Soren Kierkegaard

had become a part ofthatrelationship, it was almost impossible to get him
or her out of it again. The same thing had indeed happened with Regine,
who had earlier served as the occasion that enabled Kierkegaard to come
to greater clarity about his own task. Now God was using someone else, a
man, Nielsen: “The fact is, I am the person who is to be brought up, and
for this purpose someone like this is used and is brought into my God
relationship.” Nielsen was not the end, he was the means by which Kierke-
gaard attained his end: “I always need a person at the point that I am to
make a sharp turn. To me, he will be what that little girl once was, though
to a much lesser degree.” Where the relationship with Regine had been
emotional, the relationship with Nielsen was one of principle. That was
how the two cases differed. The similarity, on the other hand, was that in
both cases, even though Kierkegaard realized quite early that the relation-
ship had no future, he left it to the other party to sever the connection.
This process can be followed in Kierkegaard’s and Nielsen’s relatively
detailed correspondence during the summer of 1849. Among Professor
Nielsen’s privileges were the long vacations he spent north of Copenhagen
in a pretty spot between Lyngby and Ta ̊rbæk, from which he wrote letters
to his walking companion back in the stinking city. It was not long, how-
ever, before Kierkegaard’s letters began to bulge oddly, full of suspicion.
For example, after he sent Nielsen a copy ofThe Sickness unto Deathhot off
the printing press, Nielsen immediately read it and thanked him profoundly
for it on July 28: “Dear Mr. Magister! Thank you for the note, many thanks
forthebook,athousandthanksforthecontentsofthebook.”ThenNielsen
added some reflections on the relation between Climacus and Anti-Clima-
cus, who in his view had a number of similarities, for example, in the way
they defined offense. Kierkegaard’s reply of August 4 inexplicably went
astray in the mail, but he had been farsighted enough to make a copy of it:
“What an anticlimax! Is this appropriate for a professor of logic? You thank
a ‘thousand times’ for the contents of the book, less for the book, least for
the note.—You surely forget that I am only the editor, so that when you
write to me the climax ought to be reversed.” Kierkegaard’s objection was
thus the following: He himself was only the editor, so Nielsen ought prop-
erly to have thanked him least for the book’s contents, more for the book
itself, and most for the note—after all, that was the only thing that had been
authored by Kierkegaard!
Nielsen would hardly have been delighted with this philosophical repri-
mand, but nonetheless he was not without good humor in his letter of
August 10, when he informed the master, “I have seen the light. I have
made a new discovery. In my last note I observed that Climacus and Anti-
Climacus encountered each other in offense, each coming from opposite