Soren Kierkegaard

nate, so to speak,from withinand with as little bias as possible, granting the
assumption that Adlerhadin fact had a revelation. In this connection he
emphasized that the book was not intended to provide a critique in the
traditional sense, and that Adler’s ownpersonwill also be drawn into the
investigation: “Magister Adler is thus not an author. By dint of his revela-
tion-fact he has become a phenomenon. In the midst of reality he is a dra-
matic figure, and it is out of the question to do what is normally required,
to forget him in order to concentrate on his writings. No, this is solely a
matter of using his writings in order to concentrate on him, who by dint
of his revelation-fact has been placed in such an extreme position that he is
either a charlatan or an apostle.” Given this radical set of alternatives—
charlatan or apostle—we more than suspect what the final outcome of the
investigation will be, and we have to grant Kierkegaard that his undertaking
is an unusual one: “In addition I myself know very well how strange the
whole business appears. In dealing with an author who hitherto has not
been read particularly much, I am writing a book that presumably will not
be much read, either. Just as the story is told about those two princely
personages who were so very fat that they exercised by circling around each
other—thus, in a little country it can easily become an exercise for writers
to circle around each other.”
In the beginning, however, it was mostly Kierkegaard who circled
around himself. Thus, large portions of the first chapter, which treats the
relationship between the “extraordinary” person and an ethical-religious
“existing order,” are related to the problems posed inFear and Trembling.
Similarly, when Kierkegaard argues in the second chapter that a contempo-
rary revelation (in this case, Adler’s) does not differ in its paradoxicality from
the incarnation, he is repeating a series of positions he took and points he
made in theFragmentsand thePostscript, to which he frequently refers in
long footnotes. In these chapters Adler functions chiefly as a mere occasion,
and he himself is rarely the focus of the analyses. Adler only becomes a
central figure in chapter three, which includes a careful reading of the docu-
ments presented inPapers Related to My Suspension and Dismissal. At eighty-
three pages, this is the longest chapter in the book, and here Kierkegaard
reveals himself to be a formidable inquisitor who pursues even the least
details of the case with an almost metaphysical zeal in order to lay bare his
opponent’s self-contradictions in the most excruciating fashion; in doing
this Kierkegaard of course occasionally slips into the defiantly gloating and
sophomoric style he never quite outgrew.
As the case dragged on, things of course became a little hot for Adler. In
one of his replies to the ecclesiastical authorities, he therefore attempted
to temporize a bit, claiming that perhaps the revelation mentioned in his