Kierkegaard and His Contemporaries: The Culture of Golden Age Denmark

Kierkegaard Studies Monograph Series 10 Kierkegaard Studies Edited on behalf of the Søren Kierkegaard Research Centre...

Author: Jon Stewart

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Kierkegaard Studies Monograph Series 10

Kierkegaard Studies Edited on behalf of the

Søren Kierkegaard Research Centre by Niels Jørgen Cappelørn and Hermann Deuser

Monograph Series 10

Walter de Gruyter · Berlin · New York 2003

Kierkegaard and His Contemporaries The Culture of Golden Age Denmark Edited by Jon Stewart

Walter de Gruyter · Berlin · New York 2003

Kierkegaard Studies Edited on behalf of the Søren Kierkegaard Research Centre by Niels Jørgen Cappelørn and Hermann Deuser Monograph Series Volume 10 Edited by Niels Jørgen Cappelørn

The Foundation for the Søren Kierkegaard Research Centre at Copenhagen University is funded by The Danish National Research Foundation.

앝 Printed on acid-free paper which falls within the guidelines of the ANSI 앪 to ensure permanence and durability.

Bibliographic information published by Die Deutsche Bibliothek Die Deutsche Bibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data is available in the Internet at ⬍http://dnb.ddb.de⬎.

ISBN 3-11-017762-5 ISSN 1434-2952  Copyright 2003 by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co. KG, D-10785 Berlin All rights reserved, including those of translation into foreign languages. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. Printed in Germany Disk conversion: OLD-Satz digital, Neckarsteinach Cover design: Christopher Schneider, Berlin

Table of Contents Acknowledgements . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

viii

Abbreviations of Kierkegaard’s Primary Texts . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

x

Preface . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

xiii

The Original Sources of the Essays . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

xv

Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

1

I. Philosophy Poul Lübcke F.C. Sibbern: Epistemology as Ontology . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

25

Peter Thielst Poul Martin Møller: Scattered Thoughts, Analysis of Affectation, Struggle with Nihilism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

45

Johannes Witt-Hansen H.C. Ørsted: Immanuel Kant and the Thought Experiment. . . .

62

K. Brian Söderquist Kierkegaard’s Contribution to the Danish Discussion of “Irony”. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

78

Jon Stewart Kierkegaard and Hegelianism in Golden Age Denmark . . . . . .

106

II. Theology John Saxbee The Golden Age in an Earthen Vessel: The Life and Times of Bishop J.P. Mynster. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

149

vi

Table of Contents

Curtis L. Thompson H.L. Martensen’s Theological Anthropology. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

164

Niels Thulstrup Martensen’s Dogmatics and its Reception . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

181

Flemming Lundgreen-Nielsen Grundtvig and Romanticism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

203

III. Literature Kathryn Shailer-Hanson Adam Oehlenschläger’s Erik and Roller and Danish Romanticism

233

Niels Ingwersen The Tragic Moment in Oehlenschläger’s Hakon Earl the Mighty

248

John L. Greenway “Reason in Imagination is Beauty”: Ørsted’s Acoustics and Andersen’s “The Bell”. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

262

Katalin Nun Thomasine Gyllembourg’s Two Ages and her Portrayal of Everyday Life . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

272

IV. Literary and Dramatic Criticism Henning Fenger Kierkegaard: A Literary Approach. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

301

George Pattison Søren Kierkegaard: A Theatre Critic of the Heiberg School . . .

319

Janne Risum Towards Transparency: Søren Kierkegaard on Danish Actresses

330

Peter Vinten-Johansen Johan Ludvig Heiberg and his Audience in Ninteenth-Century Denmark . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

343

Hans Hertel P.L. Møller and Romanticism in Danish Literature . . . . . . . . . .

356

Table of Contents

vii

V. Art Else Kai Sass Thorvaldsen: An Introduction to his Work . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

375

Ragni Linnet Golden Tears: Johan Thomas Lundbye and Søren Kierkegaard

406

Index of Persons . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

427

Contributors. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

435

Acknowledgements This anthology has encountered an inordinate number of unexpected difficulties and obstacles on its way to publication. Therefore, it is highly satisfying to see it finally in print after so many delays. I would like to express my gratitude in the first line to all of the contributors and translators of the texts in this volume who have had to wait so long to see their articles appear. Without their patience and selfless cooperation, this anthology would not have been possible. Several individuals have also played instrumental roles at different stages of this project. I would like to thank my colleague Tonny Aagaard Olsen for some of the original inspiration for this volume and valuable advice along the way. I am most grateful to my brother, Loy Stewart, for his help with proof-reading some of the featured works and for his feedback about the concept of the project as a whole. I owe Brian Söderquist my deepest gratitude for helping to trace a number of missing references for some of the articles. I would like to thank Stig Miss, the director of Thorvaldsen’s Museum for a number of very useful suggestions about this project generally and for helping to locate some of the references to the article on Thorvaldsen. I am further grateful to Johan de Mylius, the Director of the H.C. Andersen Centre at the University of Southern Denmark for his help in tracking down references related to Andersen. I would like to thank the following journals and publishing houses for generously allowing me to reprint the articles featured here: Danish Yearbook of Philosophy, Svend Olufsen and C.A. Reitzels Forlag A/S, Det Danske Selskab, Scandinavian Studies, Scandinavica, The British Journal of Aesthetics, Nordic Theatre Studies, Yearbook for Theatre Research in Scandinavia, G.E.C. Gads Forlag, and Thorvaldsen’s Museum. The following institutions have allowed the reproduction of the pictures featured in the art history section of this anthology: Thorvaldsen’s Museum, Nivaagaards Malerisamling, Den Hirschsprungske Samling, Statens Museum for Kunst, and the Royal Library in Copenhagen.

Acknowledgements

ix

I would like to express my gratitude to the Overretssagfører L. Zeuthens Mindelegat and the Søren Kierkegaard Research Centre for generous financial assistance with the publication of this volume. I owe a special thanks to Niels Jørgen Cappelørn for his encouragement and support of this project. Without his help, it would never have been realized. Finally, I would like to thank both Niels Jørgen and Hermann Deuser for allowing this volume to be published in the Kierkegaard Studies. Monograph Series.

Abbreviations of Kierkegaard’s Primary Texts B&A C

CA

CD

CI COR

CUP1

CUP2

EO1 EO2 EPW

EUD

Breve og Aktstykker vedrørende Søren Kierkegaard vols. 1-2, ed. by Niels Thulstrup, Copenhagen: Munksgaard 1953-54. The Crisis and a Crisis in the Life of an Actress, tr. by Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong, Princeton: Princeton University Press 1997, KW XVII. The Concept of Anxiety, tr. by Reidar Thomte in collaboration with Albert B. Anderson, Princeton: Princeton University Press 1980, KW VIII. Christian Discourses, tr. by Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong, Princeton: Princeton University Press 1997, KW XVII. The Concept of Irony, tr. by Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong, Princeton: Princeton University Press 1989, KW II. The Corsair Affair; Articles Related to the Writings, tr. by Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong, Princeton: Princeton University Press 1982, KW XIII. Concluding Unscientific Postscript 1, tr. by Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong, Princeton: Princeton University Press 1992, KW XII.1. Concluding Unscientific Postscript 2, tr. by Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong, Princeton: Princeton University Press 1992, KW XII.2. Either/Or 1, tr. by Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong, Princeton: Princeton University Press 1987, KW III. Either/Or 2, tr. by Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong, Princeton: Princeton University Press 1987, KW IV. Early Polemical Writings: From the Papers of One Still Living; Articles from Student Days; The Battle between the Old and the New Soap-Cellars, tr. by Julia Watkin, Princeton: Princeton University Press 1990, KW I. Eighteen Upbuilding Discourses, tr. by Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong, Princeton: Princeton University Press 1990, KW V.

Abbreviations of Kierkegaard’s Primary Texts

FSE

FT

JP

KW

LD

LRP M

P Pap.

PF

PJ PV

R SBL

xi

For Self-Examination; Judge for Yourself! tr. by Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong, Princeton: Princeton University Press 1990, KW XXI. Fear and Trembling; Repetition, tr. by Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong, Princeton: Princeton University Press 1983, KW VI. Søren Kierkegaard’s Journals and Papers vols. 1-6, ed. and tr. by Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong, Bloomington and London: Indiana University Press 1967-78. Cited by volume number and entry number. Index and Composite Collation vol. 7, by Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong, Bloomington and London: Indiana University Press 1978. Kierkegaard’s Writings vols. 1-26, tr. by Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong, Princeton: Princeton University Press 19782000. Kierkegaard: Letters and Documents, tr. by Henrik Rosenmeier, Princeton: Princeton University Press 1978. (A translation of B&A above.) KW XXV. A Literary Review, tr. by Alastair Hannay, Harmondsworth: Penguin 2001. The Moment and Late Writings, tr. by Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong, Princeton: Princeton University Press 1998, KW XXIII. Prefaces in Prefaces, Writing Sampler, tr. by Todd W. Nichol, Princeton: Princeton University Press 1998, KW IX. Søren Kierkegaards Papirer vols. 1-16, ed. by P.A. Heiberg, V. Kuhr and E. Torsting, Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 1909-48. Supplemented by Niels Thulstrup, Copenhagen: Gyldendal 1968-78. Cited by volume number and entry number. Philosophical Fragments; Johannes Climacus, or De omnibus dubitandum est, tr. by Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong, Princeton: Princeton University Press 1985. KW VII. Papers and Journals: A Selection, tr. by Alastair Hannay, Harmondsworth: Penguin Books 1996. The Point of View, tr. by Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong, Princeton: Princeton University Press 1998, KW XXII. Repetition, tr. by Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong, Princeton: Princeton University Press 1983, KW VI. Schelling Lecture Notes, tr. by Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong, Princeton: Princeton University Press 1989, KW II.

xii SKS

SL SUD SV1 WA

WL WS

Abbreviations of Kierkegaard’s Primary Texts

Søren Kierkegaards Skrifter vols. 1-55, ed. by Niels Jørgen Cappelørn, Joakim Garff, Jette Knudsen, Johnny Kondrup and Alastair McKinnon, Copenhagen: Gad Publishers 1997-. Stages on Life’s Way, tr. by Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong, Princeton: Princeton University Press 1988, KW XI. The Sickness unto Death, tr. by Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong, Princeton: Princeton University Press 1980, KW XIX. Samlede Værker vols. 1-14, ed. by A.B. Drachmann, J.L. Heiberg, and H.O. Lange, Copenhagen: Gyldendal 1901-1906. Without Authority, tr. by Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong, Princeton: Princeton University Press 1997, KW vol. XVIII. Works of Love, tr. by Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong, Princeton: Princeton University Press 1995, KW XVI. Writing Sampler in Prefaces, Writing Sampler, tr. by Todd W. Nichol, Princeton: Princeton University Press 1998, KW IX.

Preface The goal of this project has been to provide the anglophone reader with articles on Kierkegaard’s contemporaries and his various relations to them. After making several bibliographies, I set about trying to collect the best things written on this subject which were available in English. I found a number of outstanding articles that had been published in various journals over the past several years, and which had not lost their relevance with the passage of time. The result of the original literature search was productive, but ultimately other articles had to be commissioned or translated in order to fill in the gaps and thus give a more complete picture of the major figures of the period. In the selection of articles, I carefully avoided overly specialized texts; only those articles were chosen which served the function of introducing the specific figures, discussions and texts, and locating them within the period and vis-à-vis Kierkegaard. The full bibliographical information about the original publication of the essays is given below. With regard to the editing of these texts, the goal was to avoid being heavy-handed and to present the essays in as close to their original form as absolutely possible. However, the diversity of different contexts in which these works were originally published made it necessary to make some effort to standardize certain formalia regarding regulative principles, such as punctuation, forms of citation, etc. In this regard I have followed the standard guidelines and abbreviations used in the Kierkegaard Studies. Yearbook. The few texts originally written in British English have been made to conform to the orthography and punctuation of standard American English. In order to make this volume more useful to readers today, the older essays have been updated by the addition of references to the most recent editions of the respective primary texts or translations. This has usually been done in consultation with and at the request of the individual authors. When possible, quotations or allusions to Kierkegaard’s texts have been referenced to Søren Kierkegaards Skrifter.

xiv

Preface

Moreover, additional references have occasionally been added in order to document the works quoted or discussed. Some minor linguistic revision has been made for some of the essays when needed. Quotations in Danish have been translated into English for the sake of the non-Danish reader. In cases of verse quotations, the Danish original has also been given in the footnotes. The guiding principle behind these changes has been to make the articles as readable, as comprehensible and as useful as possible for anglophone students and scholars.

The Original Sources of the Essays Poul Lübcke “F.C. Sibbern: Epistemology as Ontology” in Danish Yearbook of Philosophy vol. 13, 1976, pp. 167-178. Peter Thielst “Poul Martin Møller (1794-1838): Scattered Thoughts, Analysis of Affectation, Combat with Nihilism” in Danish Yearbook of Philosophy vol. 13, 1976, pp. 66-83. Johannes Witt-Hansen “H.C. Ørsted, Immanuel Kant and the Thought Experiment” in Danish Yearbook of Philosophy vol. 13, 1976, pp. 48-65. K. Brian Söderquist “Kierkegaard’s Contribution to the Danish Discussion of ‘Irony.’ ” This article appears for the first time in this anthology. Jon Stewart “Kierkegaard and Hegelianism in Golden Age Denmark.” This article appears for the first time in this anthology. John Saxbee “The Golden Age in an Earthen Vessel: The Life and Times of Bishop J.P. Mynster.” This article appears for the first time in this anthology. Curtis Thompson “H.L. Martensen’s Theological Anthropology” in Faith, Knowledge and Action, ed. by G.L. Stengren, Copenhagen: C.A. Reitzels Forlag A/S 1984, pp. 199-216. This article has been slightly modified for this anthology. Niels Thulstrup “Martensen’s Dogmatics and its Reception” in his Kierkegaard and the Church in Denmark (Bibliotheca Kierkegaardiana, vol. 13), Copenhagen: C.A. Reitzels Forlag A/S 1984, pp. 169197. This article has been slightly modified for this anthology. Flemming Lundgreen-Nielsen “Grundvig and Romanticism” in N.F.S. Grundtvig. Tradition and Renewal, ed. by Christian Thodberg and Anders Pontoppidan Thyssen, tr. by Edward Broadbridge, Copenhagen: Det Danske Selskab 1983, pp. 19-43. Kathryn Shailer-Hanson “Adam Oehlenschläger’s Erik og Roller and Danish Romanticism” in Scandinavian Studies vol. 65, 1993, pp. 180-195. Niels Ingwersen “The Tragic Moment in Oehlenschläger’s Hakon Jarl Hin Rige” in Scandinavica vol. 9, 1970, pp. 34-44.

xvi

The Original Sources of the Essays

John L. Greenway “‘Reason in Imagination is Beauty’: Ørsted’s Acoustics and H.C. Andersen’s ‘The Bell’” in Scandinavian Studies vol. 63, 1991, pp. 318-325. Katalin Nun “Thomasine Gyllembourg’s Two Ages and her Portrayal of Everyday Life.” This article appears for the first time in this anthology. Henning Fenger “Kierkegaard – A Literary Approach” in Scandinavica vol. 3, 1964, pp. 1-16. George Pattison “Søren Kierkegaard: A Theatre Critic of the Heiberg School” in The British Journal of Aesthetics vol. 23, 1983, pp. 25-33. Janne Risum “Towards Transparency, Søren Kierkegaard on Danish Actresses” in Nordic Theatre Studies, Yearbook for Theatre Research in Scandinavia (Special issue “Women in Scandinavian Theatre”), vol. 1, 1988, pp. 19-31. Peter Vinten-Johansen “Johan Ludvig Heiberg and his Audience in Ninteenth-Century Denmark” in Scandinavian Studies vol. 54, 1982, pp. 295-306. Hans Hertel “P.L. Møller and Romanticism in Danish Literature” in Scandinavica vol. 8, 1969, pp. 35-48. Else Kai Sass “Thorvaldsen: An Introduction to his Work” in her Thorvaldsens Portrætbuster vols. 1-3, Copenhagen: G.E.C. Gads Forlag 1965; vol. 3, pp. 15-44. Ragni Linnet “Golden Tears: Johan Thomas Lundbye and Søren Kierkegaard,” originally “Guldtaarer: Johan Thomas Lundbye og Søren Kierkegaard,” Johan Thomas Lundbye 1818-1848…at male det kjære Danmark, Copenhagen: Thorvaldsens Museum 1994, pp. 182-195. This article appears for the first time in English in this anthology.

Introduction Kierkegaard has come to be regarded as a major figure in the history of 19th century European culture largely because of his relation to later intellectual trends and schools of thought. He has been an important source of inspiration for thinkers such as Barth, Heidegger, Sartre, Unamuno, and Derrida. There has thus grown up a flourishing tradition of research devoted to tracing the connections between Kierkegaard and these later thinkers. He has been seen as the father of existentialism or a forerunner of deconstruction. But while these later schools and thinkers are interested, for ideological reasons, in claiming Kierkegaard as one of their own, it remains an open question how happy he would have been with the positions that his intellectual progeny ascribe to him. Many of the purported connections are forced or question-begging in the sense that the thought of the later thinker is generally used as the point of departure; the goal then becomes to try to find something in Kierkegaard to which this thought can be said to correspond. This procedure leads to a rather distorted picture of Kierkegaard’s own thinking since it focuses on individual aspects of his writings taken out of their original context, which may or may not be so central with respect to the whole. Moreover, in the process much of Kierkegaard himself is lost, in particular those parts of his thought which have not been taken up and put into the context of the thought of later thinkers or schools, even if these same things were quite important for his immediate Danish reception. There is another strong trend in scholarship at present which tries to place Kierkegaard in relation to social and political issues that are relevant today. Research of this sort pursues the common sense desire to make Kierkegaard address the burning problems of our time, with the intuition being that if he cannot be made to do so, then he is irrelevant, uninteresting or, even worse, simply another dead, white, European male. This sort of research tends to be apologetic at least to some degree since it tacitly wants Kierkegaard to have social and political sentiments in harmony with those of the progressive

2

Introduction

researcher today. Thus, the conclusion is almost invariably that Kierkegaard was a feminist or a democrat or the like. This approach also distorts the nature of his thought. The obvious problem is that by taking Kierkegaard out of his own time and culture and forcing him into our own, we, due to our own ideological investments, run the risk of losing his thought altogether and transforming him into something that he never was. Ultimately, it is not clear that this approach does him any real service. By forcing his writings to speak to issues and problems which they were never originally intended to address, we run the risk of making him appear absurd. Moreover, we draw attention away from other aspects of his thought which are of wider interest and stand the test of time much better. I submit that more justice is done to Kierkegaard by leaving his views in their original context and by seeing him for who he was, namely a nineteenth century Dane, with all the limitations, shortcomings and prejudices which that entails. Even if Kierkegaard cannot offer us a solution to our present dilemmas, it does not follow that he is irrelevant for the modern reader. It might bother some that Kierkegaard was not a modern democrat, an egalitarian, a multiculturalist, a deconstructionist or the like, but there is nevertheless enough that is interesting and original in the thought of the nineteenth century Dane to hold our attention for some time. This is of course not to say that we should reduce Kierkegaard exclusively to the period in which he lived and regard him as a figure of purely historical interest. To be sure, an effort should be made to determine the more universal nature of his views and thus, as it were, to bring him into dialogue with our modern world. The claim is merely that attempts of this sort should begin with a careful study of Kierkegaard and his sources in their own time. Only with this sort of historically grounded picture can one have an adequate basis for the comparisons which attempt to make him topical today. The problem is when interpreters start at the wrong end, by attempting to understand his opinions on our current issues without first bothering to explore him in his own time. Even if one is interested exclusively in finding out what Kierkegaard has to tell us today, ultimately this can best be done precisely by an investigation of him in his time. This allows one to identify the targets of his criticisms more clearly and thus to clarify his philosophical or theological motivations. Often one can find analogies in the past to positions in the present, and seeing Kierkegaard’s views on past issues can be a key to discovering what he would say about similar ones today. Thus, a historical approach in fact opens up

Introduction

3

Kierkegaard’s thought for different interests and applications relevant for our modern world. The present anthology is an attempt to resist the popular, modern research trends sketched here by seeing Kierkegaard in his immediate context, i.e. in relation to his Danish contemporaries most of whom he knew personally and with whom he was in constant dialogue. The cultural achievements of what has come to be known as “the Golden Age of Denmark” represent an exciting and important chapter in European intellectual history. However, outside Scandinavia few can name the leading figures of Danish intellectual life who made that period what it was. Aside from Hans Christian Andersen and Kierkegaard himself, the most important personalities of the time have been largely neglected and even forgotten by international research. The present anthology is an attempt to correct this unfortunate tendency and to stimulate interest in the literature, history, philosophy, drama, theology and art of the Golden Age generally. Due to a wealth of translations, Kierkegaard and Hans Christian Andersen have long since become familiar names in the Englishspeaking world. However, as is well-known inside Denmark, they were not isolated figures on the Danish intellectual scene of the time but rather merely the best-known representatives of an extremely rich period in Danish cultural life that began at the start of the 19th century and continued for some fifty or sixty years. There has long been a tendency to place Kierkegaard on center-stage and to read his contemporaries, rather unfairly, only through his eyes. Now some of the other figures from this period are finally coming to be appreciated in their own right. Since the appearance of Bruce H. Kirmmse’s now standard work, Kierkegaard in Golden Age Denmark,1 interest in this period has increased dramatically, and there is every indication that it will continue to do so. As is the case with Kirmmse’s book, much of this interest had its beginning in Kierkegaard studies and then later was expanded to include other figures of the period of Golden Age Denmark. This recent historical orientation has been a vast improvement over the once ahistorical Kierkegaard research by opening up rich new perspectives on his thought. More recently there have appeared the anthologies edited by Bente Scavenius, The Golden Age in Denmark, Art and Culture 1800-1850 1

Bruce H. Kirmmse Kierkegaard in Golden Age Denmark, Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press 1990.

4

Introduction

and The Golden Age Revisited, Art and Culture 1800-1850.2 These excellent works are aimed primarily at a popular audience with a general interest in Denmark’s history and culture. Thus, their goal is not to introduce the various figures of Golden Age Denmark in a scholarly fashion, and the featured articles are more impressionistic than rigorous pieces of original scholarship. Moreover, the essays are accompanied by a number of color pictures, a fact which contributes to the impression that the two anthologies are in large part art books. What is needed in the research now is an anthology which collects articles which are academically valuable in their own right, while also being readable and accessible. The goal is not to introduce Danish culture and intellectual life to English-speaking tourists but rather to trained scholars and students. This new interest has made clear the need for improved availability of secondary literature in English on the main figures from this period. Given the lack of familiarity with the Danish language in the United States and Great Britain, this is necessary in order to make the rich intellectual life of this period accessible to the world of anglophone scholarship. The main goal of the present anthology is to familiarize the English-speaking world with Kierkegaard’s diverse relations to the leading figures in Golden Age Denmark. This anthology thus consists of several essays which treat various discussions and thinkers of the day. The texts featured represent the work of scholars from many different fields. They give excellent discussions and analyses of the leading writers, poets, philosophers, critics, theologians and artists of the age; the articles serve individually to make these figures better known and together to paint a more complete picture of the intellectual milieu of the period. Few thinkers have managed to awaken the interest of scholars from so many different disciplines as Kierkegaard. He is still discussed passionately in philosophy, theology, literature, history, literary and dramatic criticism, and even art history. This anthology has been divided into several different sections which reflect the importance of Kierkegaard in the different fields. While it makes no claim to completeness, this anthology does feature sections which represent the main fields in which Kierkegaard studies are being pursued today.

2

Bente Scavenius (ed.) The Golden Age in Denmark, Art and Culture 1800-1850, Copenhagen: Gyldendal 1994. The Golden Age Revisited, Art and Culture 1800-1850, Copenhagen: Gyldendal 1996.

Introduction

5

I. Philosophy The first section of the present anthology treats the philosophy of the Golden Age. It includes five articles dedicated to individual philosophers or philosophical movements of the period. There was never an independent philosophical tradition in Denmark prior to the Golden Age, and thus it is no surprise that the country’s philosophy even during the first half of the 19th century was largely derivative, being dominated primarily by the then recent trends in German thought.3 During the final decade of the 18th century Kant’s philosophy came to be influential in Denmark.4 Kant was introduced in Copenhagen in 1793 with the lectures of Christian Hornemann (1759-93), who had been a student of the Kantian Karl Leonard Reinhold (1758-1823) in Jena in 1791. Perhaps the most important Kantian in Scandinavia was Niels Treschow (1751-1833), a Norwegian philosopher who taught at the University of Copenhagen from 1803 until 1813.5 Kant’s ethics and political philosophy were formative for the jurist Anders Sandøe Ørsted (1778-1860), who gave an extended account of the main lines of this part of Kant’s thought.6 Kant also exercised a significant influence on Ørsted’s brother, the natural scientist Hans Christian Ørsted (1777-1851), and the priest and theologian Jakob Peter Mynster (1775-1854). Further, Kant’s philosophy played a role in the work of the controversial Frantz Gotthard Howitz (1789-1826),7 who was at the center of a major philosophical dispute on the freedom of the will in 1824-25.8 The Danish Kantians met with determined opposition from thinkers such as Tyge Rothe (1731-95) and Johannes Boye (1756-1830), who were critical of various aspects of Kant’s philosophy. It has been argued that Kierkegaard freely incorporated many aspects 3

4

5

6

7

8

For a useful overview, see Harald Høffding Danske Filosofer, Copenhagen and Christiania: Gyldendalske Boghandel, Nordisk Forlag 1909. See Anders Thuborg Den Kantiske Periode i Dansk Filosofi. 1790-1800, Copenhagen: Gyldendal Boghandel, Nordisk Forlag 1951. Harald Høffding “Danske Kantianere og deres Modstandere” in his Danske Filosofer, op. cit., pp. 25-39. See, for example, Treschow’s Aphorismer til Forelæsninger over den Kantiske Philosophie, Christiania 1797. Forelæsninger over den Kantiske Philosophie, Copenhagen 1798. See Anders Sandøe Ørsted Over Sammenhængen mellem Dydelærens og Retslærens Princip, Copenhagen 1798. See Frantz Gotthard Howitz Determinismen eller Hume imod Kant, Copenhagen 1824. See Oluf Thomsen F.G. Howitz og hans Strid om Villiens Frihed, Copenhagen: Levin og Munksgaard 1924.

6

Introduction

of Kant’s thought without always clearly indicating the source.9 In any case Kant’s influence on both Kierkegaard and the period generally was substantial. In Denmark as in Germany it was the philosophy of Fichte that followed that of Kant. When Napoleon entered Berlin in late October 1807, Fichte fled to Copenhagen after a stay in Königsberg. He stayed in the Danish capital for a few months at the home of the aforementioned Anders Sandøe Ørsted, whose brother Hans Christian had heard Fichte’s lectures in Berlin. Fichte was important for a number of Danish philosophers, including Frederik Christian Sibbern (17851872) and the Norwegian-Danish philosopher Henrich Steffens (17731845). The influence of Fichte on Kierkegaard and other Golden Age philosophers remains to be explored in adequate detail.10 In the 1830’s and 40’s Hegel’s philosophy played a central role in a number of different areas in Danish cultural life, including art, literature, law, religion and history.11 Hegel was introduced into Denmark as early as the 1820’s, but it took awhile for his philosophy to become a significant trend. Hegelianism reached its highpoint in Denmark with the lectures that Hans Lassen Martensen (1808-84) gave in 1837-

9

10

11

See Ronald M. Green’s excellent study, Kierkegaard and Kant: The Hidden Debt, Albany, New York: SUNY Press 1992. See also Kant and Kierkegaard on Religion, ed. by D.Z. Phillips and Timothy Tessin, New York: St. Martin’s Press and London: Macmillan Press 2000. See W. v. Kloeden “Kierkegaard und J.G. Fichte” in Kierkegaard and Speculative Idealism (Bibliotheca Kierkegaardiana, vol. 4), ed. by Niels Thulstrup and Marie Mikulová Thulstrup, Copenhagen: C.A. Reitzels Boghandel 1979, pp. 114-143. See T.H. Croxall “Hegelianism in Denmark” in his translation Johannes Climacus, or De omnibus dubitandum est and a Sermon, London: Adam and Charles Black 1958, pp. 46-54. Leif Grane “Hegelianismen” in his “Det Teologiske Fakultet 1830-1925” in Københavns Universitet 1479-1979 vols. 1-14, ed. by Leif Grane et al.; vol. 5, Det Teologiske Fakultet, Copenhagen: G.E.C. Gads Forlag 1980, pp. 360-369. Hans Friederich Helweg “Hegelianismen i Danmark” in Dansk Kirketidende vol. 10, no. 51, December 16, 1855, pp. 825-837, and no. 51, December 23, 1855, pp. 841-852. Carl Henrik Koch “Den danske hegelianisme” in his En Flue på Hegels udødelige Næse eller om Adolph Peter Adler og om Søren Kierkegaards forhold til ham, Copenhagen: C.A. Reitzels Forlag A/S 1990, pp. 20-33. Paul V. Rubow “Hegelianisme” in his Heiberg og hans skole i kritiken, Copenhagen: Gyldendal 1953, pp. 34-41. Jens Holger Schjørring Teologi og filosofi. Nogle analyser og dokumenter vedrørende Hegelianismen i dansk teologi, Copenhagen: G.E.C. Gads Forlag 1974. Niels Thulstrup Kierkegaard’s Relation to Hegel, tr. by George L. Stengren, Princeton: Princeton University Press 1980. Niels Thulstrup “The Situation in Denmark and Kierkegaard’s Reaction” in his Commentary on Kierkegaard’s Concluding Unscientific Postscript, tr. by Robert J. Widenmann, Princeton: Princeton University Press 1984, pp. 70-90.

Introduction

7

38 at the University of Copenhagen.12 These lectures were among the most popular in the entire history of the university and made Hegel something of a fashion among the students of the day. Also highly significant was the Hegelian journal Perseus. Journal for the Speculative Idea, published by Johan Ludvig Heiberg (1791-1860). Although the journal saw only two issues in 1837 and 1838, it created a focal point for the discussion of Hegel’s philosophy in Denmark. It is well known that Heiberg, Martensen and the movement of Danish Hegelianism were among Kierkegaard’s favorite targets of criticism.13 Schelling’s thought was important in Denmark during two different periods. His early philosophy was promoted in Copenhagen in 1802 with the influential lectures of the aforementioned Henrich Steffens.14 In 1812 the theologian Nicolai Frederik Severin Grundtvig (17831872), by attacking Schelling’s philosophy, began a literary controversy which included figures such as Christian Molbech (1783-1857) and H.C. Ørsted.15 Already during this early period, a steady stream of Danish students made the journey to Munich to hear Schelling’s lectures. The philosophy of the late Schelling was also highly significant in Denmark. With Schelling’s appointment to the Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität in 1841, a number of Danish students and scholars including Kierkegaard himself travelled to Berlin to attend his famous lecture course, Philosophie der Offenbarung.16 While the details are still a matter of some debate, there is no doubt that Kierkegaard was strongly influenced by some parts of Schelling’s thought.17 Aspects of these different philosophical trends in Denmark are treated in the articles featured here. 12

13

14

15

16

17

For the influence of Martensen’s lectures, see Skat Arildsen, Biskop Hans Lassen Martensen. Hans Liv, Udvikling og Arbejde, Copenhagen: G.E.C. Gads Forlag 1932, pp. 162-164. See Niels Thulstrup Kierkegaard’s Relation to Hegel, op. cit. Mark C. Taylor Journeys to Selfhood: Hegel and Kierkegaard, Berkeley: University of California Press 1980. Henrich Steffens Indledning til philosophiske Forelæsninger, Copenhagen 1803. See also Henrich Steffens Indledning til philosophiske Forelæsninger, ed. by Johnny Kondrup, Copenhagen: C.A. Reitzels Forlag 1996. See C.I. Scharling Grundtvig og Romantiken belyst ved Grundtvigs Forhold til Schelling, Copenhagen: Gyldendal Boghandel, Nordisk Forlag 1947. See also Harald Høffding “Grundtvig og H.C. Ørsted” in his Danske Filosofer, op. cit., pp. 57-65. See Tonny Aagaard Olsen “Kierkegaards Schelling. Eine historische Einführung” in Kierkegaard und Schelling: Freiheit, Angst und Wirklichkeit (Kierkegaard Studies. Monograph Series, vol. 8), ed. by Jochem Hennigfeld and Jon Stewart, Berlin: Walter de Gruyter Verlag 2002, pp. 1-102. See Kierkegaard und Schelling: Freiheit, Angst und Wirklichkeit, ed. by Jochem Hennigfeld and Jon Stewart, op. cit.

8

Introduction

The first article in the section treats the aforementioned professor of philosophy at the University of Copenhagen, Frederik Christian Sibbern. Sibbern is perhaps best known as the advisor of Kierkegaard’s dissertation, The Concept of Irony (1841); however, he was also a profoundly prolific and influential writer in his own right. Of all the Danish philosophers, Sibbern probably had the best knowledge of contemporary German philosophy. He had spent much time in Germany and knew personally Fichte, Schleiermacher, Goethe and Schelling. In the article presented here two of Sibbern’s main works are examined: On Knowledge and Enquiry (1822)18 and Speculative Cosmology with the Rudiments of a Speculative Theology (1846).19 Sibbern’s relation to contemporary German philosophy in the form of Kantian thought is explored as is his relation to and influence on Kierkegaard. Of particular interest is the connection made between Sibbern’s theory of human freedom and Kierkegaard’s philosophical anthropology. While Sibbern is optimistic that human beings can express the good in actuality, Kierkegaard is fixated on the sinfulness of human beings and thus highly suspicious of Sibbern’s optimism. Sibbern’s ontology with his difficult concept of “the all-constitutive” is explored in some detail. The second article is dedicated to the thought of Sibbern’s colleague, the philosopher and poet Poul Martin Møller (1794-1838). Møller is known today as one of Kierkegaard’s best loved mentors and the person to whom he dedicated The Concept of Anxiety (1844).20 Møller became professor of philosophy at the University of Copenhagen in 1830. His active period was not very long, and he did not produce a large amount of written work. He is perhaps best known for his extended article from 1837, “Thoughts on the Possibility of Proofs of Human Immortality.”21 While Møller had been highly influenced by 18

19

20

21

Sibbern Om Erkiendelse og Granskning. Til Indledning i det akademiske Studium, Copenhagen 1822. Sibbern Speculativ Kosmologie med Grundlag til en speculativ Theologie, Copenhagen 1846. For Kierkegaard’s relation to Møller see the following: Poul Lübcke “Det ontologiske program hos Poul Møller og Søren Kierkegaard” in Filosofiske Studier vol. 6, 1983, pp. 127-147. H.P. Rohde “Poul Møller” in Kierkegaard’s Teachers (Bibliotheca Kierkegaardiana, vol. 10), ed. by Niels Thulstrup and Marie Mikulová Thulstrup, Copenhagen: C.A. Reitzels Forlag 1982, pp. 91-108. See also Frithiof Brandt Den unge Søren Kierkegaard, Copenhagen: Levin & Munksgaards Forlag 1929, pp. 336-446. Poul Martin Møller “Tanker over Mueligheden af Beviser for Menneskets Udødelighed, med Hensyn til den nyeste derhen hørende Literatur” in Maanedsskrift for Litteratur no. 17, Copenhagen 1837, pp. 1-72, pp. 422-53. (Reprinted in Møller’s Efterladte Skrifter vols. 1-3, Copenhagen 1839-43; vol. 2, pp. 158-272.)

Introduction

9

Hegel’s philosophy, this work, it is often claimed, marked a clear break, for it criticized Hegel’s philosophy for lacking a theory of personal immortality and thus ultimately for being irreconcilable with Christianity. Also of interest is Møller’s course given in 1834-35, entitled Lectures on the History of Ancient Philosophy. Møller’s notes to these lectures were later published in his posthumous works.22 There one finds a long section on Socrates and an account of Socratic irony which overlaps significantly with Kierkegaard’s dissertation.23 The article presented here discusses Møller’s concept of “scattered thoughts,” a literary genre that he cultivated for many years. These poetic aphorisms suited Møller’s conception of philosophy as a nonacademic enterprise. Thus, it is no surprise that he, like Kierkegaard later, used Socrates as his philosophical model. The article explores how Møller tried to come to terms with the nihilism of his time, which took many forms, among others, romantic irony, a central theme in Kierkegaard’s dissertation. Further, the author argues that Møller’s analysis of affectation is an important forerunner of Kierkegaard’s existential psychology. The next article is dedicated to the aforementioned Hans Christian Ørsted, who is best known as a physicist and the discoverer of electromagnetism. Like Sibbern, Ørsted was one of the members of Kierkegaard’s dissertation committee. Not surprisingly, there are a number of scattered references to Ørsted in Kierkegaard’s journals.24 With regard to Ørsted’s most famous work, The Spirit in Nature (1850),25 Kierkegaard writes: The Berlingske Tidende trumpets Ørsted’s book (The Spirit in Nature) as a work which will clear up the relations between faith and science, a work which “even when it is polemical always uses the finest phrases of the cultured urbanite.” One is tempted to answer: The whole book from first to last is scientifically – that is, philosophically-scientifically – insignificant, and even when it tries to be most significant it always moves in the direction of the most insignificant phrases of triviality.26

The article presented here, like Ørsted himself, falls somewhere between philosophy and the natural sciences. It argues that Ørsted was the originator of the so-called thought experiment in the sciences. 22

23 24

25 26

Poul Martin Møller “Udkast til Forelæsninger over den ældre Philosophies Historie” in Møller’s Efterladte Skrifter, op. cit., vol. 2, pp. 273-527. Ibid., vol. 2, p. 363f. JP 5, 5092 / SKS 17, 21, AA:12. JP 4, 4780 / Pap. X 1 A 397. JP 1, 678 / Pap. X 2 A 466, p. 335. JP 2, 1798 / Pap. X 4 A 282. JP 6, 6598 / Pap. X 6 B 68, pp. 72-73, pp. 81-82. JP 5, 5909 / Pap. VII 1 A 124. Hans Christian Ørsted Aanden i Naturen, Copenhagen 1850. JP 6, 6564 / Pap. X 2 A 302.

10

Introduction

This concept is set forth in his work Prolegomenon to the General Theory of Nature from 1811.27 The article demonstrates that Ørsted found much of the inspiration for this concept in Kant’s theoretical philosophy and philosophy of nature, specifically his Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science (1786). The next article, “Kierkegaard’s Contribution to the Danish Discussion of ‘Irony,’” takes up the central issue in Kierkegaard’s dissertation. While his account of Socratic and romantic irony is well known in that work, the secondary literature has almost entirely neglected the animated contemporary discussion of the issue of irony that was going on during Kierkegaard’s student years. This discussion involved the leading figures of Danish philosophy and theology. This article traces this discussion from irony understood as an aesthetic category relevant for theater and literature, to irony as a practical, existential position. The young Kierkegaard is then understood as the final interlocutor in this discussion, taking up where the others left off. The article demonstrates how much of Kierkegaard’s dissertation was derivative from that discussion and attempts to define what precisely his original contribution was. The final article in the initial section gives an overview of the important movement of Danish Hegelianism. While readers of Kierkegaard know that he was involved in an ongoing polemic with the Danish Hegelians, such as the aforementioned Johan Ludvig Heiberg, Hans Lassen Martensen as well as the controversial priest Adolph Peter Adler (181269), not much has been written about his targets and their actual thought. The article argues that the label “Hegelian” is an oversimplified category which does not adequately capture the differentiated nature of the thought of the individuals inspired by Hegel. An overview is given of the main figures and works in this movement as well as the main Hegel critics. The article also traces the connections of each of these figures to Kierkegaard. Finally, the author makes a case for a more nuanced picture of this movement and Kierkegaard’s relation to it.

