- Jakob Peter Mynster. “You have no idea what sort of a poisonous plant Mynster was,” the dying
Kierkegaard said to his friend Emil Boesen. And he does not look entirely harmless as he sits here
in the powerful ecclesiastical uniform; paradoxically, his missing teeth lend him a greedy, sharklike air.
As a man of the State Church, he was a careful and efficient administrator, conservative but not really
high-church. Kierkegaard’s relation with Mynster—”my father’s pastor”—was marked by extraor-
dinary ambivalence. Naturally, opinions about Mynster’s personality were divided, but Kierkegaard
was not alone in his misgivings. H. N. Clausen, for example, wrote in his memoirs that “In Roman
cardinals, I have occasionally encountered a similar combination of a fine, polished, social tone and an
unctuous priestliness.”
romina
(Romina)
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