Soren Kierkegaard

intelligible, and no well-spiced Christmas cake is more full of raisins than
the majority of his works are full of very popular ingredients. But if he has
mastered the popular language, comprehensible by ‘all the masses’ (and it
must be admitted that he has), where it is a matter of witticisms, cellarman
jokes, comic comparisons, and other tidbits, then if he is not understood,
he has only his own ironic vanity to blame....Onecertainly cannot re-
quire that every literary work be of the sort that can be published in a
monthly magazine for children or have the appeal of Andersen’s fairy tales.”
It is true that Rosenhoff was critical (and the comparison with Andersen
was annoying), but in any case Kierkegaard could not complain that people
had not had a quite good sense of thecharacterof his literary production.
And not only were his writings reviewed, thereviewersof his writings were
reviewed, as was the case in late March 1846 when two issues ofNyt Aften-
bladcarried a discursive review titled “KjøbenhavnspostensReview ofCon-
cluding Unscientific PostscriptandConcluding Unscientific Postscript.”
The printing presses of Copenhagen continued to run, attracting varying
degrees of attention, and the wheels hummed, not always with words of
praise, it is true, but when we consider the heartlessness, indeed, the bestial
character that was generally typical of reviews of the time, Kierkegaard got
off rather easily indeed. On May 7, theTheological Journalcarried an eight-
page review ofPhilosophical Fragmentswritten by the theologian J. F. Hagen,
who signed himself “80” for the occasion. As Hagen reminded his readers
in the introduction to this review, he had earlier written a detailed examina-
tion ofFear and Trembling, just as, even earlier, he had published a review
ofEither/Orthat had taken up all of thirty-two newspaper columns. Despite
the fact that Hagen was generally positive, and that in reading thePostscript’s
critique of the Hegelian spirit of the day he found “the author’s sharp and
penetrating investigation entirely justified,” Hagen was and remained
Hagen, and Hagen was a nobody. And it was simply the case that Kierke-
gaard was so snobby that it was notnearlyas importantwhathad been written
about him aswhohad written it.
Therefore, what his former secretary P. W. Christensen—the fellow who
some years earlier had been “scribbling in the newspapers,” to borrow Kier-
kegaard’s phrase—had to say was a matter of indifference to Kierkegaard.
On two occasions Christensen had in fact gone to a great deal of trouble to
enter the lists against his former employer. On March 29, 1846, he pub-
lished a lengthy article in theDanish Church Timestitled “Faith and Dialec-
tic: Against S. Kierkegaard,” and on September 20 of the same year he
published “The Dialectic of Faith” in the same journal. In a markedly un-
dergraduate style that was almost the inverse of Kierkegaard’s, he mounted
an attack on theConcluding Unscientific Postscript, insisting with a peculiar