II. Theology The next section of the present anthology is dedicated to the main theological minds of Golden Age Denmark. The first half of the 19th 27

Hans Christian Ørsted Første Indledning til den almindelige Naturlære, Copenhagen 1811.

Introduction

11

century was a very dynamic period in Danish theology.28 It saw important changes in the institution of the Danish State Church due to its attempts to deal with a number of new revivalist movements, including various forms of pietism.29 This period also witnessed the birth of the popular Grundtvigian movement, which was highly influential in several spheres. The conflicts between these fledgling movements and the State Church led to a number of far-reaching social and legal changes. The importance of the Danish Church can be seen, among other things, by the significant degree of influence enjoyed by the priests and bishops, who were highly visible participants in social and political discussions and some of whom were themselves politicians. The significance of this institution can be seen indirectly by the violence Kierkegaard directed against it in the last year of his life. Theology played a very central role at the University of Copenhagen. The Faculty of Theology attracted the brightest minds of the day. At the time when Kierkegaard was a student, the University of Copenhagen had more students of theology than of any other faculty; indeed for a time about half of the entire student population studied theology.30 The Faculty of Theology was the locus for discussions about a number of different theological trends during the period, e.g. the conflict between rationalism and supernaturalism and the introduction of speculative theology. Schleiermacher’s theology of feeling also played a significant role in university circles, influencing, among others Henrik Nicolaj Clausen’s (1793-1877) rationalist theology. These trends filtered down to the general population as the students graduated and received their own congregations. While most Kierkegaard scholars at least know the names of theological figures such as Grundtvig, Mynster and Martensen, the picture that is presented of them is almost invariably identical to that painted

28

29 30

See Den danske Kirkes Historie vols. 1-7, ed. by Hal Koch and Bjørn Kornerup, Copenhagen: Gyldendalske Boghandel, Nordisk Forlag 1950-66; vol. 6, 1800-1848, by Hal Koch. See Bruce H. Kirmmse Kierkegaard in Golden Age Denmark, op. cit., pp. 27-44. See Leif Grane “Det Teologiske Fakultet 1830-1925” in Københavns Universitet 1479-1979, op. cit., vol. 5, p. 325. See also the enrollment statistics in vol. 3, Almindelig historie 1936-1979, Studenterne 1760-1967, ed. by Svend Ellehøj and Leif Grane, Copenhagen: G.E.C. Gads Forlag 1986, Tabel 17, pp. 408-409. See also Bruce Kirmmse “Socrates in the Fast Lane: Kierkegaard’s The Concept of Irony on the University’s Volocifère. Documents, Context, Commentary, and Interpretation” in International Kierkegaard Commentary: The Concept of Irony, ed. by Robert L. Perkins, Macon: Mercer University Press 2002, p. 37.

12

Introduction

by Kierkegaard himself. The reader quickly receives the impression that all of the Danish theologians during Kierkegaard’s time were no better than modern day Pharisees. Little work has been done in English to explore in any detail what positions these thinkers held and what their theological motivations were. This section devoted to theology explores the life and thought of some of the main theological figures who were important for Kierkegaard. The first article treats the person and thought of the famous Bishop of Zealand, Jakob Peter Mynster. Kierkegaard’s relation to Mynster is fairly well known. While this has been called into question,31 it has often been claimed, following Kierkegaard’s own statements, that his father was a great admirer of Mynster. Kierkegaard himself was confirmed by him in 1828.32 Even though Kierkegaard ultimately became alienated from Mynster toward the end of his life, there is evidence of a quite positive relationship in much of the authorship. Kierkegaard’s estrangement from Mynster culminated in his attack on the Church after the latter’s death in 1854. In his article, “Was Bishop Mynster a Witness to the Truth,”33 Kierkegaard lashes out at what he perceives to be the corruption of the priesthood in Denmark and its departure from the true nature of New Testament Christianity. In the article presented here the author tries to get beyond the usual prejudices surrounding Mynster in order to give a balanced assessment of his character and abilities and to come to a more accurate understanding of his role in Golden Age Denmark. It traces his career and development through the various controversies that he was confronted with. Based on these analyses, the author argues for the claim that Mynster was ultimately “an earthen vessel at the heart of the Golden Age.” The next article, “H.L. Martensen’s Theological Anthropology,” concerns Mynster’s successor to the post of Bishop of Zealand. Hans Lassen Martensen has also been much maligned by both Kierkegaard himself and Kierkegaard scholars. Although Kierkegaard as a young student seems to have been on fairly good terms with Martensen, attending his tutorials and visiting his mother while the latter was 31

32

33

See Niels Jørgen Cappelørn “Die ursprüngliche Unterbrechung. Søren Kierkegaard beim Abendmahl im Freitagsgottesdienst der Kopenhagener Frauenkirche” in Kierkegaard Studies. Yearbook 1996, pp. 328-329. LD, p. 4 / B&A 1, 4. See Niels Jørgen Cappelørn “Die ursprüngliche Unterbrechung” op. cit., pp. 322ff. “Var Biskop Mynster et ‘Sandhedsvidne,’ et af ‘de rette Sandhedsvidner’ – er dette Sandhed?” in Fædrelandet no. 295, December 18, 1854; M, pp. 3-8 / SV1 XIV, 5-10.

Introduction

13

abroad on his study trip, nevertheless when Martensen returned in 1836 Kierkegaard’s animosity was quickly awakened (not least of all due to Martensen’s vocal advocation of Hegel’s philosophy and his attempts to apply it to theology). Martensen quickly established himself at the University, and evidence from Kierkegaard’s journals bespeaks his jealousy of Martensen’s success.34 As is well known, Martensen was one of the central targets of Kierkegaard’s attack on the Church at the end of his life. The immediate motivation for his first article against the Church (mentioned above) was Martensen’s claim, made in his eulogy to his predecessor, that Mynster had been a witness to the truth. In the essay presented here the author explores the thought of Martensen with an analysis of, among other things, three of his main early works, his dissertation On the Autonomy of Human SelfConsciousness (1837),35 his Meister Eckhart (1840),36 and his Outline of the System of Moral Philosophy (1841).37 An overview is given of Martensen’s early theology, epistemology and moral philosophy. The author ultimately makes a plea for a recovery of Martensen’s thought for addressing the central theological issues of our day. The next article featured here, entitled “Martensen’s Dogmatics and its Reception,” continues the story of Martensen’s intellectual development. It explores in some depth what is arguably Martensen’s most important mature work, his Christian Dogmatics from 1849.38 The main outlines of this text are explored as well as its most significant sources. A detailed account is given of the animated critical discussion that this work initiated. A number of thinkers such as Rasmus Nielsen (1808-84), Peter Michael Stilling (1812-69), Peter Christian Kierkegaard (180588), Jens Paludan-Müller (1813-99), Carl Emil Scharling (1803-77), Magnus Eiriksson (1806-81), and Wilhelm Rothe (1800-78) entered the fray. Much of the second half of the article is dedicated to Søren Kierkegaard’s reaction to the work and its reception. In the Preface to Christian Dogmatics Martensen alludes to Kierkegaard’s works polemically, 34

35

36

37

38

See JP 5, 5225 / Pap. II A 597. See also JP 2, 1183 / SKS 17, 49, AA:38. JP 5, 5226 / SKS 18, 83, FF:38. Hans Lassen Martensen De autonomia conscientiae sui humanae in theologiam dogmaticam nostri temporis introducta, Copenhagen 1837. Danish translation: Den menneskelige Selvbevidstheds Autonomie, tr. by L.V. Petersen, Copenhagen 1841. Hans Lassen Martensen Mester Eckart. Et Bidrag til at oplyse Middelalderens Mystik, Copenhagen 1840. Hans Lassen Martensen Grundrids til Moralphilosophiens System, Copenhagen 1841. Hans Lassen Martensen Den christelige Dogmatik, Copenhagen 1849.

14

Introduction

and Kierkegaard’s various scattered remarks about the work in his journals show clearly that he was infuriated by this. Kierkegaard sketched a number of different responses both to Martensen’s work and to his critics but, for whatever reason, decided against publishing these. The next featured work treats the charismatic and influential priest N.F.S. Grundtvig. To date none of Grundtvig’s works has been translated into English,39 and for this reason he remains a somewhat unknown figure to anglophone readers. Although in the Danish literature Kierkegaard’s complex relation to him has often been explored,40 virtually nothing has been written about this in English. As is well known, Kierkegaard engaged in polemics against Grundtvig in both his published works and his journals.41 Perhaps his most famous criticism of Grundtvig appears in the Concluding Unscientific Postscript, where Kierkegaard’s pseudonymous author criticizes Grundtvig’s conception of the Church,42 the role of history in Christianity, and the “matchless discovery”43 concerning the priority of the church and its oral rituals over the text, i.e. the Bible. Kierkegaard regards as historically naive Grundtvig’s view that the oral tradition in the congregations with the Apostles’ Creed, the Lord’s Prayer, the Communion, and baptism comes directly from “the mouth of the Lord,” and thus should be regarded as more essential than the Bible which was written later.44 Kierkegaard’s polemic with Grundtvig was particularly acrimonious 39

40

41

42 43 44

It should be noted that there is an important translation project of Grundtvig’s works currently underway at the University of York under the direction of S.A.J. Bradley. When complete this project will make available to the anglophone world a number of Grundtvig’s most significant texts. See Søren Holm Grundtvig und Kierkegaard, Copenhagen: Nyt Nordisk Forlag, Arnold Busck 1956. Hellmut Toftdahl Kierkegaard først og Grundtvig så, Copenhagen: Nyt Nordisk Forlag, Arnold Busck 1969. Carl Weltzer Grundtvig og Søren Kierkegaard, Copenhagen: Gyldendal 1952. Emanuel Skjoldager Hvorfor Søren Kierkegaard ikke blev Grundtvigianer, Copenhagen: C.A. Reitzels Forlag 1977. Otto Bertelsen Dialogen mellem Grundtvig og Kierkegaard, Copenhagen: C.A. Reitzels Forlag 1990. Otto Bertelsen Kierkegaard og de første Grundtvigianere, Copenhagen: C.A. Reitzels Forlag 1996. F.J. Billeskov Jansen Grundtvig og Kierkegaard med ni andre åndshistoriske essays, Copenhagen: C.A. Reitzels Forlag 1996. E.g. SL, p. 259 / SKS 6, 241. SL, p. 378 / SKS 6, 351. SL, pp. 463-464 / SKS 6, 427-428. PF, p. 107 / SKS, 4, 303-304. CUP2, Supplement, pp. 16-27 / Pap. VI B 29, pp. 101-112. CUP2, Supplement, p. 27 / Pap. VI B 30, pp. 112-113. CUP2, Supplement, pp. 27-29 / Pap. VI B 33, pp. 114-115. CUP1, pp. 34-46 / SKS 7, 41-52. E.g. CUP1, p. 36f. / SKS 7, 43. See, for example, JP 5, 5089 / Pap. I A 60. See Bruce H. Kirmmse Kierkegaard in Golden Age Denmark, op. cit., pp. 213ff.

Introduction

15

due to the fact that his own elder brother, Peter Christian, was himself a Grundtvigian. The article featured here examines Grundtvig’s complex relation to romanticism through many stages of his life. In the first part of this essay, the sources of Grundtvig’s romanticism are examined with special emphasis on the German Romantics such as Schiller, Fichte and Schelling. In the second half, points of comparison and contrast are discussed between Grundtvig’s works and the main ideas and motifs of romanticism. Of particular importance in this regard is Grundtvig’s use of ancient Nordic mythology and history. The conflict between Grundtvig’s Christian faith and his aesthetic attraction to Nordic mythology is carefully explored.

III. Literature The next section is dedicated to the rich literary works produced by writers of the Golden Age. The first half of the 19th century was a tremendously productive time for Danish authors. It featured some of the best known poets in Danish literature such as Jens Baggesen (17641826), Steen Steensen Blicher (1782-1848), Bernhard Severin Ingemann (1789-1862), Schack Staffeldt (1769-1826), Adam Oehlenschläger (1779-1850), Johan Ludvig Heiberg, Poul Martin Møller, and Grundtvig. Many different forms of poetry flourished during this period, in particular lyric and dramatic. While poetry had long enjoyed hegemony in Danish letters, prose came into its own at this time and established itself firmly in the 1820’s. Among the major prose writers of the Golden Age were Hans Christian Andersen (1805-75), Thomasine Christine Gyllembourg-Ehrensvärd (1773-1856), Peter Ludvig Møller (1814-65), and Knud Lyhne Rahbek (1760-1830), not to mention Kierkegaard himself. The articles selected for this section illuminate the life and work of some of these figures. The first of these articles is dedicated to the poet Adam Oehlenschläger. Kierkegaard refers to Oehlenschläger in a number of his published works and journals.45 He seems to have been particularly fond of the historical tragedy Palnatoke (1809)46 and the dramatic poem Aladdin or the Wonderful Lamp (1805).47 The article featured 45

46 47

E.g. EO1, p. 22 / SKS 2, 30. EO2, p. 144 / SKS 3, 142. P, p. 52 / SKS 4, 513. JP 6, 6413 / Pap. X 1 A 402. Adam Oehlenschläger Palnatoke. Et Sørgespiel, Copenhagen 1809. In Oehlenschläger’s Poetiske Skrifter vols. 1-2, Copenhagen 1805; vol. 2, pp. 75-436.

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Introduction

here examines Oehlenschläger’s use and defense of material from Nordic mythology as the subject matter for literary works. This was thematically highly significant for other writers, not the least of whom was Grundtvig. This article examines in particular an unfinished drama by Oehlenschläger from around 1802 entitled Erik and Roller. The author claims that if Oehlenschläger had completed this work at the time, then the history of romanticism in Denmark would have been radically different. Continuing with the theme of Nordic mythology, the next article treats a dramatic work by Oehlenschläger, Hakon Earl the Mighty (1807).48 This work portrays the final conflict between the Nordic pagan religion and Christianity. The former is represented by Hakon, the tragic hero of the piece, while the latter is portrayed by his rival Olaf. The drama tells of how they vie for rule of Norway and how in the end Hakon and the old Nordic world-view and way of life are destroyed forever. The final scene of the piece is given particular attention as is the seemingly arbitrary conversion or change in character in the defeated Hakon. The next article in this section explores the connections between H.C. Ørsted’s theory of acoustics and Hans Christian Andersen’s tale, “The Bell.” As is well known, Kierkegaard knew Andersen personally. Indeed, his first book, From the Papers of One Still Living (1838), is a critical review of Andersen’s novel Only a Fiddler (1837).49 In the highly original essay featured here, the author demonstrates the intimate connections between the natural sciences and the humanities in the Golden Age. At the time it was normal that natural scientists such as Ørsted were also profoundly interested in philosophy, literature and other humanities fields. Their science was not something distinct from these interests but rather a part of an organic world-view which grew out of them. J.L. Heiberg writes of his former tutor Ørsted, “For who does not know that although he was especially devoted to the sciences, all the concerns of humanity were of heartfelt interest to him.”50 The featured article points out how Andersen’s story effectively captures some of the main concepts in Ørsted’s thought such as the unity and reason in nature and above all the affinity between nature and mind. Ørsted was convinced that the spirit of nature 48 49 50

In Oehlenschläger’s Nordiske Digte, Copenhagen 1807, pp. 233-425. Hans Christian Andersen Kun en Spillemand, Copenhagen 1837. Johan Ludvig Heiberg “Autobiographiske Fragmenter” in Prosaiske Skrifter vols. 111, Copenhagen 1861-62; vol. 11, p. 489fn.

Introduction

17

expressed itself in sound and was thus keenly interested in the field of acoustics. Ørsted’s theory of acoustics was not lost on Kierkegaard. In his journals Kierkegaard mentions the so-called Chladni figures or acoustical figures that Ørsted experimented on.51 The final essay in this section is dedicated to Thomasine Christine Gyllembourg-Ehrensvärd, known as Fru Gyllembourg, who was a novelist much admired by Kierkegaard. In his aforementioned early work, From the Papers of One Still Living, he discusses her A Story of Everyday Life (1828). Later in 1846 he dedicated an entire book to her final novel Two Ages (1846).52 This novel is examined in the article presented here. The author argues that while Thomasine Gyllembourg is primarily concerned with portraying the changes that were taking place in family and social life in the first half of the 19th century, Kierkegaard’s concern in the review is quite different. Instead of treating the work on its own terms, the author argues, he introduces a set of theoretical categories which he imposes on his reading of the novel. It is shown that he had already developed these categories in his earlier works, prior to ever reading Two Ages. Thus, ultimately Kierkegaard uses the review as an opportunity to further develop some of his own thoughts and theoretical categories instead of exploring the novel itself.

IV. Literary and Dramatic Criticism The next section treats Kierkegaard’s relations to the literary and dramatic criticism of the Golden Age. When one recalls the small size of Copenhagen in the first half of the 19th century, it is startling to see the number of literary journals that flourished during the period.53 Many Kierkegaard readers are familiar with periodicals such as 51

52

53

JP 5, 5092 / SKS 17, 21.6, AA:12. JP 1, 133 / SKS 17, 244.21, DD:69. See Hans Christian Ørsted “Forsøg over Klangfigurerne” in Det Kongelige Danske Videnskabernes Selskabs Skrifter for Aar 1807 og 1808 vol. 5, Copenhagen 1810, pp. 31-64. See also Andrew D. Jackson “Acoustic Figures” in Intersections: Art and Science in the Golden Age, ed. by Mogens Bencard, Copenhagen: Gyldendal 2000, pp. 100-111. In English as Two Ages: The Age of Revolution and the Present Age, A Literary Review, tr. by Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong, Princeton: Princeton University Press 1978. A Literary Review, tr. by Alastair Hannay, Harmondsworth: Penguin 2001. See vol. 1 in Jette D. Søllinge and Niels Thomsen De Danske Aviser 1634-1989 vols. 1-3, Odense: Odense Universitetsforlag 1988-91. See also Poul Jensen Presse, Penge og Politik 1839-48, Copenhagen: G.E.C. Gads Forlag 1971.

18

Introduction

Kjøbenhavns flyvende Post, Fædrelandet and the Corsair, but there was a vast number of others as well. Some of the most important episodes in Danish literature were debates which took place in these journals about matters of criticism. Writing works of criticism was a literary genre that virtually every author in the Golden Age used at some point since it was a way to establish one’s credentials in the literary world. Kierkegaard was of course far from oblivious to this, penning himself a handful of explicit works of criticism and discussing various literary and dramatic texts in others. The first article in this section explores Kierkegaard as a literary author, primarily in his early works. It traces his complicated relation to the aforementioned Johan Ludvig Heiberg, the leading critic of the time. Kierkegaard’s fascination with seducers and demonic figures such as Don Juan, Faust, and Ahasverus, the wandering Jew is explored in some detail. The picture of the young aesthetic Kierkegaard that emerges from this account is quite different from that of the profoundly religious Kierkegaard often portrayed in the secondary literature. The second article treats a side of Kierkegaard that has been given little attention, namely Kierkegaard as a drama critic. In addition to being an avid theater-goer, Kierkegaard was keenly interested in dramatic criticism and theory. In this article the author examines Kierkegaard’s dependence on the criticism of Heiberg. While in works such as the Concluding Unscientific Postscript (1846) and Prefaces (1844), Kierkegaard criticized Heiberg for his Hegelianism, nevertheless prior to this he in fact cultivated a positive relation to Heiberg and was highly influenced by him.54 Kierkegaard’s bitterness towards him was the result of Heiberg’s critical assessment of Either/Or (1843),55 to which he responded with an article, “A Word of Thanks to Professor Heiberg.”56 In the article featured here the author argues that Kierkegaard adopts Heiberg’s conception of a great work as the unity of con54

55

56

See Henning Fenger Kierkegaard: The Myths and their Origins, tr. by George C. Schoolfield, New Haven and London: Yale University Press 1980, pp. 135-149. Sejer Kühle “Søren Kierkegaard og den heibergske Kreds” in Personalhistorisk Tidsskrift series 12, vol. 2, 1947, pp. 1-13. See also See H.P. Holst’s Letter to H.P. Barfod, September 13, 1869, in Encounters with Kierkegaard. A Life as Seen By His Contemporaries, tr. and ed. by Bruce H. Kirmmse, Princeton: Princeton University Press 1996, p. 13. Johan Ludvig Heiberg “Litterær Vintersæd” in Intelligensblade vol. 2, no. 24, March 1, 1843, pp. 285-292. In COR, pp. 17-21 / SV1 XIII, 411-415. Fædrelandet no. 1168, March 5, 1843.

