Soren Kierkegaard

of ancient Rome. “So in the end it becomes a sort of pleasure (correspond-
ing to the pleasure experienced by spectators when gladiators fought with
animals) for a member of the public to witness this combat: an individual
possessing nothing but the power of the spirit and who absolutely refuses
to accept any other power, fighting for the religion, the religion of sacrifice,
against this gigantic corps of one thousand professional pastors, who say
‘No, thank you’ to spirit but who heartily thank the government for pay,
for titles, and for crosses of knighthood.” And when Kierkegaard came up
with an example of such a “life” lived in relation to New Testament Chris-
tianity, a person would have to be more than a little obtuse not to associate
that life with something tending in the direction of Kierkegaard himself:
“Let me give an example. To live in such a way that one works more
strenuously than any compulsory laborer, and in the process puts money
into the project; to amount to nothing; to be ridiculed, and so forth. For
the great mass of people, living like this must seem to be a kind of madness;
in any case, most people will feel that this is alien and will look upon such
a way of living as alien. The truth, however, is that this sort of life is a life
lived in relation to the Christianity of the New Testament.”
Kierkegaard’s campaign was a corrective to “the established order”; he
had pointed this out frequently and vociferously. But it was also something
else, something he expended almost equal energy onnotmentioning: It was
a corrective to extensive portions of his own works; his pseudonymous
ventroquilism had now reversed itself, finally turning into personal state-
ments. “When the castle gate of inwardness has long been closed and is
finally opened, it does not move soundlessly like an interior door on spring-
mounted hinges,” he explained with a medieval metaphor. In the work
What Christ Judges with Respect to Official Christianity, dated June 16, he ex-
pressed himself more directly: “I began by passing myself off as a poet,
cunningly taking aim at what I surely believed was the central point of
official Christianity.” The crux of the situation was that people had trans-
formed “Christianity into poetry” and had thus abolished “the imitation
of Christ, so that one can relate to the exemplar merely by means of the
imagination, living oneself in totally different categories—which means that
one relates oneself to Christianity poetically.” Kierkegaard noted with re-
spect to his tactics that “the procedure was the same as that used by the
police to make the persons involved feel secure; this is something the police
do precisely in order to gain the opportunity to investigate a case more
thoroughly.” And as time passed, this investigation revealed so much that
the poet had to undergo a transfiguration: “Then that poet suddenly trans-
formed himself. He cast off his guitar—if I may be permitted to put it thus—