Soren Kierkegaard

gardens into decent shape, and when he took a walk across his adjacent
properties, he could not suppress a certain feeling of “self-esteem.” But this
was also the very feeling that would vanish almost totally when he had to
write his sermons. There were times when he felt entirely bereft of ideas
and had to take “refuge in the sermons of others” in the hope of finding “a
theme or a longer piece” that might inspire him: “Thus almost weekly, I
had a very painful feeling—which I call ‘the Saturday despair’—from which
I am still not immune, even after forty-four years of practice. For on a
Saturday,afteronehasworkedoneselfintoexhaustioncompletingasermon
and then reads it through and finds it so insipid and stupid that one can
barely bring oneself to speak those words—but has nothing else to offer
one’s listeners—one does not go to bed with a light heart.”
During the summer of 1803 Mynster experienced a decisive break-
through in his spiritual development. In the evening twilight, as so often
before, he had been sitting on the sofa reading a book—on this occasion,
Jacobi’s work on Spinoza—when suddenly an insight filled him like an
illumination from on high: “If conscience is not a meaningless figment of
the imagination—and I had no doubts that it was not—then, if you must
obey it in one thing, you must obey it in everything, without exception;
you must act and speak in accordance with your duty, as fully as you know
it and are capable of doing, entirely unconcerned about the world’s judg-
ment, its praise or blame....Thefull significance of Christ’s words ‘No
one can serve two masters’ had dawned on me, and I had thus gained entry
into his kingdom.”
This great internal revolution stood in marked contrast to the outward
uniformity of the world that surrounded the young curate. He passed the
time with varied reading—Plato, Herodotus, Sophocles, Dante, Tasso.
Mynster read “everything I wanted to read, and I believed, with some justi-
fication, that almost every sort of reading is grist for a cleric’s mill.” For this
same reason Mynster was a frequent visitor at the Vemmetofte Monastery,
where the fine collection of older French literature kept him busy from
morning till evening. He traveled to Copenhagen a couple of times a year,
but the friends of his youth had changed, as had Ole, who had now become
head physician at Frederik’s Hospital. After a couple of brutal disappoint-
ments in his love life, Ole had followed his stepfather’s example and married
a widow, who brought four of her own children with her into the marriage.
Olehad nowlost himselfinbourgeois lifeand practicaltasks,thus forfeiting,
Jakob Peter believed, “receptivity for the ideal,” just as his fiery intellect
had been supplanted by an ill-concealed irritability. Ole’s ever-present ten-
dency to dominate his younger brother now became almost tyrannical, and
the warm relationship between the two brothers tapered off into a coolness