Soren Kierkegaard

it.... I open up the N. T. and I read, ‘If you wish to be perfect, then sell
all your goods and give it to the poor and come and follow me.’ Good
Lord, all the capitalists, the big government officials, and the pensioners,
too—just about the entire race excepting the beggars—we would be done
for, if it weren’t for scholarship,” by which Kierkegaard here means New
Testament scholarship, exegesis, which turns everything into something
problematic, thereby cutting the roots off every form of radicality.
Dreier certainly read Kierkegaard. “The time is not so far off,” Dreier
wrote, “when the same thing will happen to the pastors as happened to the
Roman augurs: When they encountered one another in their black cowls
and their ruff collars—oh, what a tasteful getup!—they could hardly keep
from laughing at one another.” This venomous little aphorism might well
have been inspired by Kierkegaard, who had written something similar in
Either/Or. The specific criticism of those who earn their living as pastors
was Dreier’s little twist, however—and it was precisely this detail that reap-
peared in Kierkegaard’s writings three years later, as a remarkable sort of
thank-you: “When paganism was disintegrating, there were some priests
called augurs. It was said of them that one augur could not look at another
without grinning. In ‘Christendom’ it may soon be the case that no one
will be able to look at a pastor—or indeed, it will soon be the case that one
person willnot beable to lookat another—withoutgrinning: for,of course,
we are all pastors.”
TheparallelswithDreier—whichcanbedocumentedwithmanylengthy
passages—themselves demonstrate that Kierkegaard’s social and political
views had undergone an appreciable transformation since the mid-1840s,
when his old-fashioned conservative notions had been dominant. His views
from that era could serve as a defense of social oppression, but based on his
new insights, he had now come to a series of far-reaching conclusions that
revealed the one-sidedness and hypocrisy of his earlier opinions. Still, both
inhisearlierandinhissubsequentwritings,Kierkegaard’sdeclaredsolidarity
with the common man remained intact: “Truly, truly, this, too, is some-
thing I have felt and acknowledged, and it has always been a source of
indescribable inspiration to me that, before God, it is just as important to
be a maidservant, if that is what one is, as to be the most eminent genius.
This is also the source of my almost exaggerated sympathy for the simple
class of people, the common man. And therefore I can get depressed and
sad, because they have been taught to laugh at me, thereby cutting them-
selves off from the one person in this country who has loved them most
sincerely. No, it is the cultivated and well-to-do class, if not the aristocrats,
then at least the aristocratic bourgeoisie—they must be targeted, that is
where the prices must be jacked up in the salon.”