prevailing social and ethical norms. Because “when an individual, in accor-
dance with the New Testament, relates himself primitively to God like this
and understands it in his own way, then, unless he lets go of it, he will have
a collision.”
Kierkegaard’s critique of cultivation, which began as a critique of the
Heiberg dynasty but gradually developed into a broader diagnosis of the
conventionalism of the culture of cultivation—where cultivation becomes
merely higher-order bourgeois philistinism—has here been transformed
into a theological torpedo that was guaranteed to collide with the monu-
ments and shrines of cultural Protestantism. A Christianity from which “the
terror has been removed” is in fact no Christianity at all, but has become
mere civic virtue and other forms of philistinism. It is thus quite ludicrous—
as Climacus explains in hisPostscript—“to see people, who are Christians
solely by virtue of their baptismal certificates, behave a`la Christians on
ceremonial occasions. Because the most ludicrous thing which Christianity
can ever become is to be what in the trivial sense is called ‘customary prac-
tice.’ To be persecuted, abominated, scorned, mocked, or to be blessed and
praised—this is appropriate for the greatest of all powers. But to become a
mild-mannered custom, good taste, and the like is its absolute opposite.”
Or, in its most abbreviated form: “The more cultivation and knowledge,
the more difficult it is to become a Christian.”
Postscript: Kierkegaard
With this emphatic statement, Kierkegaard intended to bid his cultivated
age an anxiety-laden adieu. The official leave-taking of his authorial career
took place on February 27, 1846, with the publication ofConcluding Unsci-
entific Postscript to the Philosophical Fragments. A Mimical-pathetical-dialectical
Compilation. An Existential Contribution b yJohannes Climacus. In this work
Climacus presents his reader with a grandiose, panoramic view of every-
thing that had been produced fromEither/Orup to and includingStages on
Life’s Way. Climacus calls his investigation “A Glance at a Contemporary
Effort in Danish Literature,” presenting it indignantly as the unmasking of
literary fraud: For years, a person unknown to Climacus, a certain Magister
Kierkegaard, as well as a number of pseudonymous authors have been pub-
lishing exactly those works that Climacus himself had been of a mind to
write—he had succeeded only in finishingPhilosophical Fragments. This gives
Climacus a great opportunity to provide commentaries on all these writings,
the interrelatedness of which he gauges in such detail that he comes close