unpublished article dated April 8, 1855, it is clear how important it had
been for Kierkegaard “to use the daily press without coming into contradic-
tion with my views about the daily press.” Still, for the good of the cause,
Kierkegaard brushed aside these various difficulties, and on May 24 the first
issue ofThe Momentwas published; it had a press run of one thousand copies
and included an invitation to subscribe through the publisher, C. A. Reitzel.
As early as July 19, Kierkegaard was able to request that Reitzel print an
additional “five hundred copies ofThe Moment, No. 2,” and ten days later
he noted in quiet triumph thatThe Momentnow had a circulation about
equal to that ofFædrelandet.
Despite Kierkegaard’s insistence that he wanted to carry out his campaign
as “an individual,” his newsletter was nonetheless a break with his previous
principles, and Sibbern could scarcely believe his own aged eyes when he
saw the first issue ofThe Moment. Not only did he have some doubts about
whether Kierkegaard really had a “Christian disposition and temperament,
... although he certainly must have had something of that sort,” he was
also surprised that Kierkegaard, “who hated agitation the whole time I knew
him, himself became a zealous agitator.” Martensen also noted this reversal:
“Here he addressed himself to the masses—he, who had previously dis-
dained the masses and had only sought a quiet encounter with the individ-
ual.” Nor was it long before Kierkegaard himself began to sense the discrep-
ancy between the message and the medium, between personal protest and
public broadcast. On August 30, when he considered the effect he was
having, he found no fault with the interest people had taken in his cause.
There was absolutely no doubt that people were reading him, but the next
step people took was quite literally in the wrong direction: “The next Sun-
day, people go to church as usual. What K. says is basically true, and it is
very interesting to read what he has to say—that the whole of the official
worship of God consists of making a fool of God, that it is blasphemy. But
we are used to it, after all, and we cannot free ourselves from it; we don’t
have the strength to do so. Still, it is certain that we will take great pleasure
in reading what he writes; one can really become very impatient to get hold
of the latest issue and learn more concerning this criminal matter, which is
undeniably of enormous interest.” Naturally, Kierkegaard found this sort
of interest deplorable, and it served only to confirm him in his belief that
Christianity had been abolished and that “in our times, people are not even
in what I would call a state of religion, but are alien to and unacquainted
with the sort of passion every religion must require, and without which one
cannot have any religion, least of all Christianity.”