. He was clearly struck by this author who, much like a king, was also an eccentric figure unable to walk unnoticed amongst the people. Søren had, of course, dutifully obliged, but from lengthy journal entries reflecting on the visits we know he found the audiences largely tiresome. “
I firmly decided
to visit him as infrequently as possible.” The king enjoyed talking about ideas, especially politics, but it was apparent he did not fully understand Kierkegaard's writing. The queen professed to have read some of his works but in conversation persistently referred to “Either
and
Or”; a telling mistake that did not escape Søren's attention.
Works of Love
was delivered in an attempt to improve the situation, but Søren reflected the king seemed content to glance at the table of contents and to be sentimentally moved by a passage Søren read out loud.

A more perceptive reader was also one of Søren's primary intended audience members. Søren was particularly keen to elicit Bishop Mynster's
opinion (“
. . . it would have made me
indescribably happy to have him agree with me . . .”), and he went to see him on November 4, 1847. It was to be another dissatisfying meeting. “
Today I looked in
on Bishop Mynster. He said he was very busy—so I left at once. But he was also very cold toward me. Very likely he is offended by the latest book.” Very likely. Mynster was no fool and would have perceived this was yet another thinly disguised critique presuming to tell him and his church what Christianity really was.

There was another intended reader to whom Søren did not dare pay a visit. On the day before Søren's short audience with Mynster, Regine Olsen married Johan Frederik Schlegel at the Church of Our Saviour in Copenhagen.

Regine Schlegel,
neé
Olsen. Photograph of Regine from 1855.

The next month, Peter and Søren finally sold the Nytorv family home, splitting the proceeds. The event, coupled with the breach with Mynster and the marriage of the new Mrs. Schlegel symbolically tied up many of the threads of Søren's old life. The following year would prove to be a watershed for the direction the renewed Søren was taking. “
Then came the year 1848
—for me, beyond all comparison the richest and most fruitful year I have experienced as an author.” During this one year Søren began or completed
Christian Discourses
,
The Sickness unto Death
,
Practice in Christianity
,
The Point of View for My Work as an Author
,
Armed Neutrality
,
Two Ethical-Religious Essays
,
The Lily in the Field and the Bird of the Air
, and other occasional pieces.

Søren's fecundity was spurred in large part by the monumental events sweeping Europe. In 1848, the “Springtime of
the People
” was afoot. Italy, Germany, Austria, and especially France saw waves of violent republican protest against the ruling monarchs. Other European nations saw similar unrest.

Not one to be left out, Denmark too enjoyed its own (bloodless) revolution. By the evening of January 20, 1848, King Christian VIII was dead. Sensing an opportunity for change, a group of Copenhagen's leading republicans (a liberal cause), headed by H. N. Clausen, gathered to draft a scheme for a free constitution. The petition was ignored by Christian's newly enthroned successor, Frederick VII. By February, news of the Revolution sweeping Italy and Paris had reached Denmark. In March a more vigorous group of liberal reformers held a series of mass meetings, this time led by Orla Lehmann. Together, members of the cultured elite, artisans, and peasants thrashed out a National Liberal platform that included as a central plank universal (male) suffrage. On March 20, Lehmann and the reformers met at the offices of the
Fatherland
and drew up another petition. The next day, a crowd of over 15,000 people accompanied Lehmann through the streets to the royal palaces. They demanded a constitution, incorporation of all Slesvig territories into Danish hands, and law from and of “the People.” Significantly, this
appeal to the common man was accompanied by a thinly veiled threat of the force that the common man could wield if he were not accommodated: Lehmann included in his petition the stark choice between popular revolt or royal assent, imploring the king to save Denmark and “
not to force the nation
to the self-help of desperation.” Lehmann was received, the reforms were accepted, and, with a triumphant roar, the crowd dispersed. By the following year, Denmark had become a constitutional, democratic monarchy.

From the point of view of someone intent on speaking to “the present age,” for Kierkegaard two significant developments stemmed from these events. The first was the explosion of the Slesvig-Holstein conflict into open war. In 1848 German nationalists had appealed to the king to recognize the unity of the Slesvig-Holstein region in southern Jutland. They were opposed by Danish republican-liberal-nationalists, led by Lehmann, who supported the so-called “Ultra Danish” party, of which Grundtvig too was a key member. The king was swayed by the Ultra-Danes: an undivided Slesvig would remain constitutionally bound to Denmark. When they heard the news, the German party proclaimed a rival militant Slesvig-Holstein government. The violence would last until 1851, leaving the country in a state of perpetual nationalistic unease. At home it would also deprive Søren of Anders Westergaard, his servant and friend (whom Kierkegaard liked to call “my body”) who was drafted into the war.

The second, related, development affected the established Lutheran Church. No longer the state church, it was now to be known as the Danish People's Church. The transition from “State” to “People” marked a shift in emphasis from a constitutional, clerical organization initially favoured by Mynster and Martensen, to one more free-ranging and populist, much to the delight of the Grundtvigians. A lot of the technical detail regarding ecclesiastical constitutions and nomenclature was obscure and largely irrelevant to day-to-day church life. However, Søren was well aware the changes of 1848 marked a significant shift
in the cultural imagination. An undefined sense of popular right was pervading politics and religion, where all must bow to a new mass entity called “the People.”

Popularity is a dangerous game. It was popular consensus, after all, that kept the
Corsair
in business no less than it kept Danes secure in the assumption that as civilised people naturally they were Christian. The course Søren was plotting diverged both from conservative and liberal assumptions. While Christendom's citizens were getting swept up for or against mass movements in the name of “the People,” they were forgetting the real persons, neighbours, and single individuals right in front of their noses. For Kierkegaard this had disastrous consequences: “
They are blind
to what the year 1848 has made sufficiently clear—that the crowd, the mass, are evil. They still live in the obsolete notion that one battles against the established order with the help of the people.” Instead, as Søren wrote in his journal a year before, “ ‘
The single individual
' is the category through which, in a religious sense, the age, history, the generation must go.” His task was becoming clear: to winkle single individuals out from their crowds so they could relate to each other and to God as persons and not as groups. The “established order” certainly needed to be opposed, but it wasn't going to be through yet another faceless movement or mob action. The social and political events of contemporary Denmark furnished Søren with a favourite phrase to describe his strategy. “
Armed neutrality
” describes a military stance without partisan engagement. Søren wrote a short book by this name (unpublished in his lifetime) articulating his peculiar position: