Soren Kierkegaard

deed—the ecstatic.... I daresay what was required, then, was my brilliant
sober-mindedness and cunning in order to dupe the times into it.” Or, as
he wrote two days before Christmas, still smarting about the “confusion
created” when the passage by Saint Paul had been applied to Martensen and
himself: “The Martensen-Peter [Christian Kierkegaard] notion of sober-
mindedness is to some extent an irreligious notion of bourgeois philistinism
and complacency.... For mediocrity, worldly deal making, et cetera, are
precisely what predominate in it.” Compared to Martensen, Saint Paul
would thus have to represent total ecstasy. And in any event, as Kierkegaard
kept in mind, he himself was no Saint Paul, and the mere fact that he em-
ployed pseudonyms pointed beyond ecstasy, in the direction of sober-
minded deliberation. Fortunately, he had spoken with Grundtvig, who was
“duly scornful in his pronouncements regarding Peter” because in his opin-
ion,whenallwassaidand done,thattalk attheconventionhad beentheoff-
the-cuff, on-the-one-hand-this/on-the-other-hand-that sort of thing that
anyone could have come up with. True, Grundtvig’s remarks did provide a
bit of consolation, but they were utterly insignificant as regarded the general
public, those nameless “numbers,” who had almost no feel for nuance and
whose psychological sense was as flat-bottomed as a pram: “Thisbrother,
the ‘numbers’ say, is not at all strange or eccentric like thatotherbrother; he
is not proud and haughty, but is lovable and hearty, a serious man.”
All in all, the episode at the Roskilde Pastoral Convention had provided
close to perfect conditions for pharisaism: “See, that’s how it goes when
one brother—silently, and in obedience to God—works quietly, making
every sacrifice, and then the other brother—in a superior manner, after
a half-hour’s preparation—frivolously takes it upon himself to provide a
profound interpretation of the signs of the times.” And there was more
spleen where that came from: “My brother’s pettiness and envy, then, has
been the only thing my family has done for me. His sole preoccupation has
been to get free copies of what I wrote. Then, when I hurled myself atThe
Corsair, he was satisfied, because he now found that everything that hap-
pened to me was God’s punishment. The name of God can be misused in
many ways.” This same level of indignation is evident in a retrospective
entry from the same period, which builds in part on the parable of the
prodigal son: “Deep down, Peter has always looked upon himself as better
than me, regarding me a little like the prodigal brother. And he was right
about this. He has always been more upright and honorable than I. His
relationship with Father, for example, was that of an upright son—mine,
on the contrary, was often blameworthy. But, oh, Peter never loved Father
as I did. Peter was never a source of grief to Father, much less a source of
grief such as I was. But Peter has also long since forgotten Father, while I