“Pastor P. Chr. Kierkegaard, Lic. Theol., My Brother”
The confrontation between Kierkegaard and Grundtvig was particularly
unpleasant for Peter Christian Kierkegaard, who was the brother of the
former but who had fraternized with the latter. On June 7, Peter Christian
attended a wedding in Gentofte, just north of Copenhagen, and shortly
thereafter he called on his younger brother, who seemed quite exhausted.
He therefore suggested that his brother take a little trip, but the reaction
was merely “Is this the time to travel?!” Apparently it was not. Peter Chris-
tian had also wanted to discuss some of the “main points concerning which
his efforts seemed to me to be misleading,” but the anticlerical warrior was
not prepared to do that either. Thus parted these two remarkable brothers
who were the bearers of so many secrets, both jointly and separately. Nei-
ther of them could have known that they would never see each other again.
In August, Peter Christian in fact spent ten days in Copenhagen, from
which he regularly traveled out to visit his nephew Vilhelm Nicolai Lund
at his estate Annissegaard, but he was unsuccessful in his attempts to contact
Søren Aabye.
Something that happened between Peter Christian’s June and August
visits to Copenhagen turned out to have fateful consequences, though Peter
Christian noted it very undramatically in his diary: “Spoke against the
pseudonymous (Sørenish) literature and theory at the Roskilde Convention
on July 5th.” Prior to the Roskilde Pastoral Convention, the general feeling
had been that this was precisely the topic that wouldnotbe discussed at the
meeting, but the Grundtvigian cleric Gunni Busck nonetheless managed to
persuade Peter Christian to give a talk on some of the “principal features of
the trend that runs through the entirety ofSøren’swork as an author.” Peter
Christian improvised his way through the talk. Afterwards, he made an
attempt to reconstruct his talk on paper, and true to form, the reconstruction
was as bone-dry and boring as the talk had been lively and elegant. His talk
had been a critical investigation of the “theology—or, as it probably prefers
to be called, the nontheology—that an academy of pseudonyms has in re-
cent years developed as a part of the literature of our fatherland.” On exam-
ining these pseudonymous figures, Peter Christian noted the absence of
what is absolutely fundamental to Christianity, namely the “renewal of the
genuinely human life, both in individuals and in the race.” Since the truth
of the Christian life makes itself visible in growth, development, and expan-
sion—all the way from “the germ of conception to the maturity of man”—
there are only two possibilities: “Either the pseudonymous thinkers, who