Soren Kierkegaard

something to a sick child—and then a couple of stronger children come
along and grab it.”
Kierkegaard also had a pronounced feeling for the psychological side of
this repression mechanism. He thus made the following comment in con-
nection with one of Mynster’s sermons (which spoke of sufferings, but
which in Kierkegaard’s view was less a consolation to the sufferer than a
pleasant reassurance to the fortunate): “In general what we have here is an
entire field for psychological observation: the cunning with which human
egotism, disguised as sympathy, seeks to protect itself against the impression
made bylife’s wretchedness, inorder to keepit from disturbingthe gluttony
of the lust for life....Andhowoften we preach and speak of the poor as
beingsomuchhappierthantherich—andthisisdoneintheguiseofsympa-
thy. It is presented so movingly: How happy the poor are able to live, free
of all the burdens of wealth. Now is this a speech to provide consolation to
the poor? No, it is a turn of phrase that is exceedingly welcome to the rich,
because then they do not need to give anything to the poor.”
These twin frauds in the social and religious spheres presuppose each
other; they create the conditions for each other’s existence in an obscure
but quite tangible dialectic that compelled Kierkegaard to revise a number
of his previous positions. Reflecting on the idea of Providence, he wrote
the following in 1854: “Among people who own something or who have
amounted to anything in the world, one frequently—or even most of the
time—encounters a tendency to be a bit religious. They like to speak of
believing in Providence, about Governance....Charming! But if you ana-
lyzed this piety a little more closely, you would perhaps instead shudder at
this sort of cruelty and egotism. / For if one owns something or has
amounted to anything in the world, one wants to enjoy these earthly goods
in a refined manner by attributing them to God, making oneself important
by being the object, perhaps the very special object, of Governance’s solici-
tude. Aha! / Next, one might perhaps have a tendency to imagine that in
order to continue possessing these earthly goods, it would be desirable that
there be a Providence, a Governance—as a guarantor, one might think.
Aha! / Furthermore, it is flattering for a person to imagine that what one
has achieved in the world is, in fact, a reward from Governance because
one has used one’s life wisely and piously. Aha!... Finally, in the existence
of this Governance one even has a defense for not doing more than one
does for those who suffer, because one is afraid of interfering in a manner
that might disturb the plans Governance has for every individual.”
It is in journal entries like these that we find a portion of the theory and
some of the impetus behind the materialistic critique of the clergy and of
Christendom that Kierkegaard developed more fully a couple of years later