Soren Kierkegaard

norm for preaching in Denmark. Hence, this artistic distance—even in the
clumsiest of sermons.”
To put it mildly, Kierkegaard’s description was ungenerous, but he was
far from wrong to situate Mynster closer to Goethe, the refined epitome of
cultivated society, than to Luther, the sturdy reformer of Christendom. The
key concept iscultivation, and Kierkegaard was the first of the cultivated to
empty the concept of its original contents and refill it with new, negative
contents. “Cultivation” would no longer be a term for the complicated
process of the genesis of the self; it would no longer mean one’s individua-
tion in keeping with and in harmony with one’s natural capacities and with
the surrounding culture. No, Kierkegaard associated cultivation with elit-
ism, with good manners and good taste; he slipped a certain snobbism into
the concept, attributing to it the dubious odor of the hoity-toity and the
artsy-fartsy, which it has never quite lost. “Bishop Mynster’s service to
Christianity is really that his considerable personality, his cultivation, his
superiority among the circles of the distinguished and the most aristocratic
people, enabled him to expound the fashion—or, more solemnly, the
agreed principle—that Christianity was something that no really deep and
serious person (how flattering for them!), no cultivated person (how very
pleasing!) can do without.”
Here Christianity had been made into something presentable and normal,
but it had thus been deprived of its radicality and its scandalous character, its
alpha and omega. For indeed, if “Christianity is cultivation,” then “being a
Christian is more or less what a natural man would wish to be in his happiest
moments”—whichmeansthatweare,“asitwere, three-quartersofamillion
miles away from the language about the Redeemer who had to suffer in the
world and who requires the crucifixion of the flesh.” Kierkegaard showed
no noticeable hesitancy about drawing his conclusion: “But Mynster’s religi-
osity is approximately this: One lives essentially like an honorable pagan; one
makes one’s life comfortable and good, enjoys its amenities—but then also
confesses that one is very far from having attained what is highest. It is this
confession that he actually regards as Christianity.... It is a rather bargain
version of Christianity—one can easily make this confession.”
There was shamming in this “confession”—which, by the way, was in-
distinguishable from the “admission” proposed by Kierkegaard himself
(though especially by his comfortable yes-men) as a possible defensive posi-
tion when the Christian demands made by the late Kierkegaard seem too
inhuman. This sort of thing was thus a “bargain version of Christianity” and
would not do. The real alternative to this soft Christianity, this effeminate
religiosity that sticks its tail between its legs as a matter of principle, was