Soren Kierkegaard

in which this very same “Superintendent” (the primate of the Danish
Church) is first grilled over a slow fire and then served in a spicy sauce.
Kierkegaard puts a quite theatrical stamp on the hypocrisy: “Julie and Fanny
are the Privy Councillor’s daughters. They are discussing the feast,...and
Julie says, ‘Believe me, it is very burdensome and inconvenient for the
Superintendent to participate in feasts like this. He would much rather live
in poverty—did you hear him last Sunday?” And Fanny (who of course had
the same name as Mynster’s wife!) had indeed heard him preach, and there-
fore she is doubly delighted that the Superintendent now “deigns to be with
us—and with the turtle.” Fanny and Julie are full of religious rapture: Oh,
that Superintendent, he is really something! And Kierkegaard concludes:
“That is how to have turtle in a really uniquely piquant sauce—no wonder
it has such exceptional flavor.”
Kierkegaard, too, appreciated a good dinner, and he did not subscribe to
a double standard of morality that would have forbidden Mynster to do
what Kierkegaard himself did to excess. Mynster would not have been a
better Christian if instead of turtle and vintage wines he had dined on a
quarter piece of zwieback and a little lukewarm water. Rather, Kierke-
gaard’s critical point was to emphasize the hypocritical doubling of pleasure
that takes place when one starts out the day preaching poverty and finishes
it off slurping up turtle soup—andlets it be known that one would really
rather not!
ThedistasteawakenedinKierkegaardbythishypocrisywasaccompanied
by the worry that worldliness had been given free rein quite as a matter of
course, so that the prevailing culture would triumph without any resistance.
The tale about the turtle feast was thus actually a tale about the triumph of
history—about the final conquest of Christianity by cultivated society. And
this was exactly the terrain in which Kierkegaard situated the highly pol-
ished Mynster: “What is great in him is a personal virtuosity a`la Goethe.
This explains why he has a certain dignity of bearing, but his life does not
actually express anything....ForMynster, preaching in the marketplace
would be quite impossible—indeed, the most impossible of all things. And
yet this business of preaching in churches has become something close to
paganism and theater, and Luther very rightly gave eager support to the
notion that there really should not be preaching in churches. In paganism
the theater was divine worship—in Christianity the churches have generally
become theater. How so? Like this: People find it pleasant and not without
a certain enjoyment to commune with the Most High via the imagination
once a week like this. But nothing more. And this has actually become the