Whether one is outraged, angered, insulted, shamed,
saddened, embarrassed, perplexed, bemused, inspired,
enthused or exhilarated by Kierkegaard's intemperate
condemnation of Christianity as embodied in the
Christian Church; one will do well to reflect on the
relationships of Kierkegaard's diatribes to the
entirety of his religious expression.  To the extent
that my own reading of Kierkegaard's writings is
still fragmentary, I consider my conclusions tentative,
and I am grateful to be corrected by those of you
who are more knowledgeable.

During most of his productive life, Kierkegaard was
preoccupied with the examination and analysis of 
an inner, subjective religiosity, rooted in the
Protestant doctrine of justification by inward faith
rather than by outward works, and nourished by the
currents of mysticism, pietism and romanticism which
permeate the theology of the 17th, 18th and 19th
centuries.

Kierkegaard's uncompromising obsessions with the inner
life as the locus of religious experience and with
subjective conviction as the criterion of truth are
sources of perplexity not only for the contemporary
student; they were also for Kierkegaard himself obstacles,
well-nigh insuperable, to what the psychiatric social
workers and guidance counsellors of our own day would
term a satisfactory occupational and social adjustment.
Psychologically incapable of marriage, a failure in
the Christian ministry, and hopelessly overqualified
as a teacher or writer, Kierkegaard was condemned by
his sensitivity and by his talent to spiritual exile
in the country of his birth. Kierkegaard's link to the
world, not only biologically but spiritually, was his
father; and it was his father's world to which he was
bound.  At his father's side he listened to Mynster's,
the Bishop of Seeland's, sermons and Bishop Mynster, as
his father's pastor, became the churchman most revered
by him.  After his father's death, Mynster became a
father surrogate, to whom Kierkegaard remained loyal 
as to a protective spiritual patron, until Mynster's
death.  Kierkegaard was painfully aware that Mynster
did not reciprocate his affection, but at best tolerated
him as a potential troublemaker not to be relied upon.
Mynster never gave Kierkegaard's work the recognition
that was its due.

With Mynster's death and the loss of Mynster's albeit
fantasized support, the framework within which Kierkegaard
had cultivated his religion of inwardness collapses. 
Although it may be argued that Mynster's support of
Kierkegaard existed largely in the disciple's imagination,
with Mynster's death, the precarious equilibrium of
Kierkegaard's social relations is upset.  The repudiation
of the world implicit at all times in subjective inwardness
now becomes explicit in the most uncouth and external of
objective manifestos, rejecting and condemning not only the
Church as the institution that purports to be the trustee
of religion, but most offensively, the personalities, the
bishops and pastors, who are the church's representatives. 
The mystic poet of the soul metamorphoses into the renegade
outlaw journalist who assaults the sanctuary of the church
and threatens its ministers.  It was as if the social reality
which Kierkegaard had so resolutely denied, suddenly exacted
its price, took its revenge on a soul that had persistently
defied it, and condemned him to become a hapless gladiator
in the arena of public curiosity, a martyr whose fate was
sealed even before the contest began. Since Kierkegaard
considered suffering an indispensable concomitant of piety,
it is not surprising if Kierkegaard now acted as if to provoke
the martyrdom that history seemed determined to deny him.

The dialectic between the inside and the outside with which
much earlier in his life Kierkegaard had humorously introduced
"Either/Or" and which characterizes the entirety of his theology,
a dialectic which perhaps existed previously only in hypothesis
and in theory, now once more becomes manifest in history. The
similarity between Luther's assault on the Papacy and Kierkegaard's
assault on the Lutheran clergy is obvious.  The denial of the
legitimacy of the church again becomes the vehicle for the
assertion of faith.  The repudiation of wordly Christianity
becomes the path to salvation.

The paradox which is made manifest, which is acted out by him
in the last months of Kierkegaard's life, far from being an
eccentric curiosity in the history of religion, seems to me
to be an essential expression of the paradox at the very heart
of Christianity, an expression of the paradox of incarnation
as the (con)fusion of the divine and the human, of the ideal
and the real, of the subjective and the objective, of the
inward and the outward, a (con)fusion with which it is our task,
whatever name we give to our religion, to make our peace. 

Ernst Meyer
review@netcom.com