Soren Kierkegaard

lion in all the low-life bars and dives, turn up in aristocratic society, standing
there fussing with his cravat.” Once a knave, always a knave, Kierkegaard
was fully convinced: “Goldschmidt—once the tool of contemptibleness,
now the virtuous one, the goody-goody! Once the grinning mountebank—
now the ethicist! Once, hiding behind the knaves, the darling of the mob—
now the aristocrat, the fine, fine aristocrat, who hobnobs at the dinner table
with barons and counts—and yet despite all the transformations, essentially
the same.”
Here, without knowing it, Kierkegaard was, for the first and last time,
in agreement with P. L. Møller, who shortly before his final departure from
Denmark had encountered Goldschmidt (and had heaped scorn upon him
for his opportunism.) In his first issue ofNorth and South, Goldschmidt, the
Jew, had praised the historical accomplishments of Christianity in glowing
terms, and Møller, who was in an unusually bad mood that day, satirically
congratulated Goldschmidt, telling him that he would surely be cited by
Bishop Mynster, perhaps, indeed, even canonized, so that the faithful would
make pilgrimages to the shrine containing his obviously so Christian-spir-
ited bones. In his fury, Møller had said that by giving upThe Corsair
Goldschmidt had failed himself. Goldschmidt, Møller argued, had abso-
lutely no natural tendency toward playing any positive role in public life. As
Goldschmidt later recounted Møller’s words: “The corrosive Jewish nature
required hatred, and it was in hatred that I had my strength.” Even though
(according to Goldschmidt) Møller’s words had been devoid of any trace
of “vulgar hatred of Jews,” the two had just barely managed to avoid parting
on hostile terms.
The appreciative words about Goldschmidt that Mynster published in
1851 were thus a fulfillment of Møller’s prophecy from 1848, but in Kier-
kegaard’s eyes they were also a calculated provocation, because they gave
tacit approval to the bestial treatment he had been accorded byThe Corsair
some years earlier. After all, the word “appearance” wasn’tthatwonderful!
Mynster could have written “phenomenon” if he had wanted to. But he
didn’t, he wrote “appearance,” and he did it only so he could squeeze the
two old enemies into the same sentence.
In no time at all there were a great many journal entries dealing with the
notorious comparison with Goldschmidt, and there is some truth to the
claim that in publishing his essay, Mynster had inaugurated a “secondCorsair
Affair.” Nor was Kierkegaard in doubt about the consequences Mynster’s
remark would have, both in human terms and theologically: “That line
about Goldschmidt was fateful. (1) It provided a sad insight into Mynster’s
evil side. (2) It gives me precisely the hard evidence against Mynster that I
would have to have if I were to attack. I have long been aware that his