Soren Kierkegaard

there can be no doubt that I am absolutely well-fitted, and that I would
bear a great responsibility were I to refuse a task of this sort....Humanly
speaking, from now on I may be said not to be merely running aimlessly,
but to be going toward certain defeat—trusting in God that precisely this
is victory. I understood existence in this way when I was ten years old, and
this is the source of the enormous polemic in my soul. This was how I
understood it when I was twenty-five years old. And this is how I under-
stand it now that I am thirty-four years old. This is why Poul Møller called
me the most thoroughly polemical person.” On January 24, 1847, the deci-
sion to remain in the city had become definitive: “Praise God that I was
assaulted by all the vulgarities of the rabble. Now I have really had the time
to learn inwardly and to convince myself that it had in fact been a melan-
choly idea to want to live out in a rural parsonage, doing penance in seclu-
sion and oblivion. Now I am standing my ground more decisively than I
have ever done.”
We might think that in the wake of the attack byThe Corsair, Kierkegaard
still had good reasons to leave the city, but he himself in fact drew just
the opposite conclusion. Whatever other motivating factors there were,
Kierkegaard also seems to have used the episode withThe Corsairstraight-
forwardly as a pretext for remaining in town, and indeed a pattern seemed
to be emerging: Just as he had needed the break with Regine in order to
become an author, he needed the collision withThe Corsairin order to
continue as one! Simply put, Kierkegaard had a need for opposition, harass-
ment, and suffering as the stimuli for his writing. “Abuse that would have
made another person unproductive only made me more productive,” Kier-
kegaard wrote in a heroic journal entry from 1849, where he avoided asking
himself the rather obvious question of whether in reality he actuallysought
outsuch “abuse” in order to keep himself productive. Despite the fact that—
as, for example, in the journal entry from 1846 cited above—he could label
a pastoral call an “idyllic wish,” he knew very well that such an idyll had
its costs: “The moment one merely mentions a rural pastor, one automati-
cally thinks of a frugal, but calm and contented life out in a quiet landscape
where the mill goes ‘click-clack, click-clack’; where the stork stands on the
roof during the long summer days; where in the evening the pastor sits in
the arbor with his spouse, so ‘paternally happy,’ happy with life, happy with
his modest but meaningful work.” Thus it was not merely the hollyhocks
along the walls of the parsonage that could go to seed. The pastor himself
was also in danger, “because it is certain that fixed ideas can easily develop
in a parsonage.” Kierkegaard concluded: “Even if one says that life in the big