Soren Kierkegaard

start: a real, actual life, a very real, actual life in us; one must not relate to
Christianity via the imagination. Good. But now to Martensen’s exis-
tence—what does it express?... It expresses that he—honestly—has
profited from the great deception that we are all Christians. For all these
distinctions of being the court chaplain, of being a knight, of being cele-
brated at dinners, are essentially related to the illusion that we are, sort of,
all Christians.” The tacit approval of such an illusion reveals that “Mynster
has really demoralized Martensen,” who had adopted the bishop’s category,
a category that was as comfortable as it was profitable: peace. “What does
this peace mean? It means that one guarantees oneself one of the most re-
spected positions in society, with the prospect of an even more respectable
one. And that is where one would like to remain and really enjoy life.
Therefore one must have peace. This is tarted up as Christianity.” All in
all: “What drivel his whole business is.”
Kierkegaard’s malaise seemed already to have reached its culmination
point there, but his reading of section 234 of theDogmatics, on “The Order
of Salvation,” gave him even greater nausea. Here Martensen wrote: “The
individual can develop his charisma in love’s reciprocity with the many
different charismas that are all present and belong to the same kingdom. He
cannot fulfill his sanctification by living in egoistic and sickly fashion as an
‘individual.’ ” Kierkegaard felt struck right in the solar plexus. “Martensen
appears to be directing sarcasm at me with this talk of a sickly, egoistic life
as an individual,” he noted, but he did not lack for a rejoinder: “What
Christianity understands by health is something entirely different from what
the worldly person understands by health. By health, the worldly person
understands saying good-bye to infinite effort, but to be shrewd about finite
goals, to get yourself a lucrative living and a velvet-covered belly as quickly
as possible, to live in aristocratic circles.” After nine years of marriage to
Helene Mathilde Hess, who died in September 1847, Martensen married
Virginie Henriette Constance Bidoulac in November 1848. Kierkegaard
was well-informed about this and could thus continue as follows: “And
when, in addition to this, a man has been married two times, a worldly
person will regard him as very healthy, indeed he will even see it as proof
of unusual healthiness that, in hisEthics, the person himself is capable of
teaching that second marriages are not praiseworthy”—which Martensen
had indeed said on page 84 of hisOutline of the System of Moral Philosophy
from 1841. When a person is capable of bending his own moral principles
like this to suit his own tastes, then everyone can come up with glib remarks
about other people’s sickliness, Kierkegaard snarled, adding this dialectical
conclusion: “See, in this sense I am certainly a sickly person—and an egoist.
To yield to an idea, to lose some of the animal health that selfishly looks