Soren Kierkegaard

the four latest books, Adler is merely a genius, pure, unadulterated genius—
and yet he apparently thinks he is still in agreement with his first book. It
has been forgotten that those words in the preface to theSermons(to which
Adler repeatedly returns) had been imparted to him in a revelation in which
they were dictated to him by the Savior. It has been forgotten that the
Sermons(to which Adler frequently refers) had been written in collaboration
with the grace of Jesus.” The situation is grotesque, the confusion is com-
plete, and Kierkegaard reacts with a combination of a humorous shake of
his head and strenuous indignation: “That a man can forget his cane some-
where in town is an innocent enough thing; that a man can forget his name
or even the fact that he is married, and go off and get himself engaged, is
bad enough; but to forget that one has had a revelation—it is a sort of
blasphemy.”
Despite the fact that Adler “maintains a tavern for brilliant wit” in his
books, he nonetheless reflects a typical tendency: He is an exponent of the
aestheticizationthat is characteristic of the times and he is thus capable, in a
Hegelian twinkling of an eye, of transposing Christian categories into purely
human terms: “When the sphere of the paradox is abolished or explained
by being referred back to the aesthetic, an apostle becomes neither more
nor less than a genius, and then good-bye Christianity! Brilliant wit and
spirit and revelation and originality and being called by God and ingenuity
and an apostle and a genius: They all end up amounting to about the same
thing.” In this respect Adler was not notably different from many of his
colleagues: “They speak loftily of the Apostle Paul’s brilliant wit, of his
beautiful metaphors, et cetera—sheer aesthetics. If Saint Paul is to be re-
garded as a genius, then things look pretty bad for him. Only pastoral igno-
rance could hit upon the idea of praising him aesthetically....Itcould as
easily occur to this sort of thoughtless eloquence to praise Saint Paul as a
stylist or a linguistic artist or, even better, since it is known that Saint Paul
also was an artisan, to claim that his achievements as a tentmaker were such
perfect masterpieces that no carpetmaker before or since has been able to
make anything as perfect—for as long as you say something good about
Saint Paul, then everything is all right.” But everything is not all right,
however, if one forgets that the capacity in which Saint Paul acted was that
of anapostle, and that it was by virtue of that capacity that he possessed his
specific qualities: “As a genius, Saint Paul does not bear comparison with
Plato or with Shakespeare. He does not rank particularly high as an author
of beautiful metaphors. He has a totally obscure reputation as a stylist.—
And as a carpetmaker, well, I must say that I do not know how high he
might rank in that respect.” So with respect to Saint Paul the conclusion is
obvious: “As an apostle he has no kinship whatever, not with Plato, nor