Soren Kierkegaard

tions that Kierkegaard has not lived, has not suffered, in vain, but that his
words have penetrated into many hearts; that in his life he opened the eyes
of many to the falsity and corruption in the lazy habits and self-deification
of our Church; that he won many true friends who value him and his work
and will preserve and propagate his memory.”
One of those who most doggedly sought to “propagate the memory” of
Kierkegaard during these years was Mogens Abraham Sommer. He was a
charlatan, charismatic, great as a plagiarist, and a religious chameleon with
a varied background in Grundtvigianism, the Inner Mission movement, the
Baptists, the Adventists, and other circles. Similarly, in the worldly sphere,
this son of a sailor from Ribe tried his luck at a little of everything, ranging
from carpenter, to tailor, office worker, copyist, self-styled homeopath, and
as a private tutor specializing in the cure of souls at Haderslev Prison. Even
his name was false, inasmuch as in the language of Jutland, the Jewish
“Schomeˆr,” meaning “watchman,” had become the “Sommer” [Danish:
“summer”] that seemed so full of promise. He was already in full swing
when Kierkegaard’s attack on the church broke out, but the nine issues of
The Momenttruly fired him up. In his memoirs, modestly entitledStages on
Life’s Way, Sommer referred to the articles in the various issues ofThe
Momentas some of his most important sources. It is not clear whether or to
what extent he ever had personal contact with Kierkegaard. He himself
claimed that after writing to Kierkegaard a number of times, he had gone
to call on the master one day and had managed to tell the man “what I felt
about him.” Kierkegaard had supposedly listened and then replied: “That
is good, my friend! Just keep to the New Testament and you will not go
wrong. Go with God!” Thereupon, Sommer recounted, “Tears ran down
my cheeks. My heart said ‘Amen!’” Sommer omitted this emotion-
drenched scene in the second edition of his memoirs, perhaps because it
had only been a dream. Although he was not one to insist on the petty
distinction between dream and reality, Sommer nonetheless wanted to ap-
pear credible.
Sommer saw himself as Kierkegaard’s legitimate heir, and the dundering
demagogue proclaimed this to all the world on his endless road trips, arguing
for the formation of small, “pure” Kierkegaard-congregations that would
cut themselves off from the world and break with the church. Through his
private pestering and public pamphleteering, Sommer managed to harass
Peter Christian Kierkegaard (who, in Sommer’s view, did not represent
“the Christianity of the New Testament”) to the point that in 1866 the
bishop was compelled to rebut Sommer’s criticisms at a public forum in
Aalborg. Sommer’s message was quite compatible with the socialism he
embraced in the early 1870s, and as late as 1881, he was issuing demands