Soren Kierkegaard

for his assistance. But as I was on my knees and about to thank him, he
seized me in his powerful hands, took a glistening basin, dipped it into the
river, and held my hands in the flames.... I begged, I wailed, I accused
him, I cried out to Heaven, but the strong man was implacable. When he
had held me like this for as long as he wanted, I finally had to beg forgive-
ness, and then he let me go. My fingers were glowing, but I was freezing
cold because I was naked!”
Martensen has listened to all this with bated breath and wants to know
whether Nielsen ever got his clothing back, to which Nielsen answers that
the unnamed person had thrown his clothing into the river of fire. “Did he
give you an old coat?” inquires Martensen. No, replies Nielsen, he did not
give me his coat, he only lent it to me—for the time being. “Good Lord,
so you really are,.. .” and Nielsen gets the final word, “a rag.”
The novel keeps going, over literary sticks and stones, but we will stop
here.A Life in the Underworldis not a brilliant work of art, but if we bear in
mindthat itwaswritten byaprofessorof philosophy,thevisionary leapsand
the flickering scenes are in fact quite impressive. Clearly the most important
motive behind the novel was animosity toward Martensen, a distaste for his
polished, affected manner, for his elegant unnaturalness, hisartificiality, and
for his ludicrous and superstitious belief in a dogmatic system. But the novel
wasalso—albeitrathernaively—Nielsen’sattemptatreconciliation,atcom-
promise, an effort to make himself comprehensible to Martensen, whose
recognition he sought. The novel is certainly not a piece of confessional
literature, but it is nonetheless very open and indiscreet, and it is clear that
Nielsenfeltoppressedandunabletoresolvetheconflictshehimselfdepicted
betweenKierkegaardandMartensen.KierkegaardhaddemandedthatNiel-
senshowadeterminationthathecouldnotsummonup,andNielsenopenly
confessed to his copying: He was nothing but a rag; he had wrapped himself
in Kierkegaard’s cast-off coats, and even those were only on loan. But at
the same time, we sense Nielsen’s fear of Kierkegaard’s undertaking, which
with its extreme subjectivism also had a demonic dimension, at times actu-
ally coming close to violating Nielsen’s integrity as a person.
Nielsen later filled out his portrait of Kierkegaard in several drafts of a
lecture that he had apparently wanted to deliver at the university in one of
the series of popular lectures that were offered in the evenings for the gen-
eral public. On a large sheet of paper under the heading, “Movements of
Ideas,” Nielsen wrote straightforwardly that “Kierkegaard was our greatest
Christian thinker.” But then he added that this same Kierkegaard, “with an
obstinate zeal, with a penchant for paradoxes, with a nervous melancholia,
had wanted to revive Christianity and to whip himself up into being a
Christian (a genuine imitator of Christ). But what did he discover?—that