you cannot endure contemporaneity, if you cannot endure seeing this in
actuality, if you could not go out into the street—and see that the god is
right there in that appalling spectacle, and that this is what would happen
to you if you were to fall to your knees and worship him—then you are
notessentiallya Christian.”
The Voices of the Scandalized
A while later, Kierkegaard met someone on the street, and it wasn’t exactly
the god, nor was it just anybody. It was Just Paulli, whose smarmy, smiling
face folded into creases of clerical concern, confiding in Kierkegaard that
all sorts of people had been interpreting his remarks as nothing but foolish-
ness, as “fun and games.” Kierkegaard could not endure the prissy mixture
of sanctimony and sensationalism that had enveloped Paulli in its glutinous
grasp; Paulli was an “old gossip,” he sneered. Nevertheless, Kierkegaard
began to have some doubts about whether his literary behavior was defensi-
ble and felt compelled to provide further explanations in his journals. At
first he tried to view the whole matter as a trifle: “Well, even if it were
true—so what? Everything that is genuinely beneficial and new can lead to
abuses of this sort.” Then he put forth a more principled argument based
onaparallelwithclassicalantiquity:“Believeme,thepersonwhofirstbegan
to introduce comical roles into tragedies had to put up with people finding
it offensive.” It was important to make use of the comic in religious matters,
because in its attempt to resemble the ideal, the age lacked sufficientchildlike
naı ̈vete ́: “Christianity has come to a standstill in a worldly shrewdness that
doesn’t givea damn about theideal and regardsas dreamers thosewho strive
to attain it.” Thus the comic is important because it is only by using the
comic that one can draw attention to the “disparity between this Sunday
solemnity and everyday life.”
In fact, there had been an awareness of this disparity for a very long time,
extending all the way back to the three medieval ecclesiastical traditions—
the Feast of the Ass, the Feast of the Fool, and the Easter Comedy—that
Kierkegaard had already touched on when writingOn the Concept of Irony.
In the first of these festivals, an ass participated in processions and theatrical
scenes; the second was a carnival-like New Year’s feast that parodied eccle-
siastical ceremonies; and the third took its name from the comical stories
that were narrated from the pulpit during Easter week. “I am well aware of
what I am doing,” Kierkegaard wrote in complete agreement with Anti-
Climacus, “and believe you me, this secondhand, rote, lazy, world-histori-
cal habit whereby one always sort of speaks of Christ with a certain venera-