Soren Kierkegaard

Either/Ortwelve years earlier. Kierkegaard’s lapidary style, his satire, his
paradoxical provocations and well-turned points, his jollity, even the tone
in “those piquant and nervous articles,” as Goldschmidt called them, bring
to mind some of the best of the “Diapsalmata” with which Aesthete A had
introduced himself in the first part ofEither/Or. A little cluster of aphorisms
in the sixth issue ofThe Momentis entitled “Brief and Pointed,” and the
fourth one in this group takes the form of an absurd, mechanical dialogue:
“‘Did the Apostle Paul have an official position?’ No, Paul did not have an
official position. ‘Did he, then, earn a lot of money in some other way?’
No, he did not earn money at all. ‘Was he at least married, then?’ No, he
was not married. ‘So then Paul was not a serious man!’ No, Paul was not a
serious man.” Goldschmidt, on the other hand, was a serious man, for he
took the aphorism a bit too seriously, pointing out to Kierkegaard in his
journalNorth and Souththat Paul had in fact earned money, inasmuch as he
had been “a tentmaker by profession.” The second of these aphorisms is
unusually direct in its form: “In the splendid cathedral, the high, well-born,
highly honored, and worthy Geheime-General-Ober-Hof-Preacher, the
chosen darling of the important people, steps before a select circle of the
select, andmovinglysermonizes on a text chosen by himself, namely, ‘God
has chosen the lowly and despised of the earth’—and no one laughs!” And
then of course, everybody laughed. Maybe even Goldschmidt.
At the eleventh hour, the master of irony had managed to have laughter
once again on his side, which, in addition to everything else, was one of
the more or less conscious motives behind the campaign. In the draft of an
issue ofThe Moment, in a piece titled “Who I Am and What I Want,”
Kierkegaard declared that the “power that I shall use (this is how I under-
stand it in accordance with Governance) is—yes, people will be taken
aback, but this is how it is—it is laughter!... But of course, it is dedicated
to a religious cause when I serve that cause. And see, this was why it pleased
Governance that I, having been doted on by profane ridicule, should volun-
tarily make myself vulnerable so that I could become—if you will—the
martyr of ridicule, so that, thus consecrated, and with the very highest ap-
proval of divine Governance, I could become a bothersome ‘gadfly,’ an
awakening scourge upon all this spiritlessness.”
Helped along by obviously ex poste rationalizations, Kierkegaard here
attempted to rearrange the sequence of the factors involved, so that the
martyr of ridicule could once again be doted on. In this connection it is
thus quite symptomatic that he appended to this journal entry a reference
to the “last diapsalm” inEither/Or. For this was the passage about the vain
aesthete who was in seventh heaven, where he was asked by the gods to
make a choice from a selection that included youth, and beauty, the loveliest