The Time of Terrors
Kierkegaard had plenty to keep him busy in the new year. In the middle of
November 1840 he had enrolled in the pastoral seminary, where he was
supposed to prepare sermons and participate in judging the sermons of his
fellow seminarians. In Holmens Church, on Tuesday, January 12, 1841, he
preached his first sermon ever. The text was a passage from the letter to the
Philippians (1:19-25) in which Paul speaks of bein gsplit between the earthly
and the heavenly: For Paul, Christ is life, so in reality to die is a gain. Those
who judged Kierkegaard found that the sermon was “very well memo-
rized,” that his voice was “clear,” his tone “dignified and powerful,” and
that the contents bore the stamp of “much thoughtfulness and keen logic,”
but, they objected, “it was rather difficult and on a level that was probably
much too lofty for the average person.” While he was participating in the
various exercises at the pastoral seminary, Kierkegaard also began making
his preparations to write his dissertation for the magister degree, which he
completed durin gthe winter of 1840-41 and (since the pastoral seminary
recessed for the month of April) the early sprin gof 1841. The work stole
time from Regine, who may have complained that her fiance ́was using
magister dissertations and pastoral seminaries as pretexts to avoid seeing her.
As an odd sort of proof of how incredibly busy he was, as a present for
Regine’s nineteenth birthday Kierkegaard sent her a manuscript he had
prepared in connection with an exercise at the pastoral seminary. And on
March 9, when he had finished writin gup his assessment of a sermon by
one of his fellow students, he wrote to Regine that it was certainly not
“because I have the pen in my hand that I am, as it were, takin gthe occasion
to write youon occasion,” somethin gfor which she had apparently criticized
him, probably with justice.
Regine had had to pass the time some other way and set a good example,
so when her fiance ́turned twenty-eight he received a pearl-embroidered
letter case made by nimble-fingered Regine’s own hands. Kierkegaard
thanked her for the letter case the very same day, and with his thank-you
he enclosed a rose, but not just any rose: “Enclosed I am sendin gyou a
rose. Unlike your gift, in my hands it did not develop in all its splendor.
But it has withered in my hands. Unlike you, I have not been a happy
witness to how it all developed. I have been a sad witness to its gradual
fadin gaway. I have seen it suffer. It lost its scent; its head lost its luster; its
leaves drooped in their struggle with death; its blush faded away; its fresh
stem dried out. It forgot its glory and thought itself forgotten, and it did
not know that you preserved the remembrance of it. It did not know that