Soren Kierkegaard

generous assistance of J .F .Giødwad was employed .Thus on May 18, 1844,
Giødwad had the task of delivering to the printerThe Concept of Anxiety
andPrefaces, both of which were classified as pseudonymous material, while
two days later Kierkegaard himself turned up withThree Edifying Discourses
andPhilosophical Fragments, on the title pages of which his own name ap-
peared .A person can no more disown the unique and recognizable features
of his style than he can his handwriting, and in the letter he had written
Boesen from Berlin, Kierkegaard had indeed referred to his writings as
“healthy, happy, thriving, cheerful, blessed children, easily born, yet all
bearing the birthmark of my personality.” If later literary labors delivered
somewhat more melancholic beings into the world, they, too, always bore
that mark, sometimes so unmistakably that not even the most inventive of
pseudonymous draperies could conceal it .For the style is the man, and the
man, after all, was Kierkegaard.
Moreover, a number of Kierkegaard’s literary colleagues found the con-
tradiction between his disowning of his writings, on the one hand, and
the recognizability of his style, on the other, quite amusing .Among these
colleagues was Henrik Hertz, who in one of his notebooks has Kierkegaard
speak the following lines in his own defense: “I stand quite apart from my
writings, with the exception of the 1,118 edifying discourses... .Just listen!
And then he quotes a passage by each of his personae, texts that are all
similar in type, in language, et cetera.” The discussion ofFour Edifying Dis-
courses, that appeared in the January 1, 1844, issue ofIntelligensbladeunder
the heading “Ecclesiastical Polemics,” was much more respectful .It had
been written by Jakob Peter Mynster, who signed himself “Kts,” having
constructed his anonymous symbol by using the middle letters of his three
names .“I have been very moved,” the bishop wrote, “by the fact that
Mag .S .Kierkegaard always dedicates his edifying discourses to the memory
of his deceased father .For I, too, knew that estimable man .He was a citizen
pure and simple, he went about his business in life quietly and unpreten-
tiously; he had never immersed himself in any philosophical bath .How can
it be, then, that whenever his extremely cultivated son writes his edifying
discourses his thoughts always come back to that man who so long ago was
laid to rest? Anyone who has read the delightful discourse—or let us simply
call it a sermon—‘The Lord Gave, the Lord Taketh Away, Blessed Be the
Name of the Lord’ will understand why .As I myself did, the son saw his
father at times of bitter loss; he saw him fold his hands and bow his venerable
head .He heard his lips speak those words, but he also saw his entire being
pronounce them in such a fashion that he came to feel what he so beautifully
explains about Job... .And what the son learned from his aged father in
the house of sorrow he committed to paper in a sermon that will speak to