sketch of a quite worldly young man who—God only knows why—had
decided to have his child baptized, Kierkegaard recommended that instead
of clothing the baby in a baptismal bonnet, someone ought to hold “a night-
cap over the supposed father.” Having dealt with baptism (this “sheer bestial
nonsense—becoming a Christian by receiving a shot of water on one’s head
from a royal official”), Kierkegaard proceeded to confirmation, which was,
if possible, “much deeper nonsense than baptism,” inasmuch as it of course
“lays claim to something that was lacking in infant baptism, an actual per-
sonality.” Part of what makes confirmation nonsensical is to be found in
the disproportion between the age of the person involved and eternity: “A
boy of fifteen years! If it were a matter of 10 rixdollars, the father would
say, ‘No, my boy, you cannot be allowed to have it at your disposal, you
are too wet behind the ears.’ But when it is a matter of his eternal salvation
... the age of fifteen is most appropriate.” The whole business is “comedy,”
concluded Kierkegaard, who nevertheless wanted to contribute to the mer-
riment by imagining a rule requiring that “while in church, male confir-
mands would have to wear a beard, which naturally could be removed
during the family festivities in the evening.” Kierkegaard’s description of
the wedding service was not quite as festive. Instead of the normal ceremony
he proposed a New Testament alternative that hardly had much of a future.
The wedding service would be canceled because, at the last moment, “hat-
ing himself and the beloved,” the young man had chosen to “let go of her
in order to love God.” It does not take much speculation to discover whom
Kierkegaard might have had in mind in this connection.
From here it is no great distance before we arrive at general criticisms of
the whole of natural life. The pastors, an extraordinarily mediocre lot if
ever there was one, appear to constitute a special threat to the spiritual
advancement of the human race, for they continually reproduce themselves,
spawning lesser and lesser individuals who immediately congregate in small,
self-congratulatory enclaves: “From a Christian point of view, the much-
lauded Christian family life is a lie. From a Christian point of view, there is
no family life, and least of all should it be regarded as the truest form of
Christianity. At best, it can be indulgently tolerated.” And indeed, the
“Christian child-rearing that is so very much praised consists in filling the
child full of—sheer lies.” So Kierkegaard compelled these pastors—“the
whole of the merry, child-begetting, career-making pastoral guild”—to lis-
ten to quite a few words about the concupiscence, the rutting energy, the
sexual stimulus they had such a hard time keeping under control: “And
indeed, the older I get, the more clearly I realize that the nonsense into
which Christianity has sunk—especially in Protestantism and especially in
Denmark—is to a great extent connected with the circumstance that those