violence, the sophistry of the tangible)—but there will be nothing reminis-
cent of Socrates.”
If this was a prophetic passage, its fulfillment depended in large measure
on the prophet himself. He had become aware that a new era could only
begin if someone took upon himself the task of reestablishing eternity in
time. And such a reestablishment could not be accomplished without vio-
lence: “In order to recover eternity, blood will once again be required, but
blood of another sort, not the blood of thousands of slaughtered victims,
no, the more costly blood, that of the individuals—that of the martyrs, those
mighty dead who can do what no living person, who has people cut down
by the thousands, can do; who can do what those mighty dead themselves
were unable to do when they were alive but were able to do only when
dead: compel a raging mob into obedience, precisely because this raging
mob has been permitted, in disobedience, to put the martyr to death.”
God Hates Pyramids
Kierkegaard was not the only person who sat reading page proofs while
mobs of people surged past in the streets below. H. L. Martensen was also
in the process of seeing an important book through the press, and he wrote
about it retrospectively in 1882: “During the unrest of 1848 I had a tranquil
task that directed my thoughts away from the world-historical bustle to
other regions: reading the page proofs of myDogmatics, which was then
ready for publication.”
We are immediately struck by the fact that, unlike Kierkegaard, Mar-
tensen in no way connected his own situation to the political tumult taking
place at the time; on the contrary, his tranquil task led himawayfrom the
bustle of the world. There was no direct connection between the textual
and the actual, between author and task, as was the case with Kierkegaard
and hisChristian Discourses. On the other hand, while Kierkegaard did not
concern himself in any serious way with the material causes underlying the
conflicts of the day, we may at first be surprised by Martensen’s keen sense
of the social and political situation, which is not exactly what we might
have expected, given Martensen’s own social position. His career had been
marked by a brilliant and rapid ascent, and throughout his adult life he had
been quite at home in conservative and ecclesiastical circles that viewed
democratic tendencies with disapproval, were revolted by the idea of par-
liamentary government, and abominated the thought of the emancipation
of women.