Soren Kierkegaard

ous person. That is why he wants me out in the country.” Kierkegaard
went on to explain that it was of course true that somewhere, deep down,
he had always been set on becoming a pastor out in the country, but that
the increasingly confused situation in the capital—in the literary, social, and
political worlds—had created an absolutely acute need for an “extraordi-
nary” person. “Now the question is... whether there is anyone in the
kingdom suited for this other than me.”
During the following months Kierkegaard stuck to this position, elabo-
rating it into a principle. At one point in the summer of 1848 he noted:
“Reduplication is what is truly Christian....From a Christian point of
view, what is continually asked is not only whether what one says is true
with respect to Christianity, but what kind of a person is saying it? So when
a men dressed in silk and covered with the stars and decorations of various
orders says that the truth must suffer persecution, et cetera, these circum-
stances produce only an aesthetic situation....True, this silken man does
say, ‘Remember, you do not know when the moment will come when
you must suffer for the truth.’ And then the silken man weeps (for he imag-
ines himself a martyr), but the listener merely thinks: Forget it.” This falsifi-
cation was not only a phenomenon of the big city: “On Sundays out in the
country, in quiet rural surroundings, when a Reverend swears and thunders
and crosses himself in speaking of how the world persecutes the Christian
(His Reverence included), it is obvious that this is a rogue flattering his
own vanity by imagining himself persecuted in this safe, rural setting, in the
company merely of peasants and the like, who pay him due respect. No,
old fellow, this, too, is a comedy. If it is to be in earnest, then please be
good enough to go to the capital and out onto the big stage.”
The rural “old fellow” fulminated against here was to a great extent Kier-
kegaard himself, just as his metaphor of the city as a theatrical stage opened
the way to a major theme in his critique of Mynster, who in one journal
entry after another was accused of alternating between self-deception and
theatrical self-promotion—an idea that suggested other and broader theatri-
cal comparisons. In a journal entry from the early summer of 1848 we can
see the contours of the bishop, once so unshakable for Kierkegaard, were
beginning to dissolve before his very eyes: “The whole business is so inde-
scribably painful to me. When I look at Mynster—oh, he looks like earnest-
ness itself. That masterfulErscheinung[German: ‘appearance’] will always be
unforgettable to me. And yet, I would regard myself as an irresponsible
dreamer if it were ever to occur to me to conduct myself in such a manner.”
Mynster’sErscheinung, his almost awe-inspiring appearance, also made an
impression on people other than Kierkegaard. Professor H. N. Clausen, for
example, wrote in his memoirs: “In Roman cardinals, I have occasionally