scene of Copenhagen: “The day when the mob here in the city takes a
poke at my hat (and that day may not be long off) is the day I will have
won.” He insisted rather snobbishly on this requirement of being put to
death, and this—from the point of view of the ideal—turned out to be his
misfortune. His times did everything except the one decisive thing: People
sneered at him, the elite classes envied him, fewer and fewer read him; but
no one, absolutely no one, had the idea of taking a poke at the magister’s
hat, so he died a natural death. People were no longer executed because of
their religious convictions, after all. And, if they were geniuses, never.
Kierkegaard therefore had to learn to adapt himself to yet another para-
dox: being a martyr without the martyrdom associated with being a martyr.
It was perhaps not so paradoxical that he ended in this paradox, since he
was certainly the first martyr in world history to have his treatise on martyr-
dom printed on vellum—the heavy, smooth, parchment-like paper that is
also called calfskin.
And priced accordingly.
“Dr. Exstaticus”
In the early spring of 1848, probably in mid-May, Kierkegaard dipped his
poet’s pen in ink and wrote: “Think of someone in love. Yes, he can talk
day in and day out about the bliss of being in love. But if someone were to
demand that he speak and set forth three reasons that proved his love—or
indeed, even that he defend his love--wouldn’t he regard that as a crazy
suggestion? Or, if he were a little shrewder, wouldn’t he say to the person
who suggested this to him, ‘Aha! You certainly don’t know what it is to be
in love! And you’re probably a bit convinced that I’m not.’ ” Or, to say it
with blood as well as with flowers: “The only true way of expressing that
there is an absolute is to become its martyr or to become a martyr for its
sake. That is even the way things are with respect to absolute romantic
love.”
Thus it is not a question of cool calculation, of sober-mindedness. It is
about passion, rapture, aboutec-stasy, which means literally to be beside
oneself. It was not without reason that when he started studying for his
examinations in 1839 Kierkegaard playfully—but with a dash of seri-
ousness—signed himself in his journal “S. K., formerly Dr. Exstaticus.”
Events of ten years later might well have caused him to be annoyed with
himself for that 1839 signature. In the midst of all the hoopla that accompa-
nied the publication of Martensen’sDogmatics, Peter Christian had managed
to get himself involved in the discussion at the expense of his little brother.