Introduction

19

tent and form. On the basis of this, Kierkegaard analyzes different dramatic pieces in his works Either/Or and “The Crisis and a Crisis in the Life of an Actress.” The author indicates the nature of the role and the limitation of aesthetics for Kierkegaard and contrasts this sphere to that of human existence in general. The next essay featured here explores Kierkegaard’s assessment of the most famous contemporary Danish actresses of the day, Anna Nielsen (1803-56) and Johanne Luise Heiberg (1812-90). Through reference to a variety of Kierkegaard’s texts, the article demonstrates that he gave careful consideration to the female roles, such as Zerlina and Elvira in Don Giovanni. The author claims that Kierkegaard is less interested in the overall stage effect than in the particularities of the individual performances. Kierkegaard draws a strict distinction between the existential task of the dramatic personae in the theater and the genuine existential task of actual individuals. He is thus careful not to confuse the actress with her role or the person with her profession as actress. The next article treats the intellectual activity and influence of Johan Ludvig Heiberg. Specifically, it examines the subscription lists of Heiberg’s journal Kjøbenhavns flyvende Post as well as the information regarding the number of people who attended the performances of Heiberg’s vaudevilles at the Royal Theater. Heiberg has often been cast in the role of a reactionary snob who wrote only for the educated elite. However, given statistical information, the author argues that Heiberg wrote for and indeed reached a much larger and more heterogeneous audience than is usually thought. One might recall Kierkegaard’s criticisms of Heiberg’s attempts to popularize philosophy, attempts which would seem to imply that it was not Heiberg who was the elitist. The final article in this section is dedicated to the literary critic Peter Ludvig Møller (1814-65). If Møller is known at all today, then it is for his role in the so-called Corsair affair. Kierkegaard scholars know him simply as one of those who ridiculed Kierkegaard in the Corsair. This invariably leads to an unfairly dismissive view of Møller, who was in fact a highly productive and significant literary critic. The article featured here traces Møller’s biography and literary career through its main stations. Møller is understood as an intermediary figure between the school of aesthetics of Johan Ludvig Heiberg and that of Georg Brandes. The author pays particular attention to Møller’s relation to the romantic movement of the Continent and argues that Møller was the first in Denmark to fully understand it.

20

Introduction

V. Art One of the most important aspects of the Golden Age was its achievements in painting and sculpture. This period was witness to a number of excellent painters such as Vilhelm Bendz (1804-32), Dankvart Dreyer (1816-52), Christoffer Wilhelm Eckersberg (1783-1853), Constantin Hansen (1804-80), Christen Købke (1810-48), Johan Thomas Lundbye (1818-48), Wilhelm Marstrand (1810-73) and Jørgen Sonne (1801-90). In addition to painters there were also a host of outstanding sculptors such as Herman Vilhelm Bissen (1798-1868), Herman Ernst Freund (1786-1840), and Bertel Thorvaldsen (1768-1844). The Academy of Fine Arts, which was founded at the beginning of the 18th century and later came under royal patronage, played an important role in a number of different functions.57 It served as a place where artists could receive the best education in the various artistic fields from recognized masters. Further, it provided a location for public exhibitions and thus functioned as a regulative or normative institution in its decisions about which works from which artists it chose to put on public display. In addition, the Academy provided financial resources to artists in the form of travel grants, which enabled promising young artists to travel aboard, and existence grants, which allowed them to pursue their work without being obliged to provide for themselves. In addition, this was the period where public exhibitions became more frequent and permanent museums began to appear; the first of these was Thorvaldsen’s Museum, which was founded in 1848. As is well known, Danish art was not lost on Kierkegaard. He occasionally commented upon contemporary artists and incorporated images from their works into his own. This section on art history, although small, is of particular significance for the present anthology for a number of reasons. Quite often in our modern, overspecialized world of scholarship different academic fields are treated as entirely isolated and independent of any relation to the others. The result of this has been that there is very little dialogue between scholars even in closely related disciplines. This becomes problematic when treating a period such as the Golden Age which constituted an organic whole. The artists of the period knew the work of the philosophers, and the theologians that of the poets. Thus, it is no surprise that certain trends in fields such as philosophy, theology 57

See F. Meldahl and P. Johansen Det Kongelige Akademi for de skjønne Kunster 17001904, Copenhagen: H. Hagerups Boghandel 1904.

Introduction

21

or literature can be found again in the painting and sculpture of the period. During the Golden Age the leading intellectual figures were not narrowly trained specialists, but rather they excelled in a number of different fields. The present anthology attempts to reflect this fact by presenting the various figures in dialogue with one another. The articles featured here show that there were several points of overlap between the artists and the other cultural figures of the day. This aspect of the Danish Golden Age has been sorely neglected. Most works on the period are either concerned exclusively with art history or with the other fields. Very rarely is any attempt made to give an integrated account of the period which features art history as closely related to the contemporary trends in the other fields.58 The first article of this section treats the most famous sculptor of the Golden Age, Bertel Thorvaldsen. In his journals from 1836 Kierkegaard mentions Thorvaldsen as follows: “Now I understand something I frequently have wondered about – namely that Thorvaldsen emerged in our age. He really belongs to Hegel’s generation. The romantic has vanished, and the present tense of necessity (the classical) has commenced (sculpture belongs to the classical), and thus we have experienced a new classical stage.”59 Further, in Christian Discourses (1848)60 and Two Discourses at Communion on Fridays (1851),61 he alludes to Thorvaldsen’s statue of Christ at the altar of Vor Frue Church in Copenhagen. The article featured here gives an account of Thorvaldsen’s biography and analyzes some of his most famous works. Thorvaldsen left Copenhagen as a humble art student with a grant from the Academy of Fine Arts to study in Rome, where he arrived in 1797. When he returned some 40 years later in 1838, he was known throughout Europe and regarded as the greatest living sculptor. This article recreates the atmosphere of Thorvaldsen’s studio in Rome, which was visited by aristocrats and nobility from all over Europe. The second article examines the importance of Kierkegaard’s thought for the painter Johan Thomas Lundbye. Through an examination of his letters to friends and private diary, this article traces the different aspects of Lundbye’s reception of Kierkegaard’s individual

58

59 60

61

One noteworthy exception to this tendency is Mogens Bencard (ed.) Intersections: Art and Science in the Golden Age, op. cit. See JP 3, 3805 / Pap. I A 200. CD, p. 266 / SV1 X, 270. See Niels Jørgen Cappelørn “Die ursprüngliche Unterbrechung” op. cit., p. 385f. WA, p. 184 / SV1 XII, 286.

22

Introduction

books. The author argues that Lundbye identified closely with Kierkegaard’s description of the unhappy poet and of a Christian life. It is claimed that many of the central motifs in Kierkegaard’s authorship can be found again in the paintings of Lundbye. This anthology attempts to see Kierkegaard as one figure in a much larger context, i.e. Golden Age Denmark. It tries to indicate how the different thinkers, writers and artists of the age mutually influenced one another and thus how the age is best conceived not as a host of isolated geniuses each working on their own, but rather as an organic whole with the genius of the individual being necessarily bound up with the collective genius of the age. This volume represents an initial attempt to sketch Kierkegaard’s relation to some of his most significant contemporaries. It aims to see them not as minor figures laboring in Kierkegaard’s shadow but rather as significant thinkers and artists in their own right. Only by coming to a better appreciation of these figures and their work can we come to understand Kierkegaard. For only when we know precisely what it was that he was reacting to, either positively or negatively, can we begin to form a responsible opinion about that reaction and thus about Kierkegaard’s own views. Much more work needs to be done to introduce these and countless other figures to the anglophone reader, but this anthology marks a first, humble step in this direction.

I. Philosophy

F.C. Sibbern: Epistemology as Ontology By Poul Lübcke Frederik Christian Sibbern (1785-1872) was a Danish writer and philosopher. He began the study of law in 1802, but, following his graduation in 1810, he took a doctor’s degree in philosophy. As an outcome of his passion for Sophie Ørsted – the wife of A.S. Ørsted – he wrote the sentimental Gabrielis Breve (Gabrielis’ Letters, published in 1826, though written earlier and in 1850 supplemented with a second part). He was a professor of philosophy at the University of Copenhagen from 1813-70. His most important works concern philosophy and psychology, and include the following: (1) The Spiritual Nature and Essence of Man,1 (2) On Knowledge and Enquiry. An Introduction to Academic Studies,2 (3) On Poetry and Art in General,3 (4) Remarks and Investigations Primarily Concerning Hegel’s Philosophy,4 (5) Psychology with a Preface on General Biology,5 (6) Speculative Cosmology with the Rudiments of a Speculative Theology,6 and (7) Reports on a Paper from 2135.7

1

2

3 4

5

6

7

Sibbern Menneskets aandelige Natur og Væsen. Et Udkast til en Psychologie vols. 1-2, Copenhagen 1819-28; vol. 1. Sibbern Om Erkiendelse og Granskning. Til Indledning i det akademiske Studium, Copenhagen 1822. The English title is abbreviated here as KE. Sibbern Om Poesi og Konst i Almindelighed, Copenhagen 1834. Sibbern Bemærkninger og Undersøgelser, fornemmelig betreffende Hegels Philosophie, betragtet i Forhold til vor Tid, Copenhagen 1838. Sibbern Psychologie, Indledet med almindelig Biologie, i sammentrængt Fremstilling, Copenhagen 1843. Sibbern Speculativ Kosmologie med Grundlag til en speculativ Theologie, Copenhagen 1846. The English title is abbreviated here as SC. Sibbern Meddelelser af et Skrift fra Aaret 2135 vols. 1-2, Copenhagen 1858-72.

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Poul Lübcke

I. Knowledge and Enquiry. An Introduction to Academic Studies A. Passivity and Activity in the Cognitive Process In his work Knowledge and Enquiry from 1822 Sibbern attempts to combine the conception of cognition as a passive submission to truth with the idea of cognition as a personal activity. Sibbern’s initial definition of cognition is that it is “essentially a finding, a reception, a vision.”8 This definition of the nature of cognition in its passive mode is elaborated by an investigation into the meaning of truth. “For all knowledge aims at the truth, and per se we should arrive at the truth, come to hold and to have it. But the truth is not something dependent upon us; it is, and remains so – without regard to us – as it is in itself.”9 In other words, because we have no influence regarding what is true, our cognition must have the character of a search rather than of a creation. Truth is given independently of us, and in our cognitive act we seek to find it. As opposed to this definition of the appropriation of the truth we find the following: “All knowledge becomes a reality through a determination, a doing, a creation, and only by such means; so that this process is essentially connected with it. We know only while creating. (Scimus, quia facimus).”10 Sibbern’s idea here is that whatever is to be known can only be known when our consciousness “presents it to us or represents it to us (objectifies it to us).”11 Because every act of cognition is associated with an act of consciousness, the manner in which consciousness represents the object of our knowledge involves an activity. The framing of ideas by consciousness contains an element of “arbitrariness,”12 i.e. activity. B. Intuition and Thinking. Freedom Sibbern now draws a distinction between two types of cognition: intuition (Anskuelse) and reasoning – i.e. a distinction between intuitive and discursive knowledge. The difference lies in the fact that when we know or recognize immediately (as in the simple act of perception, or in a spontaneous experience of joy), consciousness is so absorbed13 in

8 9 10 11 12 13

KE, p. 3. KE, p. 3. KE, p. 18. KE, p. 19. KE, p. 20. KE, p. 24.

F.C. Sibbern: Epistemology as Ontology

27

its intuition that consciousness is merely about something, without any element of “self-consciousness” – “it does not become visible for itself.”14 Here the potential productivity of consciousness is entirely lost in the object of cognition; it can only submit passively to the intuition and thereby to the truth. As the subject (consciousness) tries to attain a wider knowledge of what is immediately given in intuition, “the object of knowledge and the knowing subject – which in pure intuition were undivided – draw apart from one another and stand opposed due to an act of reflection.”15 By way of reflection “self-consciousness” enters the field, and thereby a distinction between subject (the knowing consciousness) and object (that which is to be known) comes into being. In intuition this distinction did not in fact exist, but as soon as it appears, the possibility arises of consciousness – by virtue of its active (arbitrary) faculty of apprehension – being in disagreement with the object of knowledge. Such a discrepancy between subject and object opens up the possibility of error16 – a possibility that did not exist in pure intuition, where consciousness directly submitted to the truth. As soon as the distinction between subject and object arises, however, it becomes the task of consciousness to submit the arbitrary apprehensive faculty to the truth – an endeavor which, of its very nature is opposed to immediate recognition and contains the possibility of error. This endeavor to know has the character of reasoning,17 i.e. discursive thought, as opposed to the immediacy of intuition, and a demand for argumentation, study or research has arisen.18 14

15 16 17 18

KE, p. 29. “For itself” is a translation of what in German would be Fürsichsein. Cf. Hegel’s concept of Fürsichsein (Enzyklopädie der philosophischen Wissenschaften im Grundriss (1830), ed. by Friedhelm Nicolin and Otto Pöggeler, Hamburg: Felix Meiner Verlag 1959, §§ 96-98, pp. 147-176. The Encyclopaedia Logic. Part One of the Encyclopaedia of the Philosophical Sciences, tr. by T.F. Gerats, W.A. Suchting, H.S. Harris, Indianapolis: Hackett 1991, pp. 153-157). The concept of Fürsichsein implies that something isolates itself by turning towards itself, by withdrawing from its “otherness” into independence. This general definition is now transferred to the field of consciousness, “self-consciousness” being understood as a withdrawal from the object (which is thereby constituted as object for the first time), in that consciousness turns towards itself. Thus self-consciousness in Hegel and Sibbern may be interpreted as a highly developed Fürsichsein. We may see in this an association of logical, epistemological and ontological concepts. KE, pp. 29-30. KE, p. 164. KE, pp. 36ff. KE, p. 37.

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Thus, the possibilities for cognition have both increased and become restricted. The restriction is due to the possibility of error, whereas the increase is constituted by the possibility consciousness now has of acquiring more knowledge than that provided by pure sensation. The highest form of cognition must combine the immediacy of intuition with the comprehensive cognition of discursive thinking, and Sibbern calls this final state of cognition “to behold all things within God”19 – a state in which a comprehensive whole is intuited, as distinct both from sensation’s intuitive fixation to the particular and from the discursive questioning and argumentation of thought. Furthermore, since “knowledge of truth” for Sibbern includes not only sensation and cognition by way of understanding (Forstand) and reason (Fornunft),20 but also knowledge of “the Good,”21 we are able to understand why Sibbern can talk about “the inquirer’s relationship to the truth and to his science”22 as a religious relationship, in which to strive to know what is actually true goes hand in hand with the knowledge of what is normatively true. In this way devotion to science provides at one and the same time knowledge of the world in all its actuality and submits the scientist, qua morally responsible person, to a religious love of truth.23 The possibility of truth being considered evil, and that one might envisage an inconsistency between the knowledge of what is truly good (cognition of value) and what is in fact the case, and in this sense factually true, is not considered – it remains outside Sibbern’s field of inquiry. Later on in the 1830’s and 40’s this “optimism” was subjected to doubt, first of all by Poul Martin Møller, and subsequently – in a radical manner – by Søren Kierkegaard. It is important to note, however, that Møller and Kierkegaard, although they criticize Sibbern for his unmitigated confidence in the Good (the Idea) expressing itself in concrete form, both agree with Sibbern’s definition of truth as some19 20 21 22 23

KE, p. 40. KE, p. 5. KE, p. 7. KE, p. 11. At the end of Sibbern’s work it becomes clear that this “reign of love” is of supreme importance to him, which is why he concludes by expressing as high an opinion of the educated (dannede) man as of the uneducated person in relation to the highest good. This is in distinct contrast to the paper by Johan Ludvig Heiberg eleven years later, Om Philosophiens Betydning for den nuværende Tid, Copenhagen 1833. See KE, p. 203.


29

thing “independent” of us, i.e. the truth, including personal truth, is always bound to a norm for what is true. Herein lies a radical difference between Møller or Kierkegaard and modern existentialism, since the latter does not recognize the independence of any such norm from the individual choice. For Sibbern, Møller and Kierkegaard alike, modern existentialism would represent a kind of nihilism. The term “nihilism”24 is made use of explicitly by Møller in a paper from 1837, and in the same year the same phenomenon is described as “changing affectation”25 or “moral irony.”26 Nihilism – or moral irony – is consistent with the failure to recognize existent values (truths) independently of what one regards as good (true). In other words, one’s own arbitrariness is the highest norm. For Møller, on the other hand, it is a question of subordinating individual arbitrariness to the demands made by the idea of personality. This conception is common to Sibbern, Møller and Kierkegaard: man is both free and finite, being to some extent independent of the law of causality. But this freedom can degenerate into arbitrariness if man does not regard himself as responsible for realizing a norm (the idea of personality) through his existence. Even Kierkegaard retains this anthropology throughout his authorship; it underlies his dissertation in 1841, in which he maintains that irony consists of a discrepancy between phenomenon and essence.27 We find it once more in Either/Or (1843), in which Judge Wilhelm says that man must choose himself in his eternal validity by choosing the absolute self (the idea of personality).28 When in The Concept of Anxiety (1844) Kierkegaard defines the “demonical” as “anxiety about the good,”29 he means that man is afraid of becoming himself, of fulfilling the demands of the Absolute. When in The Sickness unto Death (1849) Kierkegaard says that “the self” is “constituted by another,”30 he means that man is created by God and thereby responsible for His will for man, i.e. responsible for the norm God has constituted for man. The difference between Sibbern and his two contemporaries, however, is that whereas Sibbern is very optimistic with regard to the ability of the norm (idea) to realize itself in the phenomenon/existence/actuality, Møller is skeptical about it, and Kierkegaard 24 25 26 27 28 29 30

P.M. Møller Efterladte Skrifter vols. 1-6, Copenhagen 1848-50; vol. 5, pp. 88, 99. Ibid., vol. 5, p. 162. Ibid., vol. 5, p. 172. CI, p. 247 / SKS 1, 286. EO2, p. 214 / SKS 3, 205f. CA, p. 118 / SKS 4, 420. SUD, pp. 13-14 / SV1 XI, 128.

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is in grave doubt. The difference between Sibbern and Kierkegaard is thus not so much a difference in their conception of the fundamental definition of anthropology, but in their optimism regarding the actual realization of the idea. C. Finite – Infinite Cognition But why does consciousness have to pass through these three stages: (1) intuitive and certain, though limited, cognition, (2) discursive and uncertain, though comprehensive, cognition, and (3) intuitive, certain and comprehensive cognition?31 Sibbern answers this question by referring to the finitude of human cognition.32 In other words, Sibbern tries to solve the epistemological problem of the relation between truth and human consciousness by referring to an ontological problem; he tries to solve the problem of the distinction between intuition and thinking by referring to man’s status as a finite creature. The fact that cognition is characterized by rational thinking, that the reasoning consciousness must make use of some kind of judgment,33 of concepts and language,34 may be seen as a special instance of the ontological problem of the relation between finitude and infinitude – the problem about why “time and temporality exist at all, and life appears in embryo at all.”35 Sibbern attempts to derive the finite from the infinite. The infinite cannot exist without appearing as finite. However, it is only possible to understand the finite as the expression of the infinite. The infinite has necessarily to manifest itself by means of the finite.36 That this manifestation must have the character of consciousness becomes evident from the fact that only consciousness can truly possess the eternal, i.e. consciousness may be regarded as an ontological manifestation of the eternal. Self-consciousness, intelligence, and freedom are derived there31 32 33 34 35

36

KE, pp. 32-33. KE, pp. 32-33. KE, p. 20. KE, pp. 20-21 KE, p. 32. On this basis I also try to understand why Sibbern does not attempt to explain intuition sensualistically, but explains sensation as a special subordinated instance of intuition: intuition must primarily be understood as an ontological category, which expresses the infinite’s giving-consciousness-to-itself. Here Sibbern unambiguously associates himself with the German tradition originating with Kant and Schelling. Cf. Heidegger’s Kant und das Problem der Metaphysik, Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann 1973, pp. 25ff. KE, pp. 33-34.


