Soren Kierkegaard

2, 1855, after his elderly cousin Michael Andersen Kierkegaard had lost his
wife, Kierkegaard received a message from the undertaker, who informed
him that he would be picked up by carriage on the day of the funeral.
Kierkegaard sent his regrets, however, and in a letter (which, incidentally,
is the last dated letter we have from his hand) he explained that for a number
of years he had not “attended a funeral for anyone, not even members of
my closest family, which you yourself will know, Uncle, for I attended
neither the funeral for our aunt in Gothersgade nor that of cousin Andreas,
so I would surely give offense to others, who of course will be present, if I
were to make an exception in this case. So, dear Uncle, let me be excused.
And perhaps would you also inform the undertaker of this, so that he does
not send a carriage to pick me up because of a misunderstanding.”
Kierkegaard had other business to attend to and had to let the dead bury
their dead. And on May 10 he published two articles inFædrelandet,“A
Result” and “A Monologue,” both of which focused harshly on the paucity
of reaction from the clergy. In this connection he set forth a clarification:
“It was against the fantasies of Bishop Martensen that I protested. I did not
pose the matter in such a way that the clergy must be obligated to be wit-
nesses to the truth. No, I posed the matter like this: They must take down
that sign.” Six days later Kierkegaard himself hung out his own sign. The
occasion was the newly published second edition ofPractice in Christianity;
he explained that if the work were being published for the first time now,
on May 16, 1855, it would not “have been by a pseudonym, but by myself,
and the thrice-repeated preface would have been dropped....Earlier, my
idea had been that if the established order could be defended, this was the
only way of doing so: by poetically (therefore, by a pseudonym) passing
judgment upon it....Now, on the other hand, I am completely convinced
of two things: both that, from a Christian point of view, the established
order is untenable and that every day it exists is, from the Christian point
of view, a crime; and that one may not call upon grace in this manner.
Therefore, take the pseudonymity away; take away the thrice-repeated
preface and the ‘Moral’ to the first section—then, from a Christian point
of view,Practice in Christianityis an attack on the established order.”
The pamphlet “This Must Be Said, So Let It Be Said,” which appeared
the following week along with its two so-called “accompanying sheets,”
made it abundantly clear that an “admission” was no longer a possibility.
The two accompanying sheets bore the dates April 9and 11, 1855. The
first of them had originally been addressed to Cultus Minister C. C. Hall
and had been written in the form of direct discourse; Kierkegaard deleted
those features and published the piece as an official declaration of hostility
to official Christianity. On May 26, before anyone had managed to reply,