Soren Kierkegaard

he could inquire about his heavenly mission under cover of darkness, and
seen with Kierkegaard’s eyes, Nicodemus was another name for timorous-
ness and cowardice. It was thus terrifying two days later when Kierkegaard
“read the sermon that came next in my collection of Luther’s sermons,”
and it was again Nicodemus who peered out from the pages of the volume.
This decided the matter. To ignore two such unmistakable signals would be
reckless, for they could only mean that Kierkegaard must publishChristian
Discourses, and he therefore complied, albeit in fear and trembling: “Perhaps
not a soul will read myChristian Discourses. Perhaps the alarm will be
sounded in the camp and I will be the manhandled victim. Perhaps. Oh, it
is difficult to bear such a possibility.”
Kierkegaard’s metaphors were military, but there was not much in the
way of alarms sounding in the camp. This could be owing to, among other
things, the quiet little fact thatChristian Discoursesprobably had very few
readers, for a considerable number of copies remained unsold at the time
of their author’s quite unbloody demise. It is obvious that Kierkegaard’s
ideas about the possible effect of the discourses were totally out of propor-
tion, and he himself could see this in his somewhat more sober moments.
“Perhaps there is also a good deal of hypochondria in this fear of mine,” he
wrote, but then he quickly added that “of course, this has nothing to do
with the matter one way or the other.” And he was right about that. For
the point was not the disproportion between Kierkegaard’s tragicomic pa-
thos and any factual dangers, but rather the relation between the textual
premises and his own existential conclusion—and therefore he gradually
wrote himself more and more into the role of martyr, which thereby turned
out to be a role written for him in more than one sense.
Thus we should not waste much time being amazed at the fact that it
was precisely during the revolution—which, of course, was pretty much
the epitome of the multitude and the mass—that Kierkegaard saw the cate-
gory ofthat single individualconfirmed and validated. For a category such as
this was not merely a universal principle for everyone who might want to
realize it in his or her life; no, if the category of that single individual had
suddenly become the significant point in the midst of this historical vortex,
it was because it was only through the efforts of Kierkegaard, the discoverer
of this category, that the vortex could be brought to a standstill. This cer-
tainly does look like a rather circular conclusion, which properly speaking
it is, but this was nonetheless the way in which Kierkegaard came to a
conclusion—and concluded that he could include himself in the vortex of
world history.