31

from, because only a free being can take over the Kingdom of God with full submission;37 only such a being can choose whether to submit to the truth or not. In other words, the Kingdom of Love (the manifestation of the eternal divinity) presupposes a being that can choose freely; but this presupposes a self-consciousness that again presupposes a subject (self) confronted with some kind of objectivity,38 an objectification whereby “life descends into time and temporality.”39 This contains three important points: (1) that for Sibbern the divine (eternal) needs temporality in order to manifest itself completely and cannot possess a transcendent sovereignty. (2) Sibbern’s concept of freedom possesses the same duplicity as cognition as a whole, i.e. presupposes both arbitrariness (the undetermined possibility of choice and the activity of freedom) as well as a norm which freedom must fulfill in order to realize itself as true freedom (the passivity of freedom); this norm is the demand for a striving towards the fulfillment of the Kingdom of Love. (3) We can see that this cognition only makes sense within this general ontological context, so that the arbitrariness of the faculty of apprehension must be viewed as a special case of the underlying, free relating-oneself-to-the-truth, which man expresses so vividly both in theory and practice. That is why Sibbern is also able to assert that scientific cognition, qua cognition, is a form of life and consequently dependent on “faith” in the possibility of fundamental cognition, or knowledge of God.40 D. Empirical and a priori Construction Sibbern distinguishes between “intellectual cognition” and “empirical cognition.”41 For empirical cognition to be genuine it must be coordinated within a wider context that tallies with intellectual cognition (Forstand and Fornunft), a process which has the character of a “construction a priori.”42 Sibbern thinks that even the most simple sensation may demand intellectual cognition when its given context is not manifest, and, consequently, we are obliged by means of arguments “to determine the notion of it in a particular way.”43 This may be com37 38 39 40 41 42 43

KE, p. 34. See also KE, p. 161. KE, p. 34. See also KE, p. 161. KE, p. 35. KE, pp. 45-46. See also KE, pp. 170-173. KE, p. 55. KE, p. 58. KE, p. 61.

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pared with his earlier remark that the simple intuition to be found in primitive sensation is abolished as soon as we seek a closer understanding of what is sensed. Such understanding may be regarded as viewing what is sensed in a wider context, and the finitude of this cognitive process necessitates the use of reasoning. The task consists of providing an a priori construction of the frame within which the explanation of the object of sensation may be discovered. Sibbern’s concept of apriority differs in two ways from Kant’s. In the first place Sibbern interprets the a priori categories as being applicable to reality itself44 – he is a realist and a speculative philosopher, not a transcendental philosopher. Even more important is the fact that Sibbern, unlike Kant, says that the a priori construction can be tested empirically, that “an exact, empirical observation must furnish the proof of this construction’s correctness and thoroughness.”45 Since Sibbern does not clarify this point, one is tempted to ask whether his concept of apriority ultimately corresponds to the modern scientific conception of a model, which may be tested by means of observation. I interpret Sibbern as meaning that whereas the concept of a model implies that the empirical observation might well be thought of as being isolated from its relation to the tested model, the concept of apriority itself implies a pre-understanding, which is a necessary qualification if the empirical observation is to have any meaning at all. In my view Sibbern regards all cognition as being guided by a pre-understanding of the divine, i.e. by a pre-understanding of the fundamental cognition of totality. This universal preunderstanding acquires its concretization in the a priori construction, which provides the structuring whole within which a possible sensation can make sense. If this is true, then an empirical observation itself cannot be a test of what is constructed a priori, but can merely give rise to a renewed a priori self-reflection. But Sibbern remains obscure on this point, and to interpret his epistemological ontology as some kind of hermeneutic philosophy is only one among other possible interpretations.46

44 45 46

KE, p. 65. KE, pp. 68-69. An argument in support of the postulate that Sibbern’s philosophy is hermeneutic in the way in which he compares the observation of nature with the way we read a book (KE, p. 69). His description of the reading situation corresponds in many ways to the modern hermeneutic philosophers’ interpretation of the understanding of a literary work.


33

E. Grounds of Knowledge and Grounds of Existence. Grounds and Concepts Important for Sibbern is the distinction between “grounds of knowledge” (Erkendelsesgrunde) and “grounds of existence” (Tilværelsesgrunde).47 Until now we have been occupied only with the former, which merely state what grounds we have for assuming something, but Sibbern also requires us to consider the grounds that act in reality itself. Sibbern’s distinction appears to me to correspond to the modern distinction between argumentation and causal explanation, to which he seeks to connect a theory of ideas. In discovering the grounds underlying the existence of a phenomenon we have in fact stated its concept (Begreb).48 It is, for instance, the concept of frost that makes water freeze – not the North Wind blowing over the water.49 Frost is that ground of existence which causes water to freeze, whereas the North Wind is merely one of the actual circumstances of the freezing. If we had no concept of frost, no amount of actual circumstances would make water freeze. This leads to Sibbern’s distinction between the rational and the extrarational. The concept constitutes the rational, but if we merely had the concept, we would have just as little existence as if we merely had the actual circumstances. However complete its conceptual determination, the “actual existence would…still be accidental.”50 This leads to the concept of the Absolute. F. The Absolute. The Idea Neither the rational (the concept, the ground of existence) nor the extrarational could by themselves account for being. We need a third “principle, which does not merely determine (in an ideal manner), but realizes or actualizes (in a real manner).”51 “This is the true being and essence.”52 “It is only seen as it should be seen when it is seen as something living, which vitalizes or even actualizes all things.”53 The why of the ground is not dropped, but seen in its real context. The how of this life is thus ideal-real. We have thereby arrived at Sib47 48 49 50 51 52 53

KE, p. 72. “Rationes cognoscendi” and “Rationes essendi.” KE, p. 88. KE, p. 97. KE, p. 104. KE, p. 105. KE, pp. 105-106. KE, p. 106.

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bern’s concept of the Absolute,54 thus acquiring a better understanding of his earlier thesis – that the finite originates in the infinite. It is inherent to the Absolute itself, qua unity of ideality and reality, that it cannot isolate itself in ideal inwardness but has to manifest itself outwardly.55 The reason for this lies in its fullness,56 in its “demand for love.”57 This is explicitly connected with the transition of cognition (consciousness), qua cognition, into an ontological dimension: “knowledge too is one of the forms whereby the eternal manifests or realizes itself, and perfect knowledge of the truth is essentially the living of the Idea itself and its representation in consciousness.”58 “Truth, or the true, is that which vitally produces that agreement, being itself instrumental in determining the entire formation of the Idea.”59 We have thereby arrived at the actual meaning of the thesis that cognition has to submit to the truth “passively.” In contradiction to the thesis that cognition consists of a correspondence between subject (consciousness) and object (the empirical, the given), Sibbern asserts that the truth consists of a correspondence between subject (consciousness) and Idea. Only in so far as the empirical is in accordance with the same idea to which consciousness has to submit may the truth be defined as correspondence between subject (consciousness) and object (the empirical and external world). The passivity of cognition does not therefore imply that we should allow our cognition to be guided by a passive reception from the external world; we have in fact just seen that every reception from the world is guided by an a priori construction. When the truth is defined as a correspondence, what is primarily meant is a correspondence between consciousness and Idea – and only indirectly may we talk about the truth as a correspondence between consciousness and an empirical object. G. Science in the Service of the Idea From this determination of the Absolute as Idea, composed of both rational and “extra-rational” elements, Sibbern is able to derive his 54 55 56 57 58 59

KE, p. 87, pp. 108-109. KE, p. 107. KE, p. 109. KE, p. 110. KE, p. 112. KE, p. 113.


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ideal of science. “This representation of the Idea by means of and according to its own self-representation, whereby it in itself (as the inward) is possessed and viewed together with its (more outward) representation, is science, the true and perfect science.”60 The Idea in science must be the conscious expression of the Idea in the cosmos, which, “as the self-constituting and self-actualizing living principle, passes through it and dwells within it and thereby bears it all.”61 The Idea becomes the horizon (my expression) within which all concrete cognition can come about, and may thereby be distinguished from the concept – in being the living pre-understanding that provides the fundamental structure within which the concept may express concrete understanding.62 Apart from the Idea and the concept, which both contribute to a “systematization” of science, i.e. a search for the consistent and rational, Sibbern regards science as necessarily comprising “piecemeal studies.”63 The reason given is that the Idea “appears in its full strength, as truly all-determining, first in the manifold concrete.”64 Within this manifold of appearances a plurality of sciences must appear and – under the coordinating leadership of the Idea – each seeks, with its own method, to achieve knowledge. In other words, we find an epistemology and a theory of science built upon the basis of an ontological theory of the Absolute as the unification of the rational and the extra-rational. Thus, the concept of knowledge may be combined with the concept of personal development and of God’s Kingdom of Love, which all people must seek to realize. These thoughts are to be found again in the next work of Sibbern’s, which is analyzed in the following.

II. Speculative Cosmology with the Rudiments of a Speculative Theology A. The All-Constitutive: Real and Ideal This short work (about 140 pages) contains in highly concentrated form the most complete exposition of the metaphysical basis of Sib60 61 62 63 64

KE, p. 116. KE, p. 120. KE, pp. 122, 126. KE, p. 147. KE, p. 146.

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bern’s philosophy65 and both continues and develops thoughts we have already found in Knowledge and Enquiry from 1822. But whereas the latter is an epistemological work, which develops into an ontology of cognition, the book from 1846 is cosmological and ontological from the outset. Furthermore, without conflicting with the book from 1822, it contains an important new elaboration of the concept of development. Sibbern’s concept of the Absolute corresponds in 1846 to the concept of “the all-constitutive,”66 which is a “synthetic unity of the all-ideal and the real.”67 Other expressions for the Absolute or “the all-constitutive” are “the all-valid,”68 “the ideal-real,”69 “actuality”70 and “the allactive.”71 Whereas the term “Absolute” implies something static, the terms “all-constitutive” and “all-active” imply something dynamic. It becomes more and more important for Sibbern to stress this point. The “all-ideal” is what ensures “order”72 and structure in existence. By virtue of its ontological status, it is at the same time a principle of rationality73 (all-intelligence). The third important definition is that it is “eternal”74 and thereby independent of what is created in time. On the other hand, it is merely hypothetical in character,75 i.e. the “allideal” (e.g. a law of nature) does not itself possess constitutive power but requires real preconditions in order to be valid. This “real” is the “extra-rational”76 which is to be formed by the Idea. This should be 65

66 67 68 69 70 71 72

73 74 75

76

On a scrap of paper from July 2, 1903 Sibbern’s daughter, Margrethe, wrote: “Isn’t The Cosmology the best book my father ever wrote? Do not the twenty supplementary sections contain the fruits of all his philosophy? I am questioning the empty air – the dead give no answers.” (Jens Himmelstrup Sibbern, Copenhagen: J.H. Schultz Forlag 1934, p. 98). SC, p. 14. SC, p. 4. SC, p. 3. SC, pp. 1, 5. SC, p. 4. SC, pp. 3, 8. Sibbern mentions the following examples of the all-ideal: “mathematical” (p. 93) and “logical” (p. 96) principles, and certain “laws of nature,” e.g. “the law of gravity” (p. 93). To this may be added “the fundamental features of the self-consciousness,” e.g. “respect” and “humility” (p. 93) must be part of the all-ideal that remains unaltered throughout time. SC, p. 2. SC, p. 2. This conception of the ideal as something hypothetical may also be found in P.M. Møller. See Efterladte Skrifter op. cit., vol. 3, p. 202. SC, p. 5.


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understood relatively: the real understood as “the circumstances,” is of course partly formed when the Idea appears – but in relation to the new structure, the old is merely “the circumstances,” and – as such – unstructured. Sibbern’s concept of the real is thus in family with the Aristotelian concept of “secondary matter,” which is also unstructured in relation to a possible new structure. This already implies a dynamic factor: the real is the temporal or factual, which is to be formed by the Idea. But just as the Idea cannot produce anything alone, neither can the real produce anything on its own. Only the allconstitutive is the ideal-real “in which the fullness of intelligence is seen in a dynamic appearance through an actuality in which it is realized and thereby appears as the fullness of existence.”77 One might believe that the all-constitutive was merely a sum of the real and the ideal; this interpretation is quite wrong, however. We have to distinguish between four factors, all of which enter into “the all-constitutive”: (1) The all-ideal, or that which is to be realized (the hypothetical), (2) the real, or the circumstances under which the realization has to take place, (3) the realization itself, or the ideal, which forms the real, and (4) the power whereby the realization appears. In other words, the all-constitutive is more than the mere “manifestation”78 of the possibilities79 which the hypothetical Idea represents. The all-constitutive is also the power80 that brings forward the manifestation. We may therefore interpret the all-constitutive as that which eternally constitutes the Idea, qua the eternally constituting principle. At the same time new actual circumstances through which the Idea may be realized are eternally being constituted, and by means of this temporality arises. This means that the all-constitutive is both a principle of rationality (by virtue of the structure of ideality) and the origin of the extrarational (the real). In possessing the status of a constitutive power, the all-constitutive is “eternal”81 in two senses: (1) as eternally constituting the Idea, qua Idea, and thereby eternal, and (2) as eternally constituting the real circumstances, which are always temporal. The latter is what underlies the special relation of the all-constitutive to the temporal and needs further elaboration. 77 78 79 80 81

SC, p. 5. SC, p. 6. SC, p. 2. SC, p. 4. SC, p. 4.

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B. The Concepts of Time and Eternity If we are to understand Sibbern’s mention of the all-constitutive as being both eternal and necessarily appearing in time, it is important to understand that, for Sibbern, eternity is not synonymous with atemporality, but applies to a particular mode of temporal relationship;82 that the all-constitutive is eternal does not then necessarily mean that it is atemporal, but that it is not created in time. It is not a phenomenon in time at all; it is not even a “fact,”83 but that “basic phenomenon”84 which determines how something is created and perishes in time. That is why Sibbern is able to reinterpret the Christian idea of the world as being created out of “nothing”; to Sibbern this does not mean that the world was created at a certain time before which there was nothing. The creation of the world is not a “fact,” i.e. not something that occurs at a certain point in time. For Sibbern, the creation of the world means that the world (i.e. the manifold of finite beings or facts) is dependent upon the all-constitutive (the infinite), without whose constant renewing constitution its existence would be jeopardized. That the world is created out of nothing means that the all-constitutive (the infinite) is not itself a fact but that which makes all facts (finite beings) possible. The eternity of the all-constitutive thus consists of its characteristic way of being at all times constitutive of the facts, which are created and perish in time. The all-constitutive is “nothing” because it is not a fact – not because it is not. The above elaboration of this “constitution” leads directly to Sibbern’s theory of evolution. C. Evolution in Time: Progress That Sibbern conceives the constitution of the ideal-real as being a theory of evolution means that not only is this constitution characterized as a necessary leading-something-into-time but that it can only be carried out if something-is-led-through-time. The ideal-real not only has to express itself temporally (has to appear in time), but this latter must be in the nature of an advance. Now it is Sibbern’s opinion that the physical matter in the primeval fog of our universe85 should be considered as the way in which the 82

83 84 85

SC, p. 14. Here “of eternity” does not mean the same as “in a timeless way” but rather “in time without a starting-point.” SC, p. 18. SC, p. 18. SC, p. 25. Sibbern refers to the Kant-Laplace theory of the universe.


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ideal-real manifested itself as constitutive for the first time. (Unfortunately, Sibbern is very obscure with regard to this starting-point in time, and his philosophy probably involves a contradiction.) This manifestation has thereupon created the foundation (or real startingpoint) for the constitution of the all-constitutive by means of a temporal evolution. We are thereby shown that, in its temporal progress, the all-constitutive is in fact related to itself, and in this relation-to-itself it constitutes itself. That the all-constitutive is constantly relating-itself-to-itself, whereby the already constituted continues to exist, means that it enters into new forms that are constituted by the all-constitutive, its eternity in fact consisting of this constant constitution of new modifications of its previous actions (creations). Thus, for Sibbern the constitution process of the all-constitutive has been temporalized. The ontological preconditions of the world as such – the all-constitutive – constitute the world through an emanation, which may be understood as being a progressive temporalization. Thus, Sibbern combines the idea of emanation with the concept of progress – and this is the special feature of Sibbern’s theory of evolution. The interesting point is not that Sibbern possessed a theory of evolution, for so many of his contemporaries and predecessors (Boye, Treschow and Olufsen) had such a theory. It is more interesting that he supposes both “nature” and “spirit” to be contained in a historical evolution – whereby he differs from Steffens in his lectures from 1802.86 Of chief interest to me, however, are the philosophical arguments87 with which Sibbern supports his point of view, i.e. his temporalization of the ontological constitutive process of the all-constitutive – the emanation. The all-constitutive is simply its own temporal development and the power by means of which this manifests itself. This leads us to Sibbern’s concept of time. Sibbern says that the work of creation proceeds within time. This might lead us to believe that Sibbern’s concept of time possessed the character of a formal, empty succession, a kind of empty time to be filled up by the all-constitutive. Understood in this way, time and the all-constitutive would stand apart from each other, thus conflicting with the thesis that the 86

87

Here I agree with Hoffding’s and Himmelstrup’s interpretation of Steffens’ lectures (1802). See Harald Høffding Den nyere Filosofis Historie vols. 1-10, 3rd edition, Copenhagen: Gyldendalske Boghandel, Nordisk Forlag 1921-22; vol. 8, p. 161, and Himmelstrup Sibbern, op. cit., pp. 103 and 291. These arguments are not considered in Himmelstrup’s monograph on Sibbern.

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all-constitutive should be related to everything that can be described as rational. For, in that event, either time would be something irrational (and this is out of the question for Sibbern), or time would be inexplicable on Sibbern’s premises. Consequently, in my view, time for Sibbern has a far more intimate relation to the all-constitutive – it is in fact the emergence of the all-constitutive itself. The all-constitutive takes shape by means of a temporalization, which is time itself. Time is the emanation, qua emanation; it is not a fact, not something in time, nor the result of the emanation – but the emanation as such. If this interpretation is correct, then Sibbern has repudiated the idea that the concept of empty time (or even the concept of formal time) should be the original concept of time. Time understood as a formal category, i.e. time as a linear succession, would then be derived from the original concept of time – the concept of substantial time, or time as a substantial constitution of the world. In this case Sibbern’s concept of eternity may be seen in a new light, and the temporal significance of eternity is that eternity has to create continuity in the allconstitutive’s constitution of itself. Eternity is the continuity within time of past and future – the ideal identity within the flux of the real. One passage that would appear to support this interpretation is the following: “Time means more than changing, even more than succession, more than progress; it means as much as unfolding, and this is a filling up…time manifests itself as if assimilated into the fullness of existence and essentially belonging to it.”88 Time is not itself “in” the world: time (the temporalization of the all-constitutive) is not itself temporal but the “becoming” (Vorden) through which the world constitutes itself. D. The Sporadic Since Sibbern now sets out to explain how the world develops, how the all-constitutive constitutes itself through temporalization, he introduces one of his most central concepts: the concept of “the sporadic.”89 By this Sibbern means that development does not start and proceed further from one point or from a complete stage, but is characterized as “sporadic,” i.e. it starts from a number of different points, which appear to be separated but which later on appear to converge into one organic direction in order to form a whole. To interpret Sib88 89

SC, p. 77. SC, p. 24.


