Thenthemetaphor wasabandonedandbecamereality, ourrelationtoGod.
And then he said: And when the hour of death finally comes and the pil-
grim’s cloak is cast off and the staff is put down—andthe childgoes in to
the Father. Superb! I would bet that Clemmensen came to say it quite
unwittingly; indeed, if he had thought about it, he might perhaps have
chosen to say ’the soul’ or ’the transfigured person’ or something of that
sort. But no, ’the child,’ is masterly.”
Kierkegaard was discerning, but all the same perhaps something eluded
his analysis here—and it eluded him precisely because it concerned himself.
When he had been so dazzled by the metaphor of the child who goes in to
the Father, it might have been because of a sudden de ́ja`vu, a brief glimpse
of himself as a child, many years earlier, on his way in to his own earthly
father, whom despite everything, he continued to love.
Practice in Christianity
And there was in fact a child of this sort present in the manuscript Kierke-
gaard was completing during these very weeks. The manuscript had been
sitting there, waiting for the finishing touches, for almost two years. The
first draft of the section titled “Come Here, All You Who Labor and Are
Burdened, and I Will Give You Rest” dated back to April 1848. On June
4, 1850, Kierkegaard decided to publish the work pseudonymously, re-
minding himself that the three sections of the book “must be gone through,
to see that my person or my name or anything of that sort is not included,
as is the case in the third of them.” The third section consisted of seven
discourses, the first of which was essentially identical with a sermon Kier-
kegaard had delivered in the Church of Our Lady on September 1, 1848,
as a homily following confession and preceding communion. Kierkegaard,
in the person of Anti-Climacus, therefore had to append an explanatory
footnote to his text: “This discourse was delivered by Mag. Kierkegaard in
the Church of Our Lady....Since this was what actually gave me the idea
for the title, I have published it with his permission.” It is a question of
personal taste whether one prefers to call this gesture a sophisticated maneu-
verorin fact the beginning of the collapse of pseudonymity, but in any case,
after some editing in early August, the typesetting and proofreading moved
along very quickly, and on September 27, 1850, theAdresseavisencarried
an advertisement forPractice in Christianity, nos. I, II, III, by Anti-Climacus,
edited by S. Kierkegaard.
The third discourse of the third section begins with a prayer: “Lord Jesus
Christ! A human being can feel himself drawn to a great variety of things,