Soren Kierkegaard

despite the considerable sympathy they had felt for one another, there had
been differences between them. “Whether or not I make use of it, I must
have, and I want, the liberty of being able to spea kout without having to
take a matter of this sort [the gift of the book] into consideration,” he con-
tinued. Thus Kierkegaard did not wish to be in any debt of thankfulness to
the family—so the boo kwas sent bac k.
A remark that appears in Kierkegaard’s journals sometime after this makes
it clear that he was nonetheless familiar with the contents of at least portions
of Mynster’sCommunications. For Kierkegaard noted—almost in passing,
but full of sarcasm—that toward the conclusion of his “memoirs” Mynster
had expressed the wish that he might go to his grave an honest man. That
sentiment in fact constituted the final sentence of the book, and Kierkegaard
thus must either have purchasedCommunications, which seems unlikely be-
cause the title was not included in the library he left at his death, or bor-
rowed it from the Athenæum. If we bear in mind how intensely Kierke-
gaard concerned himself with Mynster throughout almost all his life, it
would indeed be remarkable if the man’s memoirs had not piqued Kierke-
gaard’s interest. Regardless of how the boo kcame into his hands, it must
have been terrible for him to ascertain that Mynster did not set aside so
much as a single page to describe their relationship—not even a sentence,
in fact, not a single word! The Kierkegaard family did not appear at all in
Mynster’s memoirs, neither the father—the hosier who had been so de-
voted to the bishop—nor either of his two sons, despite the fact that the
paths of both of them had crisscrossed Mynster’s for more than a generation,
and the younger of the two had seen him frequently during the very period
he wrote hisCommunications, which as noted, covered Mynster’s life all the
way up to September 13, 1852. Martensen, on the other hand, was dis-
cussed, and he was spoken of with a warmth that must have made Kierke-
gaard’s blood run cold. Mynster wrote quite openly about the “love” he
had felt for Martensen, which “had grown with each year” since the begin-
ning of their friendship.
There is no way of knowing whether the painful asymmetry between
Kierkegaard’s love for Mynster and Mynster’s total neglect of Kierkegaard
had a role in precipitating the public attack, but the fact is that his journals
from the period immediately following the publication of the perfidious
Communicationsare awash with entries about Mynster and display an aggres-
siveness not previously seen.
Thus it was Martensen and not Kierkegaard whom Mynster had taken
along with him in hisCommunications, thereby also taking him along as his
successor in the ecclesiastical profession. On October 23, 1854, this same
Martensen wrote to Gude: “So we have finally moved into the episcopal