Soren Kierkegaard

those of the socialist thinkers that we could be tempted to believe that he
had secretly read them, though such a suspicion would be unfounded. His
librarydidincludeSibbern’sSome Observations concerning the State and Church,
published in October 1849, but he had long since abandoned Sibbern—
quite bluntly labeling his old teacher as a fool—and therefore it is hardly
likely that he had read Sibbern’s brief but pointed criticism of the negative
effects of rapid democratization and the principle of competition—effects
Sibbern wanted to alleviate by implementing fundamental social reforms.
On the other hand, it is not inconceivable that Kierkegaard might have
had some acquaintance with the work of Frederik Dreier, a young socialist
writer whose works he could have borrowed from the Athenæum library,
which he visited quite frequently during these years. However that may be,
deviating wildly as they did from the naive and all-too-optimistic expecta-
tions of Biedermeier culture, Kierkegaard and Dreier stand as two radical
exceptions to the Danish intellectual life of the period. If Kierkegaard had
read Dreier’sBelief in Spirits and Freethinkingfrom 1852, he would have
recognized many of his own views, but in mirror-image, so to speak. Dreier
criticized religion from the standpoint of a natural-scientific, positivistic,
and socialist view of man, repudiating various religious notions and tenets
as manifestations of ignorance, superstition, and an outdated belief in au-
thority. In the introduction to his book, Dreier subjected the clergy and
theologytoanattackthatwasaremarkableanticipationofwhatKierkegaard
would later produce: “It scarcely takes great daring to say that we shall soon
see people laughing pastors, professors, and other phrasemongers out of
their roles. Laughter is a powerful weapon, and we shall soon see that those
who laugh last, laugh best.” His prophecy was to be fulfilled three years
later. In his polemic against clerical conservatism, Dreier emphasized that
“Christ did not shrink from talking to the common man on the street and
in the marketplace, teaching him about the villainy of the ruling class and
the uselessness of inherited ceremonies.” In April 1855, Kierkegaard would
write: “So preaching should not take place in churches, but on the street,
in the midst of life, in the reality of the daily workaday world.”
Dreier directed his criticism at Christian intolerance and especially at the
social injusticesto whichthe establishmentof astate church inevitablyleads.
Thus he stressed that, for Christ, the main thing had been “social justice,”
which was why Christ had been hostile to “the extortions of capital....The
rich man was supposed to give all that he had to the poor.” There were not
many people who wrote this sort of thing in 1853. One of the few was
Kierkegaard, who noted: “The matter is quite simple. The N. T. [New
Testament] is extremely easy to understand. But we human beings, we are
really rather cunning rogues, and we pretend that we cannot understand