contemporary figure Kierkegaard mentioned most frequently in his jour-
nals. Mynster’s posthumous reputation was thus shaped, to an extent that
would have terrified him, by his relationship with Kierkegaard—who for
his part was not satisfied with bringing only Regine with him into history.
Mynster did have his own history, however, and despite his various ad-
ministrative chores, his time-consuming official visitations, his service on
the boards of countless organizations, he managed to find the time to write
his memoirs, which he soberly titledCommunications concerning My Life.It
had taken him just under a year. The preface was dated February 2, 1846,
and on January 21, 1847, he blotted dry the ink on the final pages. So he
put the manuscript away, but he took it out again on September 13, 1852,
because he wanted to make some minor changes in the despondent tone
with which he had earlier concluded the memoirs. But the work was not
published until after Mynster’s son Frederik Joachim—to his surprise—dis-
covered the manuscript as he was going through his father’s papers after the
bishop’s death. Mynster’s son added a short preface and a brief postscript
and published it in mid-April 1854.
Thus Mynster had begun and concluded his autobiography during the
period that Kierkegaard had started calling on him systematically. It seems
a malicious irony that Kierkegaard’s journal entries describing their conver-
sations came to form the beginning of a story about Mynster that not only
concluded quite differently from Mynster’s own story about himself but
was also accepted quite uncritically by subsequent generations, who have
viewed Mynster from Kierkegaard’s point of view, and never Kierkegaard
from Mynster’s.
And this has tended to blind us to the obvious parallels between the two men.
Jakob Peter Mynster
Communications concerning My Lifeis divided into five large sections that pro-
vide a chronological narrative of Mynster’s life from his childhood until old
age. “The biography,” he explains near the end of the book, “was written
in much haste, and for the most part it was just as hastily conceived. I have
had neither the time nor the desire to rewrite it, and I have been most
inclined to commit these pages to the flames.” The tone is subdued, at times
dry, occasionally ironic and with a dash of satire. The book displays not a
little self-esteem, but this was typical of the times, for one thing, and it is
often counterbalanced by an unfeigned sense of inferiority, for another—
and in any event, as the years passed, Mynster did in fact have something
about which to feel self-esteem. Nonetheless, the preface quite modestly