Soren Kierkegaard

lighting, roads, pavement, et cetera, et cetera—there is also eternal blessed-
ness in the hereafter, a need that the state also ought to satisfy (how gener-
ous!) and in the most inexpensive and comfortable manner possible.” It
goes without saying that catering to the religious needs of the citizenry in
this way will unavoidably have a major influence on people’s view of the
New Testament, which started out as an existential “guide for Christians”
and has now become an “historical curiosity, somewhat like a tourist guide
for travelers in a particular country after everything in that country has been
totally changed. Such a guidebook is no longer of any real value for the
travelers in that country, but is very valuable as light reading. As one travels
along comfortably in the train, one reads in the guidebook that ‘here is the
frightful Wolf Pit, where one plunges 70,000 fathoms under the earth.’
While one sits smoking one’s cigar in the cozy dining car, one reads in the
guidebook, ‘here is the den of a gang of bandits who attack and abuse the
traveler.’ Here there is—that is, here therewas, because now it is amusing
to imagine how things used to be—no Wolf Pit, but a railroad, and no gang
of bandits, but a cozy dining car.”
What other people would have called the progress of culture, or even of
civilization, Kierkegaard presented as the deterioration of the race and as
the death of the person of spirit. Kierkegaard presented his genealogy of
pessimism in the fifth issue ofThe Moment: “The race has degenerated to
the point that it no longer gives birth to human beings who can bear the
divinity that is the Christianity of the New Testament.” And in this same
Momentthe reader is given a serious look at the modern, spiritless human
being: “The person of spirit is different from people like us because he is
able to endure isolation, and his rank as a person of spirit is proportionate
to the fortitude with which he can endure isolation, while people such as
us always need ‘the others,’ the herd; we despair and die unless we are
reassured by being in the herd, by having the same opinions as the herd,
etc. But the Christianity of the New Testament is precisely designed for
relating itself to this isolation of a person of spirit. In the New Testament,
Christianity means to love God in hatred of humankind, in hatred of oneself
and thus of all other people, hating father, mother, one’s own child, spouse,
et cetera—the most powerful expression of the most painful isolation.”
Thus modern man and Christianity appear to be totally incompatible.
One is either modern or Christian. The modern Christian does not exist or
exists only if history can be suspended and the eighteen hundred years be-
tween Christ and Christendom can be erased: “Persecution, ill-treatment,
and bloodshed have inflicted no such injury. No, in comparison with the
fundamental damage—official Christianity—they have been helpful, they
have been incalculably helpful....Abolish official Christianity, let persecu-