the prescribed six feet, polemics spouted unhindered from Kierkegaard’s
pen, and the clergy, shaken, was universally scandalized. “We have really
had an unpleasant time with Søren Kierkegaard’s attack on Mynster,” Just
Paulli wrote an acquaintance in mid-February. “It is truly disgraceful to
exploit Christianity as Kierkegaard does, using it to stir up a fuss. There is
something demonic about his vanity. Everything about him is calculated.
From his conversations—in earlier times we used to take walks together—
I had certainly long been aware that he believed that he himself was the
man to promote Christianity among us, and I gave him my honest opinion
about what was awry and dangerous in his writings.”
This Kierkegaard could not calculate everything, however. In the course
of March, the Schlegels were busy packing up their home, for Schlegel had
been appointed governor of the Danish West Indies, where he and his wife
would spend the next five years. On March 17, the very day of their depar-
ture, Regine left the ghostly apartment on Bredgade for a walk around town
in the hope of meeting her Søren. Whether or not it was one last, generous
gesture of Governance toward these two, whose lives had been bound to-
gether so impossibly, before long, she caught sight of the well-known figure
in the broad-brimmed hat. As she passed by, she said with a voice so soft,
it could just barely be heard, “God bless you—may all go well with you!”
Kierkegaard was quite stunned, but then he managed to tip his hat and greet
his old love—for the last time ever.
Then Regine hurried back to the apartment on Bredgade, acting as
though nothing had happened.
“Quite Simply: I Want Honesty”
In the course of the next five months Kierkegaard wrote almost a score of
articles forFædrelandet, more than half of which were published in the
course of just twelve days. It was a veritable carpet bombing with polemics.
Martensen was short of both allies and ammunition, and he asked Gude
several times for appropriate material with which to combat the “Kierke-
gaardian fuss,” as he put it in letter dated March 21. In this same letter, the
bishop, who had now made his first official visitations to Mynster’s old
precincts, confided the following: “I have had many insights into the very
miserable conditions and circumstances that characterize the ecclesiastical
situation. There are certainly things in the State Church that neither can be
nor ought to be retained. And the clergy includes a good many members
for whose sake it would not be worth supporting any ecclesiastical Establish-