And then, almost compulsively, the whole story is retold yet again: that
he, Søren Aabye, had selflessly given Denmark an author; that for the good
of the cause he had voluntarily exposed himself to the assaults ofThe Corsair;
that Peter Christian had not lifted a finger in connection with those assaults;
that on the contrary, Peter Christian had exploited the situation when he
had given his talk at the Roskilde Convention, where he made his younger
brother into the representative of ecstasy. “Then came the moment when
I attacked Martensen. From then on, on almost the greatest possible scale,
people raged against me in this little land; everything was set in motion to
have me stamped as a villain, as someone who disturbs the peace of the
grave, or to make me out to be quite simply a kind of madman—which
was repeated in the press again and again. The hearty brother had not a
word to say in this connection.” Therefore the only thing that could be said
with respect to this brother, stench and all, was that he was fundamentally a
“spineless person,” and that “the truth was” that by having associated him-
self with this “wretched but enterprising company of Grundtvigians, and
with the help of some minor accomplishments and of party solidarity, [he
has] underhandedly obtained for himself [changed from ‘lied his way into’]
an importance that is simply not his at all—while if he had shunned all that
rubbish, remaining alone with God in the true Kierkegaardian way, he
could have been of great importance for Denmark.”
We may take some solace in the fact that this article was allowed to lie
undisturbed for twenty-six years and was not published until it appeared in
the final volume of Kierkegaard’sPosthumous Papers. There is, however,
rather less solace to be found in the fact that, for considerable periods of
time, the publication of those papers was followed quite closely by an in-
creasingly tormented Peter Christian, in whose episcopal residence the edit-
ing of the manuscripts took place.
“In a Theater, It Happened That”
One of the side effects of Kierkegaard’s newspaper articles and pamphlets
was that he had managed to position himself more firmly in the public
consciousness than at any time since the publication ofEither/Or. Even
though it undeniably sounds a little awkward to use the word in this con-
text, it is hardly an error to see his campaign as a wildly successful “come-
back.” Many of his contemporaries remembered him as having been lively,
almost giddy, when they met him on the street during this period. “Yes,
you see,” Kierkegaard was said to have confided in Tycho E. Spang, “well,
Denmark has had its greatest sculptor in Thorvaldsen, its greatest poet in