Soren Kierkegaard

sketch was done with great tenderness and truly catered to Andersen’s van-
ity: He was a “wonder child” who had found “his originality and his im-
mortality” in the fairy tale.
Via Steen Steensen Blicher and Mrs. Gyllembourg, Bremer arrives at her
discussion of the other “branches of art,” represented, for example, by the
sculptors Thorvaldsen, Jerichau, and Bissen, the painters Marstrand, Sonne,
Skovgaard, and Gertner, the composers Hartmann, Rung, and Gade, and
finally the linguists Rask and Molbech. The reader is already a bit out of
breath, but must alsohear what Bremer has to say aboutthe shining “double
stars” in the firmament of scholarly knowledge, the Ørsted brothers, the
jurist Anders Sandøe and the natural scientist Hans Christian, whose discov-
ery of “electro-magnetism” is depicted as movingly as is only possible by
one ignorant of the subject.
Now the tour has finally reached the country’s philosophical thinkers.
Here Bremer a bit uncertainly singles out Tycho Rothe as the leading phi-
losopher, but then she quickly hurries onward to Sibbern, whose storm-
filled youth was obviously of more interest to her than the philosophy he
subsequently elaborated. After him comes “a seedsman in the highest sense
of the word”—no one less than Martensen. By “his living words and his
philosophical writings (highly regarded in Sweden as in Denmark), he
[broadcast] the seeds of a new development of the church’s religious life
and of scientific scholarship through a more profound understanding of
what they essentially are.” Bremer is tireless in praise of her “seedsman”:
“The unusual clarity and distinctness of language with which this richly
gifted thinker can present the most profound speculative principles, and the
interestingandingeniousmannerofhisteachingmakehimapopularwriter.
In hisDogmaticswe await a major work, and not only for the learned. It is
about time that theology developed popular appeal. That was what Our
Lord did eighteen hundred years ago.” This last sentence, at least, makes it
clear that Martensen had not been entirely successful in his private theologi-
cal tutoring of Bremer!
From this exalted notion of the parallels between Christ and Martensen,
Bremer plunges down to make yet another daring comparison: “Whereas
from his central standpoint the brilliant Martensen sheds light upon the
entire sphere of existence and upon all the phenomena of life,So ̈ren Kierke-
gaardstands on his isolated pillar like a Simeon Stylites, his gaze fixed unin-
terruptedly on a single point. He places his microscope over this point,
carefully investigating the tiniest atoms, the most fleeting motions, the in-
nermost alterations. And it is about this that he speaks and writes endless
folios. For him, everything is to be found at this point. But this point is—
the human heart. And—because he unceasingly has this changeable heart