Soren Kierkegaard

Christian Discoursesfrom 1848, which were not what I had wanted, but I
read them—and how can I ever thank you enough! I found in them the
source of life that has not failed me since.” Miss E-e enlarged on this at
considerable length, but then she got to the point: “Last Sunday you were
listed as the preacher at the Citadel. What could I do but walk out there?
And I was not disappointed. It was not one of those sermons that I have so
often heard and forgotten before it was finished. No, the speech issued forth
from a warm, generous heart, terrifying, but also edifying and reassuring;
and it penetrated to the heart, never to be forgotten, but to bear eternal
fruits, rich with blessing.” Finally, Miss e-e noted that she would view it as
a “gift of love from a person on whom God has conferred all the riches of
the spirit” if Kierkegaard would “set aside his anonymity” by announcing
himself as something more than merely a “theological graduate” and by
providing advance notice of when he intended to speak in public. To judge
from her request, e-e had not read the May 17, 1851 issue ofAdresseavisen,
because the list of preachers carried in that newspaper for the next day, the
fourth Sunday after Easter, included, “the Citadel, Mr. Mag. S. Kierkegaard,
9:30A.M.”
Another female fan also wrote a letter dated May 21. This was a Miss
S. F., who infused four closely written pages with an enthusiasm the likes
of which Kierkegaard could scarcely have seen before. She begged his par-
don that a “woman” such as herself had the audacity to take up a pen. If
she had been a “man, and thus capable of thinking and writing coherently,”
she could of course have published “something about you and would not
have needed to intrude upon your privacy.” She was contacting him be-
cause her “personal thanks to you are no one else’s business.” But she prom-
ised that this would be both the first and the last time that she wrote him a
letter, “and if you burn this as soon as you have read it, then you will hardly
notice it at all.” She had had an unforgettable day at the Citadel Church.
“For me the day was a holy day of edification, and I believe that many
others had the same feeling I had,” she wrote, employing a juicy metaphor:
“When a cup is too full, it runs over. But when a poor heart is overfull,
what is it to do? It must either burst or, like the cup, run over. That is what
my heart is doing now. For truly, I cannot without fear and trembling
approach this extraordinary situation, when I dare, in spite of your strict
prohibition, to set pen to paper in order to thank you—oh remarkable
man!—for the infinite wealth I owe to you.... I will not take up much of
your time, or of mine, with what I know you consider a waste of time and
the most superfluous of things, but I cannot die without having said to you
that you are absolutely without peer. — I know very well that you do
nothing butput a person in the right position, sharpen one’s vision, broaden one’s