Soren Kierkegaard

his most recent discourse about someone who is dead Dr. Søren Kierke-
gaard (who once wrote a discourse ‘On the Wor kof Love in Remembering
Someone Who Is Dead’), will make himself remembered in a manner that
will long protect him against a danger he seems willing to make any sacrifice
to avoid—the danger of being forgotten.” It is certainly true that the dispute
was about the meaning of the term “witness to the truth,” but it was also
about who would occupy which place in history, about who would stand
where in the firmament of the future.
There was a great deal more of this same sort of nastiness, but the worst
of it was a little subordinate clause in which Martensen compared Kierke-
gaard to Thersites, one of the vilest figures in all of Homer, whom the poet
described as follows: “Crooked were his legs; on one of them he limped
badly. His bac kwas hunched,... and thin was the hair on the top of his
head.” There can be no doubt that Kierkegaard understood this compli-
ment; he was very familiar with the second song of theIliad. And indeed,
the day after the publication of Martensen’s article, the shoemaker’s widow
who kept house for Kierkegaard found theBerlingske Tidendetorn to bits
and scattered all over the floor. That same evening there was a dinner party
at the home of the choreographer August Bournonville, who had invited
friends and colleagues from the Royal Theater; the group included Frederik
Ludvig Høedt, who was a successful actor and director but also an enthusias-
tic reader of Kierkegaard, and this proved problematic. “We had a pleasant
time,” Bournonville wrote in his diary, “but Høedt displeases me by de-
fending Søren Kjerkegaard’s vile attack on Mu ̈nster.”
But Martensen’s instructive remarks and episcopal rhetoric were wasted
on Magister Kierkegaard, who merely repeated his protest in the December
30 issue ofFædrelandet: “To represent a man who even in his preaching of
Christianity has attained and enjoyed, on the grandest scale, all possible
material goods and advantages—to represent him as a witness to the truth,
as part of the holy chain, is just as ludicrous as to spea kof a virgin with a
large floc kof children.” There are many things one can be “in addition,”
Kierkegaard explained pedagogically. One can be “both this and that and
in addition an amateur violinist.” It is different with being a “witness to the
truth,” which is in fact a very “imperious, a most unsocial category” that
does not permit itself to be linked with any other, and if, in spite of this,
the attempt is made to do so, then “one must say with Christian exactitude,
that this was a Devil of a witness to the truth.”
On January 2, 1855, Martensen wrote to Gude, expressing his delight
that his friend had viewed his article against Kierkegaard as a “well-deserved
slap.” Martensen explained that he had been compelled by his piety toward
Mynster to rebut “that outrageous attack,” even though he had no desire