notorious preface had actually only been an “awakening,” by means of
which he had been saved “in a wonderful fashion.” This he later toned
down to the utterly harmless assertion that he had experienced “the onset
of enthusiasm.” Viewed with Kierkegaard’s eyes, Adler had here become
guilty of sheer “lawyerly-pettifogging practice,” for one cannotbothclaim
to have received a divine revelationandshunt aside what has been revealed
in an attempt to appease the ecclesiastical authorities. Here there was an
absolute either/or; any such more-or-less/in-between was absurd. Matters
were not made any better when Adler added that in the future, as he worked
through them, his ideas would gradually become capable of “developing
into a more appropriate form that would be more in accord with the specific
language of the Holy Scriptures.” And things went completely awry when
Adler made excuses, adding that “even if one views mySermonsandStudies
as a child’s first, babbling, feeble, imperfect speech, I still believe that the
words bear witness to the fact that an event has taken place in which I have
been moved by faith.” It was simply improper and impermissible for one
to use this term—childish babbling—to describe something that one else-
where has insisted was written down as the Savior dictated it! Adler had
indulged in “confusion-making of the highest order”
Adler’s slippery slide from his original assertion to his later, fuzzy circum-
locutions was symptomatic of his conceptual confusion and remained one
of the recurrent points of Kierkegaard’s critique. Toward the end of the
third section of the first chapter, Kierkegaard summarized his case with the
following lines (which he later deleted): “Let us repeat it, then. Dated Hasle,
[Bornholm] June 18, 1843, we have before us a man who has been called
by a revelation and who has received from the Savior Himself a teaching
that he has written down in accordance with His dictation.—Dated May
10, 1845, we have before us a man who has been saved in a wonderful
fashion.—Dated July 5, 1845, we have before us a man who in a moment
of enthusiasm has had to seek help in looking to several fixed points of
reference. This man is Magister Adler.”
It simply does not make sense. Not by the laws of nature, at any rate.
Saint Paul and Carpetmaker Hansen
In the second section of chapter three, Kierkegaard moves from the docu-
ments related to the case to a critical reading of Adler’s four publications
from 1846. Here Kierkegaard expresses his amazement that Adler—“as a
lyrical poet in the carefree obscurity of Bornholm”—had apparently com-
pletely forgotten his revelation in order instead to behave like a genius: “In