ugly facial expressions. Finally the merriment got to be a little too much for
Lange: “One morning, when I had been challenged in this way, I went and
loaded one of the large pistols, opened the balcony door, and fired at the
enemy—at Regensen, that is. The heavens and even the Round Tower
were shaken to their foundations.” The chief of police meted out a fine
of five rixdollars and issued a paternal admonition that put an end to this
sophomoric “church battle.”
“You Dine with the Swine”
At about the same time that Thurah had published hisRhymed Epistle,
F. W. Trojel, one of Kierkegaard’s old fellow students from his university
years, was reading the proofs of hisEternity: Nine Letters from Heaven to
Dr. Søren Kierkegaard. The purpose of the work was to rehabilitate Mynster
and the established church, which according to Trojel, no one had the right
to judge, because this was reserved to God—and of course to Trojel! A
mystery-filled introductory section sketched out the humiliations in store
for Kierkegaard when he arrived in the lofty chambers of heaven. This
was followed by a charming mixture of trembling outrage and undeniable
stupidity typical of Trojel, in which it was asserted that Kierkegaard’s works
consisted of “fantasies on linguistic themes and intellectual projects, pre-
sented with the unbelievable dexterity of a modern-day virtuoso.” “Isthis,”
Trojel asked, “supposed to be Christianity?” He then approached the matter
more directly, advising Kierkegaard to release his “artful grasp upon the
strings of language,” abandoning both his “balancing act on the ladder of
thought” and his “haughty isolation.” Trojel further labeled Kierkegaard a
“glutton” and a “voluptuary,” and he even managed to force Kierkegaard
into the embraces of several lovely denizens of a harem: “You set fire to
the whole world, and yet you are the only one burning in that harem,
closeted as you are withLogica,Ironica, andDialectica.”
After a dialogue—as lengthy as it was insufferable—between “an accus-
ing angel and an angel of God” who address one another in wretched verse,
Trojel reached the ninth and last of his letters from Heaven, where he
triumphantly emphasized Kierkegaard’s “bodily flaws.” Trojel had obvi-
ously read Martensen’s article against Kierkegaard, and could thus exclaim:
“Oh, but you are a Thersites! You have that proud, conceited, malevolent
spirit, that sickly mutability and demonic acuity.... I have pointed out
your spiritual lust and cruelty. And by the same token, your pride is obvious
to everyone. What a torment for such a nature... to possess as well—in a
physical, bodily sense—something that the rude masses find ridiculous and