confessor and court and castle pastor in 1828, and that he would fill the
post of bishop of Zealand and primate of the Danish State Church from
September 1834 until his death in January 1854.
“When I Look at Mynster—”
This, then, was the powerful man who had made Kierkegaard wait in the
anteroom without suspecting that in so doing he was contributing to a
catastrophic depreciation of his own posthumous reputation. There were
obvious differences between the two, the old ecclesiastic inside, and the
brilliant little fellow waiting outside; the most marked of these was that
Mynster regarded Christianity as a great source of reassurance and relief,
while Kierkegaard saw it as a scandalous reversal of all human and cultural
values, a permanent conflict with the world. But if the differences are strik-
ing, the similarities are as well. Indeed, it almost seems as though we are
dealing with two similar lives, parallel, but displaced laterally with respect
to one another: Each bore the profound stamp of a stern father; each stood
in the shadow of a capable and dominating elder brother, from whom each
distanced himself only many years later; each was sensitive almost to the
point of delicacy, burning for wild, always impossible love; one spoke of his
inner darkness, the other of his melancholia; both often felt misunderstood,
isolated; from an early age, both were ambitious and had an itch to write;
both had an aristocratic temperament that hovered in the oddest way be-
tween distinguished bearing and hypochondria, between radical feelings of
inferiority and sky-high self-esteem; both looked with disdain upon the
political revolt then taking place; both were monarchical conservatives,
Mynster on the right side of the right wing, Kierkegaard on the left side of
it; both felt an antipathy, bordering on hostility, toward Grundtvig and the
babblings of popular Grundtvigianism; both were negatively inclined to-
ward Hegel and toward the speculative philosophy favored by Copenhagen
elite culture.
Despite all these similarities, they only followed each other warily and at
a distance—at any rate until 1846. Mynster had readFear and Trembling, the
first collections ofEdifying Discourses(which he in fact praised), and the
occasional discourses Kierkegaard published in 1845, which in their tone
and form were remniscent of his own earlier sermons and therefore won
his approval. And that of others. Thus in a letter to Mynster, dated Decem-
ber 27, 1847, Carsten Hauch expressed his thanks for some sermons Myn-
ster had sent him that he had just finished reading: “I have also read Kierke-