1854
The Death of a Witness to the Truth
“Now he is dead. It would have very desirable if, at the end of his life, he
could have been prevailed upon to make the confession to Christianity
that what he has represented was not really Christianity but a toned-down
version, for he carried the entire age....Nowthat he is dead without
having made that confession, everything is changed; now all that remains is
that his preaching has mired Christianity in an illusion.”
This was Kierkegaard’s first reaction to Mynster’s death. It had come
quite suddenly. During the previous summer he had been able to make his
usual visitation journeys. At times his family had noted that he was “a bit
indisposed,” but his sermon on December 26, 1853, had been marked by
exceptional strength and fervor. That, at any rate, was how Mynster’s eldest
son remembered it. Others had experienced something different. Mar-
tensen, for example, had written the following to his friend Gude on January
4, 1854: “Incidentally, between the two of us, Mynster is quite poorly....
More and more, you notice that he is world-weary, which is no surprise.”
Not long thereafter, Mynster caught cold, then appeared to recover, but
around noon on Saturday, January 28, he felt as though he had had a blow
to his chest and had to lie down. The pain diminished but was replaced
by a drowsiness that was so overpowering that Mynster could regain full
consciousness only in the presence of members of his immediate family. His
powers failed, and at seven o’cloc kon the morning of January 30, 1854,
the seventy-eight-year-old bishop breathed his last.
That same day the front page ofBerlingske Tidendewas emblazoned with
a blac kcross, under which was published the first of the many obituaries
that would run in the nation’s newspapers: “It is with sadness that the news
will be heard all across the land that Jacob Peter Mynster, Bishop of Zealand,
the ornament of the Danish Church, the great witness to the Christian faith,
has completed his life’s course.” Two days later, the same newspaper carried
an elegy by “O. B.”—Oluf Bang, the tireless versifier and Kierkegaard’s
physician—who hailed Mynster as a unique figure of his times. Many other
well-intentioned elegies, including one by B. S. Ingemann, were published
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