Soren Kierkegaard

tle, to trick God out of Christianity, turning Christianity into exactly the
opposite of what it is in the New Testament.” On this same occasion Kier-
kegaard insisted that he was not a “reformer,” a “seer,” or a “prophet,”
but rather “an unusually talented police detective.” Two days later, March
30, Kierkegaard was so pointed in his critique of religion that it must have
sent the men in black into a swoon: “If the human race had risen in rebel-
lion against God and had rejected or rebuffed Christianity, it would not
have been nearly as dangerous as this underhanded behavior that has abol-
ished Christianity by propagating it in a false and untrue manner.” Kierke-
gaard developed this idea the next day, March 31, in an article with the
interrogatory title “What Do I Want?” to which he himself provided the
answer: “Quite simply, I want honesty.... I am willing to dare for this
honesty. But on the other hand, I am not saying that it is for Christianity
that I dare. Assume this, assume that I became quite literally a sacrifice: I
would not, however, have become a sacrifice for Christianity, but because
I wanted honesty.”
Martensen was at his wits’ end. He reacted with defensiveness and out-
rage, reporting the following to Gude in a letter of April 2: “So Kierkegaard
has begun a new scandal with his ceaseless newspaper articles. I have not
read them but have heard oral summaries of them. Oh, this fellow reveals
himself in an increasingly frightful manner. It furthermore seems to me that
even in intellectual terms, quite apart from the moral side of the issue, he
prostitutes himself with these narrow-minded attacks, exposing himself as
a person who simply has not paid attention to the limitations of his own
talents. Here we see clearly what he is capable of in the realm of direct
communication. It would be interesting to know what Rasmus Nielsen
now thinks about the either/or he proposed in his first article. But I have
seen absolutely nothing of him, nor do I wish to.”
A week earlier, Carsten Hauch had written a letter to Ingemann, declar-
ing himself in complete agreement with the latter’s “judgment of Kierke-
gaard’s behavior.” Ingemann had expressed his indignation at “the support
the impudence and shamelessness of this sophistry has found among young
people, to whom this cruel clowning with the truth seems brilliant.” Six
years earlier, when Hauch had thanked Kierkegaard for sending him a copy
ofEither/Or, he had assured Kierkegaard that this was certainly the book
he would take along if he ever had to serve time in prison.
Magdalene Hansen, a sister of the painter Christen Købke and the wife
of his colleague, the painter Constantin Hansen, expressed herself much
more charitably in a letter to Baroness Elise Stampe: “It has also been a
continuing source of sorrow to me to hear people tear Kierkegaard apart
and, so to speak, diligently deafen themselves to the truth in his conduct so