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bern as being an atomist, however, would be a grave error. Atomism implies that the whole is the result of the interaction of isolated elements caused by the action of isolated forces that have accidentally joined to form a whole. That Sibbern’s sporadic forces are able to cooperate at all is due to the fact that they are directed by some superior principle, which anticipates the organism from the start. In other words, the sporadic progress of development should be understood as if the all-constitutive took the sporadic as its starting-point, after which the all-constitutive manifests all of it in its organic constitution. This is a particular form of holism – the complete opposite of atomism. In other words, Sibbern considers that the whole contains more than the sum (Indbegreb) of its parts.90 The all-constitutive exists already from the beginning in the separate points, and it is the all-constitutive that leads the points towards the whole. Thus, Sibbern’s typical organic way of thinking is allied with an evolutionary principle that places the isolation of the parts first in time, after which follows the development of the world as a whole. Sibbern is able to repudiate materialism on this basis, matter being a necessary though not a sufficient condition for the existence of spirit, because spirit is more than a mere product of the coordinated forces of matter.91 Sibbern then elaborates on his theory of the sporadic by assigning to the sporadic its own significant existence within the sphere of the all-constitutive: he says that the sporadic, once constituted, must be considered to endure – even when incorporated into a larger organism.92 This has a bearing on the following. E. Individuality and Organization Sibbern distinguishes between two tendencies within the cosmos: an individualizing and an organizing. The former is further divided into an individualizing tendency, in so far as it concerns matter that may only be regarded as means for the production of higher organisms, and an individualization that is significant in itself, qua the individual90 91 92

SC, p. 37. SC, p. 39. SC, p. 38. This is also the reason why Sibbern would be able to accept a modern molecular theory and at the same time be a holist. To him molecules are again a special case of something sporadic that is directed by the all-constitutive. Thus when Sibbern, unlike Ørsted, speaks of these molecules as having a real existence of their own, it is because he regards them as something sporadic, which exist forever because they have once been points of subsistence.

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ity of its own life. But only when this “life-of-its-own” is coordinated within the whole does the individual possess individual value. Sibbern would appear to think that since the all-constitutive can only constitute itself in its organic unity by passing through the individual, this individual cannot be considered as merely a means but, being a necessary means, it must also have a value of its own in so far as it helps the all-constitutive to constitute itself. The organism theory is not abandoned, but the individual acquires value of its own precisely because individuality is a necessary stage within the constitution (temporalization) of the all-constitutive. This is of special importance when we consider the sporadic as it appears in the individual personality. Within the personality we find a situation analogous to the individualizing and organizing tendencies within the cosmos as a whole. This is very important because, ontologically speaking, human freedom has only arisen as the most extreme instance of the individualizing tendency to grant independence to what has been individually formed sporadically. But these free beings only achieve this independent worth by submitting the arbitrariness of their freedom to the demands of the all-constitutive. In other words, man only achieves independent worth by making use of his independence (free will) in order to realize the universal demand. This is – as we have already seen in connection with P.M. Møller and Kierkegaard – a fundamental maxim in Danish moral philosophy of the 19th century until around 1870. There is a vast difference between this view (the resulting organic view of society) and the liberal view, that the individual has independent worth and a right to do whatever he wishes so long as he does no harm to others. Liberalism constitutes merely a formal freedom, whereas Sibbern not only describes freedom as a right but as a concrete duty towards the all-constitutive.93 Man with his individual will is now confronted with the will of the divine. In fact the human will consists of a reaction to the latter and thereby to the all-embracing “basic will” of the all-constitutive. Towards this basic will man must “feel that to submit to this comes before all else.”94 The human will is thus related to the divine will, which spontaneously expresses the demands of the all-constitutive upon the individual. However, man is free in relation to the divine challenge: the divine does not “immediately and without further ado 93

94

In his book Meddelelser af et Skrift fra Aaret 2135, op. cit., Sibbern argues, that liberalism is worse than slavery! SC, p. 64.


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reign supreme.”95 Sibbern is not – at least not in this work96 – a determinist. The divine rules only in so far as the individuals resolve to submit, “since it is only thus that the reign of spirituality and fullness can follow.”97 However, in order to realize freedom completely, man must submit to this divine challenge. Sibbern attempts, furthermore, to combine the belief in a personal God with pantheism,98 which to Sibbern consists in the fact that God expresses himself through human actions, i.e. the all-constitutive constitutes itself through its instances in the world. This pantheism, with which Sibbern associates himself by virtue of his theory of the all-constitutive, must then, according to him, be combined with the belief in a personal God, or a concrete Thou to whom man can address himself.99 Even at this point Sibbern thinks that pantheism can co-exist with the belief in a personal God: “For does not everything lead to a final appreciation of the fact that the innermost ground for the world’s existence must be centralized within itself, that the world, as it were, is one great individuality?”100 In other words, God is both the all-constitutive, qua all-embracing world, and a specially privileged phenomenon within the all-constitutive. It is important here to stress the fact that God is described within a cosmological framework of concepts. A transcendent God in Kierkegaard’s sense of the word is something totally foreign to Sibbern. The rest is evident on the basis of what has already been mentioned. The world is to be understood as teleologically determined; existence has some kind of purpose because the world contains “that freedom of action which is open to personalities who are elevated to a relative degree of independence.”101 Only if man strives to do what is 95 96

97 98 99 100 101

SC, p. 64. Sibbern’s view of determinism is very unclear. In the two works examined in this article I regard him as being an indeterminist, thereby disagreeing with Himmelstrup (Sibbern, op. cit., p. 176), where he writes that “Sibbern does not understand freedom as being the opposite of causality.” Himmelstrup has not understood the relations between passivity and activity, fact and norm, individualization and organization. However, Sibbern is not straightforward on this point; especially obscure is his treatment of freedom in Betragtninger over og i Anledning af Professor Howitz’ Afhandling om Afsindighed og Tilregnelse (Copenhagen 1824) and in the different editions of his Psychologie. SC, pp. 61-62. SC, p. 73. Sibbern quotes Fichte: “Was der von Gott begeisterte thut, das ist Gott.” SC, p. 73. SC, pp. 73-74. SC, p. 75.

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good, will the world strive to realize the divine offer of the all-constitutive. Man is the only one capable of creating a discrepancy between existence and idea, because he alone is able to accept freely the offers of the all-constitutive; but exactly because of this man is the only creature able to take over the Kingdom of Love – hence the special status of man within the cosmos.102

102

SC, p. 89.

Poul Martin Møller: Scattered Thoughts, Analysis of Affectation, Struggle with Nihilism By Peter Thielst In following the history of philosophy there is one thing among its many complicated thoughts and analyses that offers a refreshing change but also often astonishes us. I refer to the numerous somewhat ludicrous or grotesque anecdotes that have been attached to the biographies of individual philosophers. Who, for example, has not had a good laugh at the eccentricities displayed in the daily lives of Kant and Schopenhauer, or at the disparity between Rousseau’s high-sounding theories on education and his own role as a pater familias – and these are only a few instances. In this connection Poul Martin Møller (1794-1838) does not disappoint us. The information regarding his personality and his activities handed down by his contemporaries and biographers attracts more interest due to the humorous stories about him and his role as an amiable member of society than due to his merits as a philosopher. But Møller’s reputation as a philosopher has been handicapped by two other factors: on the one hand, the obscure nature of the writings he left behind him and their extremely small volume, and, on the other, the fact that his contribution to philosophy looms very small in comparison with that of his contemporary, Søren Kierkegaard, who far overshadowed everything that could be called original in it. Møller did not write or publish much, so it was not until the appearance of his Efterladte Skrifter in 1839-43 that some of his chief philosophical views became known to the reading public.1 And it was precisely in 1843 that Kierkegaard commenced his great pseudonymous authorship with the publication of Either/Or. Poul Martin Møller was not a philosopher by profession or temperament. His philosophy derived from a kind of Socratic tendency which never deserted him, either in his bohemian student days when 1

Poul Martin Møller Efterladte Skrifter vols. 1-3, Copenhagen 1839-43.

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he was the focus of a small circle of students, during their discussions and literary disputes or during the long voyage to China in 1819-21, during which Møller, who had graduated in theology in 1816 and begun studying philology, served as a ship’s chaplain but composed “scattered thoughts,” essays and philosophical speculations. Nor did it leave him during his time as a university philosopher in 1826-38 as, at first, lecturer, then professor at the newly founded Frederiks University at Christiania (Oslo), then professor of philosophy at Copenhagen itself. His Socratic bent made itself felt in his work not only with philosophical problems, but also in questions of popular education and in the tremendous engagement he showed, in and out of the lecture hall, with his students (notably, Kierkegaard). What interested Møller was truth, both concrete and personal, and its applicability to everyday life. In an age that was dominated by Hegelianism he was compelled to address the issue with the philosophy then fashionable, whose ideas of truth lay completely on the abstract plane. As a consequence he was never regarded as a great philosopher by his contemporaries. Møller can scarcely be said to have been a happy person, notwithstanding the idealistic portrait of him that some have drawn.2 He experienced disappointments in love, which wounded his self-confidence deeply and were only slightly mollified by his marriage in 1827 with Betty Berg and, after her death, with Eiline von Bülow in 1836. After 1826, when he began teaching at Christiania he underwent a succession of further disappointments, this time in the academic sphere, which could not fail to further undermine his self-confidence. It is probable that throughout his life he had a feeling of personal inadequacy, and his Socratic propensity rapidly developed into an inverted mannerism which hampered his spontaneous development as an individual. And when he finally, in about 1830, had come to accept Hegel’s philosophical system both personally and professionally, he discovered to his dismay that it was not really compatible with his own basic principle, which always set the individual person and his truth at the center. Although this disappointment was a heavy blow to him, it served to make him philosophically productive in a new and original way. 2

See F.C. Olsen “Poul Martin Møllers Levnet” in Møller’s Efterladte Skrifter vols. 1-3, Copenhagen 1839-43; vol. 3, pp. 1-115. Vilhelm Andersen Poul Møller, Copenhagen: Gyldendalske Boghandel, Nordisk Forlag 1894. Another account of Møller and his time is given in Bernd Henningsen Poul Martin Møller oder Die dänische Erziehung des Søren Kierkegaards, Frankfurt am Main: Akademische Verlagsgesellschaft 1973, which also contains a German translation of Møller’s notes, On Affectation.

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I. In his younger years Møller expressed his personal conflicts and yearnings through the medium of poetry; but from 1819, when, as a ship’s chaplain, he embarked on a two-year voyage to China and so lost touch with intellectual companions with whom he could “let his mouth blab with its old freedom and impudence,”3 he began to jot down a series of aphoristic reflections and observations, little fragments of philosophy and psychology that he christened “scattered thoughts.” Intended, as he tells us, as “a surrogate for conversation,”4 these “scattered thoughts” were to come to be the principal medium in which he expressed himself philosophically (in a fashion similar to Nietzsche later). It is thus worth examining a little more closely what philosophical status they occupy and what they actually represent. In these “scattered thoughts” Møller often defines his ideas ambiguously and is frequently at variance with himself as to exactly how they shall be formulated. Yet, when he composes an aphorism it represents something terse, incomplete and academically noncommittal and yet, within its context, particularly apt and fitting. A “scattered thought” is at one and the same time a kind of aphorism and something conclusively reasoned out. This inner contradiction is clearly brought out in one of the first of the “thoughts”: “Scattered thoughts, as fruits of the clearer perception of the moment, are poetic in their aphoristic form, not academic. They are points of culmination of thought – a sort of hermaphrodite, half poetry, half prose.”5 The “scattered thought” is thus both a random thought or thought-association and a completed aphorism, simultaneously noncommittal and of special seriousness. The two aspects are defended in the following “thoughts”: (1) “The things that I am going to write will be written solely for setting my thoughts in motion. Unlimited scattered thoughts are an endless introduction to thinking. They are like a concert that is only a prelude, a poem consisting only of an invocation to the Muses and a promise of future song.”6 (2) “The particular advantage of recording one’s thoughts in writing is that one has to think 3

4 5 6

ES 6, p. 72. All references hereafter to Møller’s writings refer to the 3rd edition of his Efterladte Skrifter vols 1-6, Copenhagen 1855-56 (abbreviated ES). On occasion of the bicentenary of Møller’s birth, I edited a small selection of his works: Strøtanker og andre filosofiske tekster, Frederiksberg: Det lille Forlag 1994. ES 3, p. 4. ES 3, p. 3. ES 3, p. 25.

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them out, and not leave them, while still embryonic, to be crowded out by others.”7 What is aphoristic is thus compatible with the intangible and spontaneous element that was the starting-point for Møller’s recording of his “scattered thoughts,” which, notwithstanding his stringent demand for cogitation, never really reached beyond the reflections of the moment and flow of thought. But it was also precisely in this that they had their force: the focused reflection, the stabilization of the typical, the carriedthrough viewpoint, the note and the point – these are what characterize the “scattered thoughts.” In profundity and conclusiveness they might have been of greater stature than their aphoristic style suggests – this applies especially to the notes entitled On Affectation; but they were all put on paper for Møller’s own sake and remained to the end “an endless introduction to thinking.”8 Møller explained this by “looking into himself”9: “Clearness in presentation,” he wrote, “arises from lack of ability to think cohesively.”10 But before we pursue this self-recognition of his further, I want – also as an attempt to cast light on it – to point out a link between the “scattered thought” and Møller’s Socratic propensity. The essential factor in the Socratic method can be characterized as a mind-focusing dialectic that delves deep but almost never achieves any positive and coherent result, any philosophical “system.” In a long and very personal chapter about Socrates Møller writes about Socrates’ dictum, “All that I know is that I know nothing”: “Socrates in reality had no actual philosophical system, yet possessed too thorough a consciousness of the connection there has to be in a true perception’s individual assumptions for him to imagine that his insight fulfilled the demands of consummate wisdom.”11 This expresses at once both a limitation and a more stringent demand, each corresponding to the ambiguous or contradictory element in Møller’s scattered thoughts. The scattered thoughts/Socratic dialogue serve, on the one hand, as an “endless introduction to thinking”12 (i.e. philosophic system), and, on the other, as an expression of elementary dialectics which probe more deeply into a given problem than ordinary dogmatic or synthesized thinking.

7 8 9 10 11 12

ES 3, p. 92. ES 3, p. 25. ES 3, p. 22. ES 3, p. 69. ES 4, p. 100. ES 3, p. 25.

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Aphoristic inconclusiveness and the demand for objective truth are both typically Socratic, as is Møller’s employment of the dialogue form. It was through meeting and talking to other people that Socrates developed his method, and it was similarly in conversation with his friends and his students or in his “scattered thoughts” (a surrogate for conversation) that Møller developed his. But the biggest similarity between the two lies in the moral and existential demand that both pose – the demand to fight against conceitedness, naiveté and affectation. This Socratic fight against inner guardianship and the falseness of divided minds is formulated by Møller as follows: “No manifestation of life has any truth without creative self-activity.”13 And with “creative self-activity” we are back again in aphorisms and scattered thoughts as a manifest link in a continual thought-process. For even if a “scattered thought” is not a “philosophical system,” since its very aphoristic character, means something incomplete, it is Møller’s particular contribution to the dialectics of creative self-activity. The scattered thought is not a definite interpretation: it is a factor in the interpretative process, which, if creative in its idea and its engagement, possesses truth. Poul Martin Møller’s ideas about the aphoristic and about creative self-activity have roots in two earlier Danish philosophers – Niels Treschow, who was his predecessor in the Chair of Philosophy at Christiania, and Frederik Christian Sibbern, who was Professor of Philosophy at Copenhagen University from 1813-70 and Møller’s colleague and faithful helper throughout his career. Space does not permit, unfortunately, dealing here with these connecting links.14 But if we now return to the remark Møller made about clearness in presentation arising from inability to think coherently,15 it can help to investigate a link that also exists with the great coryphaeus of the philosophy of that time, G.W.F. Hegel – a link that will characterize important aspects of Møller’s writings. The “scattered thoughts” deal with themes such as dissimulation in human life, affectation, which I will speak of later, and correctness of expression in writing and lecturing, including written presentation of 13 14

15

ES 3, p. 91, p. 176. See also Svend Erik Stybe “‘Det enslige’ og ‘den enkelte’” in Festskrift til Søren Holm, ed. by Peter Kemp, Copenhagen: Nyt Nordisk Forlag 1971, pp. 13-31. See also my own remarks in 5 danske filosoffer fra det 19. århundrede: Henrich Steffens, Frederik Christian Sibbern, Poul Martin Møller, Søren Kierkegaard, Harald Høffding, Frederiksberg: Det lille Forlag 1998. See ES 3, p. 69.

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philosophical problems and arguments. Møller was quick to perceive that language (by which he meant all human speech, including philosophical terminology) represents an essential precondition for human communication: “To be able to write and speak in a good way, one must be possessed of a certain resignation that reconciles one to the fact that it is not possible to convey to other humans the thoughts in one’s breast in the whole context in which they exist. One must be satisfied to use the means that stand at one’s disposal through the wordstore of language.”16 This wholly Wittgensteinian viewpoint later had important results for Møller’s work in the form and analysis method, when he simultaneously tried to adapt to his own use the restricted communications system that languages represent and attempted to break through traditional forms in philosophy, as was natural, because it was difficult for him to resign himself to the philosophical terminology in question. His “scattered thoughts” display his characteristic intention to unite abstract thinking with concrete human life, to link the language of philosophy with that of daily speech. It irritates him, therefore, to find speech’s demands for elementary comprehensibility obstructed by an esoteric jargon in systematic philosophy. In one of the early jottings on his voyage to China he exclaims: Why can no philosophical system be elevated to a height where its terminology complies with the elementary crystallization of language, which is older than any philosophy? Why must people continue, when defining things, to widen or limit every word and not keep to the eternal classification of ideas created by nature? Is it because eternal truth, whose spontaneous vocabulary consists of unfalsified speech, can never be perceived from more than one side in a philosophical system?17

Rather than follow this viewpoint to its logical conclusion of a perspectivistic concept of truth à la Nietzsche, Møller proceeds to deal with what is a serious problem in every philosophical discussion about eternal truths – how can truth be unearthed without impairing the “elementary crystallization of language” and the high exigencies of science? This was later one of the most insistent problems for Møller when he himself picked up a philosophical system (Hegel’s) – the conflict between the “popular” lecture, which is readily understandable, and the “classical” one, with its rigidly scholarly character and vocabulary. Inclination towards the first was a natural consequence of his elementary desire to communicate and share his thoughts with other people: 16 17

ES 3, p. 132. ES 3, p. 18.

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the “popular” lecture is, academically speaking, the oral equivalent of the “scattered thought” and elementary practice. Inclination towards the “classical” lecture was a natural consequence of his never-failing loyalty to Hegel’s system and its demands for die Anstrengung des Begriffs18 – the immanent and exceedingly abstract deduction of the concept which Møller never, however, succeeded in mastering. Since Møller could seldom make up his mind about which leg he was going to stand on, he attempted a compromise, a mediation. He did this partly by applying the demand for comprehension to systematic thinking and partly by letting the “popular” lecture – in true Hegelian fashion – disintegrate: Can a philosophical system be popular? Yes! Philosophy should be popularized; but when it has completely been so, its epoch is over. To popularize a philosophy is not the work of one man but of a whole era. An era always gradually popularizes genuine philosophy, but by transforming its concepts into opinions. And then it is no longer a philosophy – it has been corroded by the tempus edax rerum, and the philosophers have made a further advance in perception which the scientific plebs have to acquire.19

When philosophy is made accessible through popular lectures, an era’s true thinking is assimilated into concrete practice and selfknowledge and therewith ceases to be true philosophy, which stands above (earthly) things by virtue of its dynamic expression of eternal truth. According to this Hegelian dialectical viewpoint, philosophy means something that must lie ahead of its present truth. It must, with its rigid scientificity, be absent, yet be sought and brought into time through a wider comprehensibility and popularization. With this double-edged standpoint, whose Hegelianism goes further than Hegel himself by regarding the popularization and consequent disintegration of the system as inevitable, Møller was able to gloss over his ambivalence regarding philosophic education. He tried to assimilate himself to Hegel’s demands but remained always a man of scattered thoughts both in writing and in speaking – and did so 18

19

G.W.F. Hegel Phänomenologie des Geistes, Hamburg: Felix Meiner 1952, p. 48. See also p. 57: “Wahre Gedanken und wissenschaftliche Einsicht ist nur in der Arbeit des Begriffes zu gewinnen.” See also p. 21: “Das Wahre ist das Ganze. Das Ganze aber ist nur das durch seine Entwicklung sich vollendende Wesen.” (G.W.F. Hegel Phenomenology of Spirit, tr. by A.V. Miller, Oxford: Clarendon Press 1977, p. 35: “the strenuous effort of the Notion.” See also p. 43: “True thoughts and scientific insight are only to be won through the labor of the Notion.” See also p. 11: “The True is the whole. But the whole is nothing other than the essence consummating itself through its development.”) ES 3, p. 120.

