Soren Kierkegaard

On the basis of these volumes, particularlyStudies and Examples,hewrote
his—first—book on the Adler phenomenon, between the middle of June
and the end of September 1846, and in a journal entry dated January 1, 1847
he described his 337-page book as finished. It was not long, however, before
problems began to surface: “The entire Adler affair pains me a great deal. I
am truly more than willing to support Adler. We need energetic people—
unselfish, energetic people—who do not give up, exhausted by unending
concern over their livings and wives and children.” Kierkegaard respected
Adler for his religious passion, something that seemed a rarity in “reasonable,
lily-livered, calculating, refined Christendom.” So Kierkegaard’s overall as-
sessment was generally positive: “In the final analysis, however, for all his
confusion Adler still has much more religiousness than most.”
Kierkegaard therefore devoted an entire section of the book to “Adler’s
Merits,” in which he noted, first of all: “What is good and meritorious
about Magister Adler is that he has been shaken, moved, that his life has
thereby taken on an entirely different rhythm than the slow trot at which
most people, in the religious sense, apathetically make their way through
life....Allreligiousness is rooted in subjectivity, in inwardness, in being
moved, in being shaken, in qualitative pressure on the springs of subjectiv-
ity.” Being moved in this manner is the indispensable precondition for
being able to engage seriously with Christianity, and this is what separated
Adler from many a “quiet, still-life professor.” But unless the “heartfelt
language of deep emotion” is united with “proficiency and training in
Christian conceptual categories,” the young theological graduate had abso-
lutely “nothing with which to resist,” and it will therefore be easy for him
to confuse internal religious feelings with a revelation. According to Kier-
kegaard, Adler was in fact in “mortal danger” because he was atop “70,000
fathoms of water”—an expression Kierkegaard otherwise never used with
reference to any specific individual. And even though throughout the book
Kierkegaard officially remained a supporter of the State Church, with
marked sympathies for Mynster (whose administrative abilities and personal
merits are praised in grand style for a number of pages), he was definitely
not blind to the fundamental absurdity that threatened Adler: “At the very
moment when, by having been religiously moved, he has undeniably come
closer to becoming a Christian than ever in the entire time he was a Chris-
tian—at that very moment he is dismissed.”
Reluctantly, Kierkegaard acknowledged that he was a party to the case,
and he therefore considered whether he ought to approach Adler and ask
him to retract the notorious preface toSome Sermons, in return for which,
as a sort of compensation, Kierkegaard would refrain from publishing his
manuscript. Kierkegaard abandoned this idea of gentle blackmail, however,