semestershedevoted himselftoseveralbooksofthe NewTestament,writ-
ing commentaries on them and translating them into Latin, the language in
whichstudentswereexaminedintheexegeticalsubjects.Butatsomepoint
during the winter semester of 1835–36 he apparently had had enough. His
translation of the epistle of James remains a fragment, and the pages in the
notebooks in which this university student was supposed to have written
his own commentaries are yawningly empty. And in a journal entry dated
May 1, 1835, Kierkegaard asked himself whether “the enormous mass of
interpretershasonthewholedonemoreharmthangoodtotheunderstand-
ing of the New Testament.”
Typical of his relationship with the university was the following little
incident which his university friend Peter Rørda mreported to his brother
Hans in a letter of December 4, 1834. When it was time to begin using the
new university auditorium, members of the theology faculty requested that
thestudentssitinassigned,numberedseatsthroughoutthesemester,sothat
they could more easily keep track of each student’s participation in the
course. As might be expected, this suggestion gave rise to protests from
those students who (presumably) were less regular in attendance and who
of course did not want to put up with such a humiliating arrangement.
Peter Rørda mwrote to his brother, who was living out in the country
in Harboør, that “the younger Kierkegaard” had particularly distinguished
himselfinthisconnectionwithhis“soberbutseriousopposition,”withthe
result that “nothing further will be done, and the old arrangement will
continue.”Soapersoncouldcontinuetoskipclasseswithareasonablyclear
conscience!
SørenAabye’sconductoutsidetheuniversitydoesnotseemtohavebeen
quite so sober. True, he paid for private tutoring by H. L. Martensen, who
had passed his theological examinations in 1832 with the very high grade
oflaudabilis & quidem egregie[Latin: “praiseworthyand indeedexceptional”]
andwholedKierkegaardthroughthemainpointsofSchleiermacher’sdog-
matics, but the tutoring does not seem to have had the desired effect be-
cause, as Martensen recalled more than a generation later, “Søren Kierke-
gaard had his own way of arranging his tutoring. He did not follow any set
syllabus,butonlyaskedthatIlecturetohimandconversewithhim.Ichose
to lecture to him on the main points of Schleiermacher’s dogmatics and
then discuss them. I recognized immediately that his was not an ordinary
intellectbutthathealsohadanirresistibleurgetosophistry,tohair-splitting
games, which showed itself at every opportunity and was often tiresome. I
recollect in particular that it surfaced when we examined the doctrine of
divine election, where there is, so to speak, an open door for sophists. In30 {1813–1834}