Soren Kierkegaard

difficulty brought a sigh or a scolding from him, the latter sometimes lasting
many days.” The stepfather was of a prosaic nature and believed that poetry
was something for only women and young people; he insisted on being an
autodidact but read nothing, which made his opinions increasingly one-
sided and trivial.
Worst of all, however, he was an awkward combination of hearty fellow
and pietist or—as his stepson put it—“much too sincere and lively a man
to be what one could call dull.” Even though he himself never set foot
inside a church, he forced the children to go, and when they returned home
quite tired, he required them to give him detailed summaries of the sermon
of the day and examined them on a chapter of the Bible. The frequent
evening devotions held in the home were also intolerable: The entire
household would gather in the parlor to watch the heavyset fellow thumb
back and forth through his diaries, looking for something with which he
could amuse the congregation: “It was usually some rather trivial, long-
winded reflections on the world’s sin and unbelief, but also on his own
weaknesses.” These pious exercises were more harmful than beneficial, and
they instilled in Mynster a true disgust for anything that might evensuggest
a stodgy pietism. And despite all this, almost a generation would have to
pass before Mynster would come to the personal conviction that Christ was
not the “bogeyman with which people had terrified me in my childhood.”
When the grotesque evening devotions were over, Jakob Peter and Ole,
together with some of their young friends, went up to their room on the
second floor, room number 5 on the corridor, for a little “fun.” They
brought their favorite books and something to smoke, but if someone had
forgotten his tobacco it was no problem, because the room also housed a
tall East Indian pipe “in which the smoke made lots of noise as it went
through the water and gave off a disgusting odor.” Ole’s friends, including
Henrik Steffens and Grundtvig, who was the son of the strict stepfather’s
sister, gathered here, discussing philosophy and aesthetics and expressing
their passionate support for the ideals of the French Revolution. The star
of the group was Steffens, who was especially excited about geology and
the “World Spirit”; next was Ole, who knew everything and was always
busy with something, but who also had a perverse dash of laziness as well
as a certain sense of distance from his own abilities. Later the three youths
formed a little debating society that they pompously dubbed the “Trifo-
lium,” whose purpose was to toughen their spirits and sharpen their com-
mand of Latin.
When Mynster looked back on his years as little Jakob Peter, his pen was
not guided by sentimentality. True, time and the forces of nature did soften
his stepfather’s frigid nature somewhat, “but in those days almost every