Soren Kierkegaard

energy that if he himself were a pastor he would consign the humorist
Johannes Climacus to Satan so that he, Christensen, might thereby once
again “be able truly to loveMagister Kierkegaard, whom I can never stop
loving.” The point of Christensen’s remark was that the pseudonyms had
put Kierkegaard in the shade, but in his typical manner Kierkegaard had
now come up with hisrejoinderand blithely ignored the rest of the matter.
“An Unhappy Lover in theDanish Church Times” was the title of the article
in which Kierkegaard, full of caustic delight, discussed Christensen’s un-
happy love. Kierkegaard noted, rather unlovingly, that “next to smoke and
drafts and bedbugs, I know of nothing more calamitous than to be the object
of someone’s mental fixation.” “If I were to say, ‘Mr. Christensen, take
hold of yourself. For your own sake (because you mustn’t do anything for
my sake), but for your own sake consider what an unhappy passion of this
sort can lead to. Consider that it is also unfaithfulness on your part to run
after me like this—you who, as a Grundtvigian, are engaged to someone
else’—if I were to say this, it probably would not help.” What was at stake
here was certainly not the matter itself, but Christensen the person, whom
Kierkegaard a couple of years later would call “a raving mad Grundtvigian.”
Kierkegaard did in fact become the object of something as calamitous as
a mental fixation when the Icelander Magnus Eiriksson pledged him his
unconditional allegiance. On November 19, 1846, Eiriksson, a rather ec-
centric theologian, a bachelor, and a sort of patriarch of the Icelandic com-
munity in Copenhagen, published a book with a title long enough to be in
the record books:The Confused, Idealistic-Metaphysical, Fantastical-Speculative,
Religion- and Christianity-Subverting, Fatalistic, Pantheistic, and Self-Deifying
Essence of Dr. H. Martensen’s Published Moral Laws, or the So-Called “Outline
of the System of Moral Philosophy of Dr. Hans Martensen.”As we can sense,
Eiriksson, who was not one to soften his views, was utterlyopposed toMar-
tensen, but, alas, all the morein favor ofKierkegaard. In one of a number of
lengthy articles, Kierkegaard replied to this “raging Roland, the combative
Magnus Eiriksson, who in frightful fashion fondles me in the most obliging
and appreciative terms.” When he first saw the book advertised inAdressea-
visenwith its grotesquely long title, Kierkegaard thought it was a “trick,”
the purpose of which was merely “to get this terror-inducing, outrageous,
nonsensical-martial, self-infatuated public notice printed and read by as
many people as possible.” “Of course I have not read the book,” Kierke-
gaard continued, but he had at any rate gathered that Eiriksson’s intention
was to get Martensen fired, and that in furtherance of this goal he had
invoked thePostscript. “This is the sort of admiring recognition that I call a
literary assault.” No, in fact it was worse than this, it was an “attack upon
my amatory absorption in the problems,” which was especially horrible