Soren Kierkegaard

eat at Mynster’s table, so now he had no one to talk to. “I found that the
total solitude, which in a normal day was only interrupted by tiresome
nonsense, gradually became altogether too oppressive.”
On one of the unusual occasions when Mynster expected company, an
uninvited guest showed up unannounced. It was Grundtvig, then a curate
in the village of Udby, still fairly young but already beginning to lose his
hair; he had decided to pay a visit to Mynster, his colleague and cousin, and
eight years his senior. Even though it was something of an inconvenience,
Mynster did set aside a couple of hours to converse with Nikolaj Frederik
Severinus, who discoursed expansively on poetry and Greek tragedy—“and
I had plenty of opportunity to be amazed at the spirit with which he passed
judgment on things about which he had no knowledge at all. Naturally,
Grundtvig found me cold and not open toward him. I really had no desire
to become better acquainted with him.” But Mynster could not avoid hav-
ing any further relationship with him, for Grundtvig went on to become
one of Mynster’s most vocal critics as well as one of his least favorite people.
Mynster could not stand the fellow; he found him boisterous and eccentric,
yet nonetheless unoriginal: “When Oehlenschla ̈ger tuned his Nordic harp,
Grundtvig had to get one like it,” wrote Mynster in a typical indictment.
Nor did Grundtvig’s historical works earn him Mynster’s respect: “For we
know Grundtvig’s prophecies—they are usually not fulfilled.” Mynster la-
beled as “idolatry” the Grundtvigian belief that the Apostles’ Creed served
as the link to the historical Jesus, and when the journalScandinavian Church
Timesbegan to fire Grundtvigian salvos at Mynster as the representative of
the State Church, he labeled the attacks “violent and boorish.”
Mynster had become truly bored with his “Spjellerupish life.” A pastoral
call in Gentofte, just north of Copenhagen, was briefly a possibility, but
when the position of first resident curate at the Church of Our Lady in
Copenhagen became available, Mynster was not in doubt. Count Moltke
arranged for him to have an audience with the king, and he was appointed
to the position on December 13, 1811. A little more than a month later he
gave his farewell sermon in Spjellerup, and the following Sunday, when he
was with his congregation for the last time, he heard his old diocesan dean
effuse about the newly departed pastor as a man who had not “merely en-
deavored to teach properly, but also to live properly.”
During the late summer of 1812, having auctioned off his personal effects
at the parsonage in Spjellerup, Mynster rented some modest, cozy rooms
in the garret of a house on Gammeltorv. This was where he spent his after-
noons and evenings, undisturbed by the thundering city—“the noise of
which I could hear under my feet”—and on the quiet summer evenings,
when the tranquil darkness descended, he could hear the gentle splashing