Soren Kierkegaard

Oehlenschla ̈ger, and now its greatest prose stylist in me. Denmark won’t
last long now!” Of course, this was intended as a joke, but notonlyas a
joke. Vilhelm Birkedal experienced a similar sort of cheekiness. He could
recall a little episode that instantly convinced him that the “dying away from
the world” that Kierkegaard “continually preached for us others, making it
into the hallmark of the genuine Christian witness,” did not apply to the
preacher himself. One day, Birkedal, who was a Grundtvigian and as such
also saw himself as involved in a “fierce battle for the church,” espied Kier-
kegaard sitting at a well-provided table in one of the best restaurants in the
city, “with an ample portion of food fit for a king and a very large goblet of
sparkling wine before him.” Kierkegaard recognized him and immediately
called out “Hello, Birkedal, you look good. Yes, you whoare persecutedare
getting fat.” To which Birkedal replied: “Yes, and you whopersecuteare
getting thinner.” For despite his “high living,” Kierkegaard was only “skin
and bones.”
Kierkegaard’s campaign made a profound impression on Birkedal, costing
him “no small amount of struggle in my soul,” but Birkedal nonetheless
succeeded in battling his way through to “light and cheerfulness,” when,
“as if in a vision, I saw our Lord Jesus standing on the mountaincryingover
Jerusalem and the sinners in the city, and next to him I saw Søren Kierke-
gaard standing andlaughingat all of us, condemning us to the abyss of
Hell....Then I was struck with the irrefutable certainty that these two
could not be in agreement, that there must be a huge distance between
them. And I at once emerged from my melancholy thoughts.” This same
Grundtvigian firmness in rejecting Kierkegaard can also be seen in Hans
Rørdam, who, in a letter dated May 4, 1855, wrote the following to his
brother Peter: “Søren Kierkegaard, who shouts that the Church of Christ
has perished, is for me like a bogey who screeches to terrify the unbelieving
and superstitious children of this world. But a Christian laughs at him. If he
went to the ends of the earth like the Shoemaker of Jerusalem [Ahasuerus,
the ‘Wandering Jew’of legend], shouting that the Church of Christ has
perished, I would ask that I might be permitted to walk behind him and
say: ‘You are lying, Søren! According to the testimony of Christ and the
Spirit of God, you are a great liar!’” Peter Rørdam probably would have
declared himself in agreement with his brother, for a while earlier he had
taken a stroll with Kierkegaard, who had indeed spoken of Grundtvig “in
mocking tones.” This caused Rørdam to break off all further contact with
Kierkegaard, whose comment had touched Rørdam, a Grundtvigian, “in
his most sensitive spot.”
The campaign taxed Kierkegaard both financially and physically, but it
also made his adrenalin flow just as happily as it had when he had written