write out from memory the sermon he had heard that morning in church,
but Søren Aabye found this dishonorable and resolutely refused to do it.
The Kierkegaard family home was steeped in religious notions typical
of humble folk, and these could not be exorcised by Mynster’s sermons.
These notions included the belief that a randomly chosen Bible verse
couldreallygive one an anything-but-random nod from Divine Gover-
nance concerning coming events and pressing obligations; similarly, anni-
versaries of birth and death dates were linked to calamities of one sort or
another. On one occasion, when Søren Aabye had chanced to turn over a
saltcellar at the dinner table, his father became furious and called him a
prodigal son and other frightful things. Søren Aabye did his best to defend
himself, pointing out that when Nicoline Christine had broken a valuable
tureen, nothing had been said at all. But his father replied that in that case
it had not been necessary to say anything, because the tureen was so very
valuable that the seriousness of the unfortunate situation was obvious. Søren
Aabye accepted the explanation, and many years later he concluded his
retrospective consideration of the incident with these words: “There is
something of the greatness of antiquity in this little story.” But in fact this
interpretation of the story is not merely rather overly dramatic, it also rests
on erroneous suppositions: Søren Aabye’s father stormed and raged over
the upset saltcellar because according to popular superstition spilling salt
meant loss of money!
Similarly distant from the Christianity represented by Mynster was the
Moravian Congregation of Brethren, whose meetinghouse was on
Stormgade, where the Kierkegaard family regularly gathered on Sunday
afternoons. The religious group had been founded in 1739, inspired by the
imaginative organizational genius Count Zinzendorf, who established the
Herrnhut colony on his estate Berthelsdorf in Saxony. The group was sup-
posed to actualize Christianity as a “religion of the heart” and to serve as
missionaries of this understanding of the faith. The heart was not to be
crushed under the consciousness of sin that the Law had awakened; no, the
heart was to be melted, and this could only be done by preaching the Gospel
of Christ, the Savior and Redeemer. The Moravian Congregation was not
a part of the State Church but had its own New Testament understanding
of what a congregation was. This made the congregation’s ecclesiastical
politics rather complicated and also led to its persecution by the government
and the clergy. Since 1773 the Copenhagen congregation had had its spiri-
tual center in the tiny southern Jutland village of Christiansfeld, whose well-
made products (including its still-famous honey cakes) were sold in Copen-
hagen. During the first decades of the nineteenth century the Copenhagen
Moravian Congregation had experienced such an increase in attendance
that it had been necessary to rebuild the meeting hall to accommodate no
{1813–1834} 11