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because behind his method of scattered thoughts reflected his own character (including his Socratic tendency) and a philosophic legacy from Treschow and Sibbern which he himself summed up in the words: “No manifestation of life has any truth without creative selfactivity.”20 The scattered thought was for Møller creative self-activity, but at the same time “an endless introduction to thinking.”21

II. In one of the earliest “scattered thoughts” from his voyage to China Poul Martin Møller writes: “It requires a kind of audacity to make psychological observations, a kind of confidence in one’s own ability to look into oneself.”22 This comment helps in understanding his original concept of affectation, in which, in attacking all species of falseness, simulation and self-deceit, he voices a powerful existential demand which is very un-Hegelian and pre-Kierkegaardian. The concept “affectation,” from French l’affectation, meaning unnaturalness, make-believe or hypocrisy, may be found in Danish from the time of Ludvig Holberg onwards,23 but has, before Møller takes it in hand, only a moral value referring to function, to personality’s extraverted actions: the act of dissembling before others, of being hypocritical or unnatural so as to play a role that appeals to their taste. The fundamental aspect of Møller’s interpretation and use of the idea is that for him it is primarily concerned, not with function, as it is with Holberg or, e.g. Sibbern, but with existence. What for him is important is not that one plays the hypocrite and deceives others but that one is deceiving oneself – duping the integrity of one’s own personality. This self-deceit consists of misinterpreting one’s own existence – and here Møller’s gradated system comes into the picture – thereby establishing or accentuating a divided consciousness: “Affectation is always based on getting led astray by some propensity without being aware of it.”24 – Did somebody say something about unconsciousness dominating the unconscious?

20 21 22 23

24

ES 3, pp. 91, 176. ES 3, p. 25. ES 3, p. 22. See Ordbog over Det Danske Sprog vols. 1-28, ed. by Det Danske Sprog- og Litteraturselskab, Copenhagen: Gyldendal 1919-56; vol. 1, column 157. ES 3, p. 174.

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Møller evidently reaches his concept of affectation by way of recoiling from Hegelian Sittlichkeit and its view of truth in life, where man’s pure self-determination acknowledges the order of reason and enters into a “complete harmony with the whole world of reason.”25 The concept “truth” corresponds in reality to the concept “Sittlichkeit,” and this, in turn, is defined as reason’s highest reality. It is within this sphere that the Hegelian dictum, “What is rational is actual; and what is actual is rational,”26 acquires its true significance: the real and the rational are, from the standpoint of free and pure self-determination, identical with truth. Sittlichkeit, the moral development of objective self-consciousness, guarantees this according to Hegel.27 This kind of truth is not undermined by affectation since the rule of Sittlichkeit leaves no room for the existential. Already with his concept of affectation Møller is thus administering a weighty correction to the Hegelian system. But his loyalty to his master is nonetheless incontestable. He prefers to avoid elaborating on the system’s premises and risk exposing gaping philosophical defects in it – “because it is here considered unseemly to draw up plans for building a temple and leave a hole in it for a poor church-mouse.”28 When Møller inveighs against moral affectation to emphasize epoch-making existential points, he does it, for instance, in the following way: “Affectation is thus not unadulterated falsehood, but has always a dash of self-deceit in it; for it is part of its nature that the person concerned is trying to be something that he cannot be – after which he will always delude himself, at least temporarily, that he can.”29 Here the divided consciousness that is a prerequisite for simulation or falsehood has been established and has distorted the identity, and with it a crucial part of the integrity of personality. Consciousness of playing a role is suspended, and the actor takes over the consciousness of the character he portrays. Herein lies the existentialist swindle and life-lie: voluntary self-deceit. As Svend Erik Stybe has pointed 25 26

27 28

29

ES 3, p. 165. G.W.F. Hegel Grundlinien der Philosophie des Rechts, Frankfurt am Main: Fischer 1968, p. 39: “Was vernünftig ist, das ist wirklich; und was wirklich ist, das ist vernünftig.” (G.W.F. Hegel Elements of the Philosophy of Right, tr. by H.B. Nisbet, ed. by Allen Wood, Cambridge, New York: Cambridge University Press 1991, p. 20.) Ibid., § 142. ES 3, p. 164. Note the parallel between this picture of Hegel and the skeptical Møller and Kierkegaard’s note about the man (Hegel in this case) who “builds an enormous castle and himself lives alongside it in a shed.” JP 3, 3308 / SKS 18, 303, JJ:490. ES 3, p. 166.

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out, a remarkable intellectual parallel can be drawn here with JeanPaul Sartre’s concept of la mauvaise foi in L’être et le néant30: “La mauvaise foi a donc en apparence la structure du mensonge. Seulement, ce qui change tout, c’est que, dans la mauvaise foi, c’est à moimême que je masque la vérité.”31 But what is the background for this freedom’s making itself unfree? It is – and here Møller looks deeply into himself and human nature – the individual’s bashfulness, lack of strength, and defective power of interpretation: Affectation most frequently arises when people do not have the strength to defy the world and reveal their character in its true colors. Therefore it is good that a few people come to stand in permanent opposition to the fraternity. In primitive nature every human being lived an independent life and stubbornly developed a character of his own because he was not harassed by the many. Today people create, by abstraction, a universal person, a society-ideal without originality, an ideal without individuality.32

He continues, “He will not come out with his own character, does not believe in its infinite profundity.”33 There is resignation and lack of self-confidence behind the affectation that sets existence against the more extroverted and active one in which people unabashedly play a role and infringe on the demands of morality. But in both forms a treachery is committed against the personality – “the idea of personality”34 is neglected in favor of a role-character created by self-deceit. This leads to the central idea in Møller’s concept of affectation: individuality, which must follow its inner law (“its idea”) and which if not respected – divided consciousness and bashfulness – degenerates disastrously into affectation in that an assumed “I” merges with the original, real one, thereby making existence figurative and unreal. Here Møller’s existential dictum, “No manifestation of life has any truth unless there be in it creative self-activity”35 is again relevant. I have already commented on this saying in connection with Møller’s aphoristic method. Now we see it charged with an existential commitment 30 31

32 33 34 35

See Svend Erik Stybe “‘Det enslige’ og ‘den enkelte,’” op. cit., p. 28. Jean-Paul Sartre L’être et le néant, Paris: Gallimard 1943, p. 87. (Jean-Paul Sartre Being and Nothingness, tr. by Hazel E. Barnes, New York: Philosophical Library 1956, p. 49: “Bad faith then has in appearance the structure of falsehood. Only what changes everything is the fact that in bad faith it is from myself that I am hiding the truth.”) ES 3, p. 176. ES 3, p. 184. ES 3, p. 175f. ES 3, pp. 91, 176.

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which also casts light on his aphoristic writings. With this maxim and his concept of “the idea of personality” as a dynamic and existential anthropology, Møller has laid the foundation for Søren Kierkegaard’s psychological and religious existentialist philosophy. Møller gradated his idea of affectation, inventing successive degrees of existential deceit and corruption and distinguishing between affectation that is momentary, permanent and alienating. Momentary affectation arises when “the character of the subject at any moment deserts a person because its virtue has not yet been sufficiently tempered.”36 This momentary self-deceit is sometimes able to break through a person’s real character because it has not yet stabilized itself or become strong enough. It is not only harmless, but to a certain degree even desirable because: “He who is not able communally to sacrifice himself to others in such a way as to be temporarily at one with them, to go quite outside himself, losing himself in other people’s circle of consciousness, may through his guardedness preserve himself from being overwhelmed by some spiritual power; but the individual who is solely protected in this way will always prove one-sided and deficient.”37 If we cannot engage ourselves in other people and their world of experience, we reduce ourselves to narrow-mindedness and prevent our existence from living truly (existing) with others. Regard for the existential life-incentive and the “nuanced” personality also appears in the following paradoxical “scattered thought”: “A certain amount of self-deceit is necessary – for it constitutes existence.”38 Isolation and obdurate “self-defence” will render one’s character sterile and produce self-deceit of a more aggravated kind. Permanent affectation comes about when a form of self-deceit or falseness becomes a habit and reinterpretation establishes itself incontestably in the character and dominates it. Psychologically speaking, repression and sublimation probably underlie this kind of affectation: “In this second degree of affectation a person absorbs a false element into himself and distorts his personality in such a way that its manifestations lose connection with his real self. For in so far as his self thus possesses a double life – one genuine but suppressed, and the other assumed, but which it wants to get itself and other people to believe in, it leads to only a pseudo-life.”39 Since it is a matter of a suppression and 36 37 38 39

ES 3, p. 169. ES 3, p. 169f. ES 3, p. 176. ES 3, pp. 171-172.

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of an assumed character pattern, there is still some hope of a genuine and true personality, provided only that the existential demand be complied with, and its verification requirement be applied consciously. Alternating affection is, according to Møller, the worst and most serious degree of affectation: “It occurs when a person does not have any kind of made-up trait in his character, any sort of habitual affectation, but has a tendency towards affection in general, now adopting one form of it, now another.”40 Here the real character is not being repressed but simply done away with: not one grain of it remains. The consistently affected person will constantly create a “temporary personality” for himself, and then replace it by another: the affectation appears to be bound up with a kind of irrefragable Sisyphean logic that renders impossible any conscious or existential salvation. This last interpretation perhaps goes a bit further, however, than Møller’s actual intention, which still holds out some hope of an authentic existence. To carry alternating affectation to its logical conclusion – nihilism – seems to Møller in principle impossible since that would entail selfdestruction by “an ethical suicide.”41 This form of affectation is, with its existential nihilism an insult to the reality of present life and its inner significance, i.e. to the individual’s creative self-activity. According to Møller, a person who attains the ultimate limit of his own existence will in one way or another be frightened back again to a form of individual existence. He refuses to believe that by dint of alternating affectation people can totally obliterate their individual characteristics. This brings us to Møller’s powerful attacks on the youthful Kierkegaard, who at one time had developed a malignantly affected spleen: if at any juncture the amiable professor said anything malicious to his admired pupil it was the following: “You are so ultra-polemicized that it’s quite horrible!”42 With this remark Møller gave his concept of affectation a preciseness that leads on to the limit of affectation, “ethical suicide,” which characterizes his subsequent Ahasverus fragments. We have now followed Poul Martin Møller’s original and notably differentiated battle against all types of affectation, and from his scattered thoughts and his correspondence we have seen clear evidence of his eagle eye for life’s everyday masquerades and pretences. But – and this seems to me important – he was himself in danger of carrying his 40 41 42

ES 3, p. 172. Ibid. See the account of Møller’s relations with Kierkegaard in Frithiof Brandt Den unge Søren Kierkegaard, Copenhagen: Levin & Munksgaards Forlag 1929, pp. 336-447.

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engagement too far: “Fear of affectation may – strange as it may at first sight seem – be carried to such lengths that an abnormal mental state is produced. The fear results in a misplaced insistence on the abstract identity in oneself.”43 In standing permanently on guard over oneself and others – affectation paranoia – there resides, a serious danger of developing an affected nature rather like that produced by habit. One can, in fact, become so set – “ultra-polemicized” – in one’s demands for truthfulness that everything is perceived as a foolish or hypocritical mannerism that undermines one’s very existence. With this scattered thought Møller gave both himself and future moralists and existentialists food for reflection

III. As we have already observed in connection with the aphoristic method and the concept of affectation, Møller’s thinking contains a number of reservations with regard to Hegel’s system even as he attempts to appropriate and identify himself with Hegel’s philosophy – its method, its ethical and social anthropology, and its world-view. But, as I have also pointed out, Møller never succeeded in his assimilation of Hegel because the differences in their thinking became increasingly pronounced. Two of the “scattered thoughts” can serve here to illustrate the wide gap that separated them: “In a completely organically developed treatise every concept is center for the whole.”44 But “Affectation is symmetry in philosophical systems.”45 And in a letter to Sibbern in 1829 we find Møller saying: “Hegel has no greater admirer than me”;46 yet a few years later – probably in 1835 – quite a different tune is heard: “Yes, Hegel is really crazy. He suffers from a monomania and thinks that the Concept can spread like this…,” whereupon, in deep silence, he made an expansive motion with his hands.47 But despite these sharp divergences, we can observe, right up to his last writings and notes – including his unfinished essay “Ontology or System of Categories” – a persistent effort to analyze and adapt Hegel’s categories and principles in an attempt to compromise with and accept them. 43 44 45 46 47

ES 3, p. 181f. ES 3, p. 91. ES 3, p. 188. ES 4, p. 135. See ES 4, p. 151.

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We shall not dwell on the problem of Møller’s relation to Hegel and his philosophy, but will simply record that his attempt at assimilation did not succeed – his analysis of affectation reveals this clearly – but he did not produce any consistent critique or fundamental attack on Hegel either. Kierkegaard, in a note to his Concluding Unscientific Postscript (1846), claimed that Møller did make some such critique, but this is not correct.48 In actual fact Møller never “outgrew” Hegel. The most he could do was to indicate one or two outstanding disagreements and make a few ironic digs at Hegelianism in general. The consistent focus of his divergences from Hegel’s philosophic system was its levelling out of individuality, creative self-activity and the authenticity of individual personality. And it was from Møller’s platform that Kierkegaard launched his sustained attack on Hegelianism. From about the middle of the 1830’s, however, Møller was sufficiently preoccupied with a perceived crack in the Hegelian edifice that, in an effort to rectify it, he composed the only large-scale, concentrated treatise of his life, “Reflections on the Possibility of Proofs of Human Immortality with Regard to the Latest Literature on the Subject.”49 As the title suggests, this was concerned with the debate then in progress in Germany about personal immortality or, to be more precise, about the possibilities of fitting personal immortality and faith in a personal God into the framework of Hegel’s system. Møller’s position in this discussion amounted to saying that Hegel’s system did not state conditions for people’s personal immortality or the existence of a personal God (theism), but that, after a discussion and the resolution of certain unfortunate obscurities, it was capable of being reconciled with Christian faith. He wanted a mediation like this because, as a Christian, he regarded both personal immortality and the existence of a personal God as closely connected with individualism and with his fundamental concept of “the idea of personality.” He could not, however, himself bring about this mediation, and he also did not think that he was capable of producing a “rigid proof” of the reality of these thoughts since, he believed a valid ontological proof of God’s existence to be impossible. But although he could not prove the reality of personal immortality or the existence of a personal God – unless he undertook “a great leap of faith” which everybody would be 48 49

CUP1, p. 34fn. / SKS 7, 41fn. Poul Martin Møller “Tanker over Mueligheden af Beviser for Menneskets Udødelighed” in Maanedsskrift for Litteratur vol. 17, Copenhagen 1837, pp. 1-72, 422-53.

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able to see through50 – he believed it was at least possible to produce an indirect proof which entailed proving the impossibility of living without the idea of personal immortality and a personal God and thus demonstrating the necessity of these concepts. The indirect proof begins and ends with his struggle against nihilism, for which reason his participation in the debate about immortality is worth commenting on: nihilism, by its violation of something that in his eyes is central in existence and in “the idea of personality,” is for him closely connected with affectation. It is affectation on the social (ethical) and world-view plane. Møller’s onslaught on nihilism first finds expression in his notes of 1835, “On the Concept of Irony,” in which he supports and extends Hegel’s criticisms of romanticism and in particular the extreme subjectivism of Friedrich Schlegel’s youthful novel Lucinde, and the “sickly sentimentality”51 of the more star-gazing kind of romantic authors. Both hyper-subjectivism and the exaggerated sentimentalism of poetic infinity-seeking assumed for Møller the colors of selfdeceit’s irony and practical nihilism since neither paid any regard to individual everyday experience. We are drawn away by them from ordinary human existence which, for example, entails an attitude to morality – one that can distinguish any individual’s character from others by a set of instilled life-habits. For the subjective ego no such moral habits exist: a purely individual judgment postulates the standards of the moment: “Subjective conviction is thus regarded as the zenith, and individual will is identified with morality.”52 Here Møller stipulates, with reference to the concept of affectation: “The will shall not determine what is truth.”53 Existential truth, by contrast, consists of the ability to transform “the idea of personality” into “creative self-activity,” which implies a function within a given morality – that is incompatible with nihilism. Subjectivist ironists and sentimental romantics come to grief by establishing a “practical nihilism” that takes a liberal view of every kind of moral commandment and standard and in fact plays ping-pong with existence. The ironic attitude and nihilism are bound up with what Møller, in another context, calls “indifferentism” – moral and existential apathy. 50

51 52 53

See ES 5, p. 64. Note, by the way, that Kierkegaard explicitly regarded “the leap” as the qualification for the religious stage, the true Christian faith. ES 3, p. 157. ES 3, p. 154. ES 3, p. 183.

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“Indifferentism” manifests itself in two forms, one passive, one active. Passive indifferentism is the attitude that sets aside current and pressing problems and instead adopts a “melancholy tendency to brood over the unknowable future,”54 and which thus has a certain connection with sentimentality, dreaming, and the Ahasverus mood.55 Active indifferentism tends in the direction of exaggerated subjectivism, but is in itself only characterized by a marked skepticism which deliberately excludes any permanent attitude to existence, and whose random gropings are only arrested by sudden “flashes and surmises” that occasionally occur and that perhaps find vent in “poetic eloquence.”56 These sidelights to Møller’s actual struggle with nihilism in his “Reflections on the Possibility of Proofs of Human Immortality” demonstrate his method of placing existential demands before moral ones. In the later phase of the struggle, when he is seeking “indirect proof” of personal immortality and a personal God, he is first and foremost concerned with establishing the impossibility of nihilism, i.e. its self-refuting character. All of his arguments about nihilism’s disintegrating nature are based on a firm conviction that the given truth distinguishes the reality that from its own necessary premises is the only intelligible one. To thwart this exclusive sphere of reality, which is trustworthy and compulsive for every human being, is to deny one’s own nature in favor of nihilism, which as its consequence (the disintegration of the character) brings one back to reason and to the reestablishment of existence – or else to suicide. Hegel’s well-known dictum in his Elements of the Philosophy of Right runs as follows: “What is rational is actual; and what is actual is rational.”57 For Møller a similar basic attitude holds true. For him, tradition – i.e. the Christian tradition, which acknowledges personal immortality – is reality in this world, the foundation on which all perception and insight must build. And tradition’s merit and reality are expressed, he says, through reason: “It is not as exterior authority that religious tradition subjugates a deficient system, but by freedom of thought and power of reason. Only this living tradition can fill the mind with rational conviction.”58 Tradition is the rational, and the

54 55 56 57

58

ES 4, p. 66. See ES 3, pp. 159ff. ES 6, p. 67. G.W.F. Hegel Grundlinien der Philosophie des Rechts, op. cit., p. 39. (G.W.F. Hegel Elements of the Philosophy of Right, op. cit., p. 20.) ES 5, pp. 72-73.

