Soren Kierkegaard

production in order to hinder every sort of direct approach—at a time
when, precisely by having taken ownership of all the pseudonyms, I ran the
risk of becoming a sort of authority.” Thus the attack onThe Corsairhad not
been occasioned by moral indignation alone, it had also been strategically
motivated and would endow Kierkegaard with an indefinable ambivalence,
inasmuch as “all possible lies and distortions and nonsense and slander are
employed in order to confuse the reader, thus helping him to become active
on his own and hindering him from entering into a straightforward relation-
ship.” Much more markedly than before, it has now become true that “to
be an author is a deed.”
With this, another deed, the deed of being a pastor, seems to have been
postponed indefinitely yet again. A month earlier Kierkegaard’s idea of be-
coming a pastor had been alive and well. He had even gone up to call on
Bishop Mynster, who listened patiently and recommended that he become
“a country pastor,” which Kierkegaard thought was a littletoolittle, but on
February 7, 1846, he wrote the following in his journal: “It is now my idea
to be trained to become a pastor. For a number of months I have prayed to
God for further help, for it has long been clear to me that I ought not be
an author any more, which is something I want to be either wholly or not
at all. For this reason, I have not started on anything new while reading the
proofs [of thePostscript], only a little review ofTwo Ageswhich again is a
concluding piece.” Scarcely had thePostscriptbeen published, however, be-
fore doubts surfaced: “If only I could make myself become a pastor. After
all, however much my present life has gratified me, out there, in quiet
activity, granting myself a bit of literary productivity in my free moments,
I would breath more easily.”
So Kierkegaard still wanted to be a pastor. Out in the country he could
use his free time to write, which in itself was innocent enough, but by his
own calculations it was a bad sign. Thus, on November 5, 1846, after he
had had a conversation with Mynster, he plainly admitted that the prospect
“of living in complete seclusion and tranquillity out in the country, for
example, has now become a difficult one for me, for I have become rather
embittered and I need the magic of literary productivity in order to forget
all of life’s mean-spirited pettiness.” Twenty days into the following year,
these thoughts returned with renewed intensity: Kierkegaard granted that
a parsonage out in rural surroundings had always appealed to him as an
“idyllic wish in contrast to a strenuous existence,” but the situation in Co-
penhagen had gradually become one that called for “an extraordinary per-
son.” He went on, not without a certain sense of self-esteem, to assert that
“as far as intellectual gifts, abilities, and mental constitution are concerned,