Soren Kierkegaard

began to play the game of pretending and for a time seized the opportunity
to appear on stage in a little theater in Nyhavn, where he was especially
successful with “roles for ladies.” And when he played the role of Else in
the playThe Ridiculously Sensitivehe looked so lovely that a male guest later
informed him that he would have fallen in love with him but for the little
circumstance that he was not a woman.
At the age of fifteen Jakob Peter took his university entrance examina-
tions,receivedtopmarksinallsubjects,andthatsameyear,1790,hematric-
ulated into the university to study theology, in accordance with his stepfa-
ther’s wishes. He went to the lectures “reasonably diligently,” but found
them “only minimally instructive.” Mynster, who had long been “small-
bodied and thin-voiced,” now suddenly became a “long, lanky person
whom everyone thought was destined to die of consumption....Asacon-
sequence of this rapid growth I had weak nerves; I often felt ill, though
without any actual illness.” On July 14, 1794, not yet nineteen years old, he
lefttheuniversity withhistheologicaldegree,having receivedtophonorsin
all disciplines.
Mynster did not have to concern himself about what he would do next.
His stepfather had long since decided that he would be a private tutor for
Count Joachim Godske Moltke’s only son, nine-year-old Adam Vilhelm.
The stepson yielded to the wishes of his stepfather. To him, one position
was as good as another, because at root only one thing mattered: “The task
with which I was unceasingly confronted, which almost consumed me, and
many times brought me to the verge of despair, was how I would amount
to anything in the spiritual sense.” We cannot help but be reminded that
Kierkegaard was not the first person to search for an idea for which he could
live and die.
In 1784 Moltke had resigned as prime minister and now spent his sum-
mers at Bregentved, his estate, and his winters in his palace in Copenhagen.
His wife, Countess Georgine, was gentle, amiable, quiet—indeed, shy—
andasarule Mynstersawonlytheservingstaffatthe eveningmeal,atwhich
the other guests included an older, German-speaking private secretary and
the count’s sickly sister, who lived at the estate. The conversation at the
table was “not very lively”; the atmosphere was strangely antique and the
tone was always dry, so when the meal was over everyone went to bed—
excepting the young private tutor who loved to spend the late evening
hours in the company of a book.
Mynster’s eight years at the estate were above all eight years with books--
books that developed and matured him. New and unsuspected areas of
growth and interest were kindled when he would disappear into the exten-
sive library of Vemmetofte Monastery. Adam Vilhelm, whom Mynster was