residence, and now I am sitting at my wor ktable, the place where Mynster
spent his many blessed years. The other evening I sat up long into the night
in this extraordinary solitude and quiet.” Two months earlier, on August
21, Martensen’s wife had given birth to their “fine and healthy little daugh-
ter,” whom they named Virginie. After giving birth, Mrs. Martensen had
been overwhelmed by a “marked case of spasms”; later she had “severe
neurasthenia” as well as “inflammation in one breast.” But now Martensen
could breathe easier: “Praise God, the real danger is past. Of course, we
must learn to be patient.” On November 12, the bishop put pen to paper
once again: He was busy, beset by the duties of his office—but to Gude he
did have to admit, “Yes, you are right. I am now living at one of the most
beautiful points in existence.”
Five weeks later, all hell would break loose.
“—That Is How a Witness to the Truth is Buried!”
On December 18, 1854, Kierkegaard published his protest. It appeared in
Fædrelandetunder the heading “Was Bishop Mynster a ‘Witness to the
Truth,’ One of ‘The Authentic Witnesses to the Truth?’ IsThis the Truth?”
This might be termed a rhetorical question. After a brief account of Mar-
tensen’s sermon, Kierkegaard presented the authentic version of an authen-
tic witness to the truth: “A witness to the truth is a man whose life, from
beginning to end, is unacquainted with everything that goes by the name
of enjoyment....Awitness to the truth is a man who, in poverty, witnesses
to the truth, in poverty, in lowliness and degradation, so unappreciated,
hated, abominated, so ridiculed, mocked, scorned—.... A witness to the
truth, one of the authentic witnesses to the truth, is a man who is flogged,
mistreated, dragged from one prison to another, and then finally (the final
promotion whereby he is awarded first-class membership in the Christian
order of precedence and is placed among the authentic witnesses to the
truth)—then finally (for after all, Prof. Martensen is speaking of one of the
authentic witnesses to the truth)—then finally he is crucified or beheaded
or burned or broiled on a grill, his lifeless body thrown in some out-of-the-
way place by the executioner’s assistant, unburied—that is how a witness
to the truth is buried!” And that, of course, was not how Mynster had been
buried. On the contrary, his burial had taken place quite literally with “all
pomp and music”; this, however, did have a certain logic to it, inasmuch
as in reality Mynster had merely been “weak, pleasure-mad, and great only
as an orator.” The conclusion was thus that “Bishop Mynster’s preaching
of Christianity tones down, covers up, suppresses, and omits some of the
most decisively Christian tenets.”