“Christianity Is the Invention of Satan”
Kierkegaard was certainly not at risk of being infected by the optimism of
his times. On the contrary, his journals from these years resound with the
monotonous hammerings of misanthropy. He became preoccupied with
inhumanity in the name of Christianity, citing, almost like a mantra, the
epigrammatic descriptionof earlyChristianity given bya number ofwriters,
includingTacitus:odium generis humani,a hatredofeverythinghuman.Kier-
kegaard then put forth a view of his own: “A View of Christianitywhich, so
far as I know, has never been proposed before, is that Christianity is the
invention of Satan, calculated to make human beings unhappy with the
assistance of the imagination. Just as the worm and the bird seek out the
finest fruit, Satan has taken aim at superior people, those with a great deal
of imagination and feeling, in order to lure them astray by means of the
imagination, getting them to make themselves unhappy, and if possible, the
others as well. This view at least deserves a hearing.”
That view most definitely received a hearing—specifically when Kier-
kegaard described his understanding of Christianity, in which the natural
life has been made the object of so much hatred that it can be difficult to
distinguish God from Satan. “It is also certain,” he wrote, “that once we
attain that high plateau that is the true point of departure for any discussion
about becoming a Christian, then every step is so difficult, so mortally dan-
gerous,thatitiscontinuallylikea‘redorblack’situation[inroulette]:Either
it is God or it is Satan.” Kierkegaard did not assemble these rudiments of
satanism into a coherent theme, but continued his journal entry with one
of his familar diatribes against this “mess called Christendom, these millions
of Christians,” typically represented by an “inoffensive, grunting, well-off
bourgeois philistine,” which from a Christian point of view is “just as ridic-
ulous as if the Round Tower wanted to pass itself off as a young dancing
girl, eighteen years of age.”
The metaphor is a good one, but it is also grotesque because it gains its
full comic effect by having two incommensurable elements collide with
each other. As such, it is typical of a series of Kierkegaard’s metaphors from
this period, all of which emphasize the distance between Christianity and
theworld,betweenethicalrequirementandnature.Ineverycase,theheter-
ogeneity is the point of the metaphor, becoming more and more intimately
connected to Kierkegaard himself. Thus on February 13, 1854, he wrote
the following under the title, “My Task. And about Myself”: “What is abso-
lutely the decisive factor is that Christianity is a heterogeneity, an incom-
mensurability with the world, that it is irrational with respect to the world