1855
“My Opponent Is a Glob of Snot”
Kierkegaard did not, in fact, write a book on the topic, but if all the various
individual documents connected to the case are gathered together, they
quickly come to constitute an entire archive of pamphlets, in which the
tone varies from shrill indignation to sober condescension. Thus on January
9, 1855,Berlingske Tidendecarried a lengthy, anonymous review of Jens
Paludan-Mu ̈ller’s essayDr. Søren Kierkegaard’s Attack on Bishop Mynster’s
Posthumous Reputation. The reviewer pointed out that Paludan-Mu ̈ller, resi-
dent curate at the cathedral in Aalborg, had convincingly proved that both
the “standard of measure” Kierkegaard had employed, as well as the “judg-
ment” he had passed, were in error, and that accordingly Kierkegaard’s
protest amounted to nothing but the “ungrateful blackening of the posthu-
mous reputation of an august personage.” Paludan-Mu ̈ller had challenged
Kierkegaard to support his claims with documentation from the New Testa-
ment, and he doubted Kierkegaard would succeed in doing so because “at
some points the Doctor wishes to be more Christian than our Lord Christ
and his apostles themselves.” In conclusion, the reviewer awarded the vic-
tory to Kierkegaard’s opponents: “They have demonstrated with certainty
and clarity that in Dr. S. Kierkegaard’s own writings, what he emphasizes
as the most decisively Christian tenets is mixed with human doctrines and
human inventions. The self-made Christianity he recommends thus leads
away from the Church and its means of grace and must end either in self-
righteousness or in despair.” And, invoking a sort of retroactive logic, the
reviewer added his own view: “His two articles inFædrelandethave obliter-
ated him as anedifyingauthor.”
Several days later Kierkegaard dismissed Paludan-Mu ̈ller’s challenge as a
distraction. The issue was whether or not Mynster had been a witness to
the truth. Period. A wide-ranging, scholarly debate would merely transform
this inherently simple question into a “prolix, learned, theological investiga-
tion with quotation after quotation....No,thank you!” The day before
Kierkegaard wrote this, Martensen had written to Gude that he found Palu-
dan-Mu ̈ller’s work “quite excellent,” but that it could perhaps have bene-
fited from a “more intense focus upon the personality.” This was Mar-
tensen’s way of more than implying that, for agitational purposes, a more
thorough exploitation of the eccentricities in Kierkegaard’s mental makeup740