Poul Martin Møller

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rational is contained in tradition – there exists but one truth, and it is, through the changelessness of tradition, self-fortifying. This point of view is, philosophically seen, the expression of a staunch dogmatism that rests upon simple tautologies and circular arguments. But it is psychologically interesting in its further development in which “the strength of reason” becomes bound up with the “system of categories” and that in turn is linked with “the elementary crystallization of language” – primitive speech being thus connected with the fundamental ideas of reason which have created the “living tradition” that every generation passes on through intellectual socialization to the next.59 The logical compulsion of language, however, is one thing, but the thought about the ideas and archetypes preserved in language is something else; and it is the blending of these different things that provides Møller with the background for the cogent correspondence between tradition, reason and the Christian faith. The “living tradition” expresses a kind of changelessness as regards language, teaching and socialization, one that characteristically tends to establish itself through the formation of a so-called “super-ego,” but it cannot prove the truth of the ideas of the past. Thus, despite some interesting details, Møller’s chief argument about the impossibility of nihilism has its serious limitations. The other side of Poul Martin Møller’s attack on nihilism is an attempt to demonstrate the self-refuting nature of its world-view, the fact that “the doctrine of annihilation (i.e. nihilism) in every context, rightly developed, impels human consciousness to a turning-point at which it reverts from the void of rejection to the fullness of true religion.”60 We have already, in connection with alternating affectation, discussed the existential element in this approach to the problem: but now we also see it founded on Møller’s notion of the changelessness of tradition. A rightly developed nihilist will run his head into a wall not only existentially but also with regard to his consciousness, since ideas and categories that lie beyond tradition and the reason bound up with it are vacuous and incomprehensible. According to Møller, nihilism thus creates a border that cannot be crossed, but that reveals its own internal contradictions. And in his eyes both nihilism and affectation constitute arrant violations of existence and of the true life that can only be based on “creative self-activity.”

59 60

See ES 3, pp. 197-198. ES 5, p. 84.

H.C. Ørsted: Immanuel Kant and the Thought Experiment By Johannes Witt-Hansen In 1897, the Austrian physicist and philosopher, Ernst Mach published an essay, “Über Gedankenexperimente,” in Zeitschrift für den physikalischen und chemischen Unterricht.1 The article was rewritten, enlarged and published in Erkenntnis und Irrtum in 1905.2 Here several thought experiments, known from the history of modern science, were presented and analyzed, and attempts were made to distinguish thought experiments from “real” or “physical” experiments. Since this essay aroused great interest among contemporary physicists and philosophers, and stimulated the discussion of basic methodological problems in science, it became a widespread and almost generally accepted view that the term “Gedankenexperiment” was introduced into the scientific and philosophical vocabulary by Ernst Mach. This view is incorrect, however. It may be uncertain when the term “Gedankenexperiment” came into use in scientific and philosophical discourse, but it can be substantiated that it was used in the modern sense as early as 1811, in an essay, Prolegomenon to the General Theory of Nature.3 The author was the Danish chemist and physicist, Hans Christian Ørsted (1777-1851). He discussed its role in creative scientific work in some detail and related it to the use of hypotheses and conjectures in science. It is remarkable, however, that in his essay he did not analyze a single thought experiment or a single “real” 1 2

3

Zeitschrift für den physikalischen und chemischen Unterricht, January 1897, pp. 1-5. Ernst Mach Erkenntnis und Irrtum. Skizzen zur Psychologie der Forschung, 2nd edition, Leipzig: Verlag von Johann Ambrosius Barth 1906, pp. 183-199. Hans Christian Ørsted Første Indledning til den almindelige Naturlære, Copenhagen 1811. See Hans Christian Ørsted Naturvidenskabelige Skrifter vols. 1-3, ed. by Kirstine Meyer, Copenhagen: Andr. Fredr. Høst 1920; vol. 3, pp. 151-190 (abbreviated NS).

H.C. Ørsted: Immanuel Kant and the Thought Experiment

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experiment either. In his short sketch of “the history of the general theory of nature,”4 he did not utilize the rich sources for exemplification provided by the founders of mathematical physics from Archimedes to Newton. For instance, one looks in vain for an analysis of Galileo’s thought experiment with freely falling bodies5 or an evaluation of Newton’s thought experiments with bodies “projected in a horizontal direction from the top of a high mountain successively with more and more velocity.”6 Even some reflections on Archimedes’ famous saying, “Give me a place to stand, and I will move the entire earth by means of a charistion (weighing machine),”7 might be illuminating. It is very strange that Ørsted primarily refers to procedures in geometry and calculus, where he discovers “nothing but thought experiments and reflections concerning them.”8 For the elucidation of the role of thought experiments in physics he refers to Kant’s Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science (1786), and offers the following comment: If now, it is the essence of the theory of nature to let the development of thoughts accompany the development of things, it is evident that in this development one must often have recourse to those thought experiments that until now have been far too often overlooked. The most beautiful examples of this sort of exposition have been bestowed on us by Kant in his Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science, although he did not call attention to this circumstance himself.9

We may add that Kant did not coin the term “Gedankenexperiment” either. Although Ørsted does not refer explicitly to the Critique, it would seem that Kant’s reflections, in his principal work, on the role played by imagination and understanding in the process of cognition left important traces in Ørsted’s Prolegomenon. If we want to verify Ørsted’s statement concerning Kant and the thought experiment, we should rather look for texts where these aspects of Kant’s theory of cognition are connected with his analysis 4 5

6

7

8 9

NS 3, pp. 179-185. Galileo Galilei Dialogues Concerning Two New Sciences, tr. by Henry Crew and Alfonso de Salvio, New York: Dover Publications 1914, pp. 62-65. Isaac Newton Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy and his System of the World, tr. by Andrew Motte. Translation revised by Florian Cajori, Berkeley: University of California Press 1946, p. 552. E.J. Dijksterhuis Archimedes, tr. by C. Dikshoorn, Princeton: Princeton University Press 1987, pp. 16-17. NS 3, p. 172. NS 3, p. 173.

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Johannes Witt-Hansen

of the experiment in physics. Such texts are to be found in the Introduction to the Critique, and in the Preface to the second edition.10 In Part III of the Introduction of the Critique there is a sort of preamble to the presentation of the distinction between analytic and synthetic judgments. Ernst Cassirer, in his Das Erkenntnisproblem in der Philosophie und Wissenschaft der neueren Zeit,11 points out that this preamble has unjustly been neglected and its purport underestimated, apparently because the readers of the paragraph usually concentrated on the rather trivial examples of analytic judgments given by Kant. Careful reading of the paragraph reveals, however, Kant’s emphasis on the role of conceptual analysis as a necessary presupposition for the contrivance and establishment of an experimental setup, and for the performance of experimental analysis. Kant points out specifically, a great, perhaps the greatest, part of the business of our reason consists in analysis of the concepts which we already have of objects. This analysis supplies us with a considerable body of knowledge, which, while nothing but explanation or elucidation of what has already been thought, in our concepts, though in a confused manner, is yet prized as being, at least as regards its form, new insight.12

Since analysis of the concepts which we already have of physical objects is a necessary condition for devising, performing and interpreting physical experiments, and supposedly is an essential part of a thought experiment at that, it would seem that Ørsted, a zealous experimenter and, for some time, a faithful Kantian, accepted the Kantian view in this matter. Although Kant does not distinguish explicitly the thought experiment as a specific procedure in physics, different from the “real” experiment, he makes clear the fundamental difference between the analysis of the conceptual frame of physics, i.e. “the concepts which we already have of objects,” and the analysis of observations of nature made in a “real” physical experiment. Referring to the relationship between the analysis of the conceptual scheme and the matter or content, Kant continues to stress that in conceptual analysis “there has been no extension of our previously possessed concepts, but only an analysis of them.”13 As Cassirer points out, this 10

11

12 13

Immanuel Kant Critique of Pure Reason, tr. by Norman Kemp Smith, London: Macmillan & Co. Ltd. New York: St. Martin’s Press 1963, B 1-B 30; B vii-B xliv. Ernst Cassirer Das Erkenntnisproblem in der Philosophie und Wissenschaft der neueren Zeit vols. 1-4, Berlin 1906-57; vol. 2, 1907, pp. 532-535. Immanuel Kant Critique of Pure Reason, op. cit., B 9. Ibid., B 9.


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does not preclude analysis of the conceptual frame from providing answers to questions that so far remained open or unanswered. Such answers may even constitute a revolution in science. In his further exposition Kant warns against the Scylla and Charybdis that the physicist must face. Addressing the dogmatic metaphysician, he gives the well-known admonishment: Since this procedure [sc. the analysis of the concepts which we already have of objects] yields real knowledge a priori, which progresses in an assured and useful fashion, reason is so far misled as surreptitiously to introduce, without itself being aware of so doing, assertions of an entirely different order, in which it attaches to given concepts others completely foreign to them, and moreover attaches them a priori.14

In the Preface to the second edition of the Critique Kant, however, warns the experimentalist not to underestimate the role played by “reason” in the contrivance of an experimental set-up, and the performance of experimental analysis. Referring to the experiments performed by Galileo, Toricelli and Stahl, Kant points out that “[t]hey learned that reason has insight only into that which it produces after a plan of its own, and that it must not allow itself to be kept, as it were, in nature’s leading-strings, but must itself show the way with principles of judgment based upon fixed laws, constraining nature to give answer to questions of reason’s own determining.”15 In order to stress that reason plays, at least, a twofold role in natural science, Kant specifies the conditions for approaching nature “in order to be taught by it.”16 In the first place, reason is “holding in one hand its principles, according to which alone concordant appearances can be admitted as equivalent to laws.”17 These principles are the principles of general and transcendental logic, described in the section, “The System of the Principles of Pure Understanding.”18 Secondly, reason holds in the other hand “the experiment which it has devised in conformity with these principles….It must not, however, do so in the character of a pupil who listens to everything that the teacher chooses to say, but of an appointed judge who compels the witnesses to answer questions which he has himself formulated.”19

14 15 16 17 18 19

Ibid., B 9-10. Ibid., B xiii. Ibid., B xiii. Ibid., B xiii. Ibid., B 189-294. Ibid., B xiii.

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In his endeavors to formulate such questions, the physicist cannot restrict himself to the analysis of the concepts which he already has of physical objects. He must take some further steps that Kant did not describe in detail. However, in his Preface to the second edition of the Critique Kant intimates that the physicist must follow the path which mathematicians paved for science, and use “[t]he true method”20 they discovered. The discovery and application of this method evoked the “intellectual revolution” or “die Revolution der Denkart,” to which Kant attributed greater importance than he attached to the discovery of the passage round the Cape of Good Hope.21 Hence, “[e]ven physics…owes the beneficent revolution in its point of view (Revolution der Denkart) entirely to the happy thought, that while reason must seek in nature, not fictitiously ascribe to it, whatever as not being knowable through reason’s own resources has to be learnt, if learnt at all, only from nature, it must adopt as its guide, in so seeking, that which it has itself put into nature.”22 “The true method,” so the founder of mathematics found, “was not to inspect what he discerned either in the figure, or in the bare concept of it, and from this, as it were, to read off its properties.”23 That is, in Kant, mathematics is neither an empirical science nor a science that relies exclusively on conceptual analysis. The true method is “to bring out what was necessarily implied in the concepts that he [the mathematician] had himself formed a priori, and had put into the figure in the construction by which he presented it to himself.”24 “[M]athematical knowledge is the knowledge gained by reason from the construction of concepts.”25 Consequently, “To construct a concept means to exhibit a priori the intuition which corresponds to the concept.”26 Hence, “mathematics can achieve nothing by concepts alone but hastens at once to intuition, in which it considers the concept in concreto, though not empirically, but only in an intuition which it presents a priori, that is, which it has constructed, and in which whatever follows from the universal conditions of the construction must be universally valid of the object of the concept thus constructed.”27 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27

Ibid., B xii. Ibid., B xi. Ibid., B xiii-xiv. Ibid., B xii. Ibid., B xii. Ibid., B 741. Ibid., B 741. Ibid., B 743-744.


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Hence, if physics is bound to use “the true method” invented by mathematicians, it is obliged to introduce a link between the analysis of “the concepts which we already have of objects,”28 and the “real” experiment. This link is consequently gained by “reason” from construction of physical concepts in intuition. It would seem that, in Ørsted’s view, this constructive act is the core of the thought experiment in Kant. We know that neither did Kant make any explicit distinction between thought experiments and “real” experiments, nor did he coin the term “Gedankenexperiment.” In his description of physical research he distinguishes, however, three phases or gradations, of which the first and the second involve operations that hardly could be called “physical”: (1) analysis of the concepts which we already have of the objects, (2) construction of physical concepts in intuition, possibly involving mathematical constructions of the type discovered in Newton’s Principia, (3) performance of “real” experiments and analysis of observations. In the first phase the conceptual frame or the mathematical scheme is scrutinized or “questioned.” The knowledge furnished by such analysis makes possible constructions in intuition or experimental operations with mental images of known objects. It would seem that reason in this second phase produces the “plan of its own,” through which it obliges nature “to give answer to questions of reason’s own determining.”29 In the following I shall quote some of Ørsted’s reflections on “real” and imaginary experiments, and give a sketch of his very special background as a scientist and philosopher. This background gives him a unique relationship and access to the Kantian Pandora’s box. Finally, I shall give an example of Ørsted’s own application of the thought experiment and offer an evaluation or assessment of his contributions to scientific methodology which, by the way, bear some resemblance to those furnished by Niels Bohr. In his Prolegomenon Ørsted gives the following account: The basis of the general theory of nature is experience; this is so according to the concept we have formed of the matter, as well as according to the way in which it has developed in time. Nature shows us many of its changes so often, so strongly and in a way so impressive to our senses that it is impossible not to observe them. They are our everyday experiences. Other changes are not discovered, unless we deliberately turn our

28 29

Ibid., B 9. Ibid., B xiii.

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attention to the matter. The collection of information about such changes is called observation. Finally, there are many changes that nature does not display directly in quite an understandable way. In order to explore their essence, one must strive to bring the objects together in such a way that their effects become more intelligible to us. In other words, in order to see the procedure of nature in the most perfect way possible, we must learn, arbitrarily, to set it to work and, as it were, compel it to act directly in our presence as witnesses. So doing is called making or performing experiments or putting nature on trial. Nature imposes everyday experiences on us; it invites observations; we ourselves create the experiment; it is our completely free creation.30

Furthermore, “In order to explore the essence of things properly, he [the experimenter] often brings them into quite new relationships which nature never so far has displayed; whereby his preconceived suppositions are either confirmed or overthrown. In short, he tries all over to induce the most secret powers of nature to reveal themselves, and tries with scale and measure to determine their course.”31 In conformity with Kant, Ørsted gives the following description of the experiment: “The performance of experiments amounts to asking nature questions; but this is of no avail, unless the experimenter knows what questions he has to ask.”32 Therefore, the art of experiment is in Ørsted not only an “art of creating in the manner of imitating nature.”33 “It has, moreover, in view to set our spirit itself to creative work in order to produce living and powerful knowledge in harmony with the continual development of nature. Its specific feature is, consequently, the creative procedure (the genetic method); and this procedure is not only applicable where we are operating on bodily objects, but has also a proper place in connection with objects that are presented merely to the inner sense.”34 The thought experiment is only “the experimental art from a higher standpoint.”35 If we recall Kant’s insistence on the constructive act as the core of “the true method” in science, it is hardly astonishing that his first true follower in the field of physics also makes use of geometry as a source of examples of thought experiments. “When we, in our representation (intuition), let a point move in order to produce a line, or when we let a line revolve around its end, and let it describe a circle with the other end, what is this but a thought experiment?”36 But also calculus is 30 31 32 33 34 35 36

NS 3, p. 168. NS 3, p. 169. NS 3, p. 170. NS 3, p. 172. NS 3, p. 172. NS 3, p. 172. NS 3, p. 172.


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adduced as an example: “Differential and integral calculus consists in nothing but such thought experiments and in reflections concerning them.”37 If we take into consideration that Newton practically throughout the Principia used the geometrical constructive way of presentation and proof of propositions, one must admit that Ørsted’s reference to calculus as a source of examples of thought experiments is legitimate. In Book One, Section 1, of the Principia Newton presents “The method of first and last ratios of quantities, by the help of which we demonstrate the propositions that follow.”38 As the reader of the Principia can verify, this method is nothing but a method for geometrical determination of the limiting values to which definite ratios of lines and surfaces approach, when the quantities of the ratios in question are supposed to be diminished in infinitum. Apart from a succinct reference to Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science, quoted above, Ørsted reflects on the thought experiment in physics in the following way: “If one does not perceive clearly, under which law of nature a definite effect or set of effects can be subsumed, then one attempts to restore this deficiency through a guess. Such guesses are called conjectures or hypotheses. They can, properly speaking, be conceived as thought experiments, whereby one will find out whether or not an event can be explained by a definite supposition together with the other known laws of nature.”39 “If one discovers that all phenomena in a rich and multifarious experience can be made understandable through the conjecture, it is accepted as true. If, on the other hand, it turns out that some circumstance is in conflict with the presupposition, then the latter is abandoned and a new one is searched for, that, again, possibly may be invalidated through a similar test; and so forth, until one comes across a presupposition that is not destroyed through the test.”40 In order to furnish a background for Ørsted’s unique career, it seems worthwhile to dwell on his situation as a scientist and philosopher. In 1797 he finished his training as a pharmacist and chemist, and took his pharmaceutical degree with honors. Although his knowledge of mathematics and mechanical physics was rather poor, he did not follow up his training with a thorough study of these disciplines. The reason for this is mainly that the professorial chair in physics at the University of 37 38 39 40

NS 3, p. 172. Isaac Newton Mathematical Principles, op. cit., Section 1, pp. 29-39. NS 3, p. 175. NS 3, p. 175.

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Copenhagen was vacant at that time and that no university laboratory in physics was available. In such condition of constraint, Ørsted had no better choice of an introductory course in physics than Kant’s philosophy of mechanics, inherent in Critique of Pure Reason (1781, 1787), and presented in Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science (1786). Although Ørsted zealously continued his experimental investigations, concentrating on the relationship between chemical processes and “galvanism,” he actually switched fields, moving to philosophy. In 1799 he became a doctor of philosophy, defending a thesis under the title Dissertatio de forma metaphysices elementaris naturae externae (Dissertation on the Forms of Fundamental Metaphysics of External Nature). The principal contents of this treatise were presented in an essay, The Main Features of the Metaphysics of Nature,41 published (in Danish) in the same year, but before the dissertation. From this treatise it is clear that Ørsted at the turn of the century considered Kant’s Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science the keystone of Newtonian mechanics and of physics in general. This view is expressed in the following words: “According to critical philosophy all laws of nature should be derived from the nature of our faculty of cognition, a conception that Kant so brilliantly has developed in his Critique of Pure Reason; and I believe that I have shown that this can be done through the derivation of all these laws a priori, only by making the propositions that are proven in this book the basis of derivation.”42 He says this with the proviso, however, that “in order to conform to the spirit of critical philosophy, I had no misgivings in deviating from the letter of Kant’s writings.”43 On this occasion Kirstine Meyer writes in “The Scientific Life and Works of H.C. Ørsted”: “It was the study of chemistry that led him to experimental science; it was Kant’s critical philosophy that led him into philosophical roads.”44 This is correct, but it should be added that, on this path, Ørsted finally came across Newtonian mechanics. This roundabout introduction to classical physics and mathematics for a long time prevented Ørsted from having a clear view of these disciplines and their problems. In particular, his concepts of force and matter remained utterly abstruse. Since the idea of “unity of nature,” the idea of “unity of physical forces,” the idea of “conflicting forces,” 41 42 43 44

Hans Christian Ørsted Grundtrækkene af Naturmetaphysiken, Copenhagen 1799. NS 1, p. 76. NS 1, p. 76. Kirstine Meyer “The Scientific Life and Works of H.C. Ørsted” in NS 1, p. XVI.


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according to the Kantian attraction/repulsion pattern, were subservient to his scientific projects, he soon came under the sway of German Naturphilosophie. In his bibliography to The Main Features of the Metaphysics of Nature45 we not only discover Lazarus Bendavid’s and Johann Friedrich Christof Gräffe’s commentaries to Kant’s Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science, but also Schelling’s Ideen zu einer Philosophie der Natur (1797) and Von der Weltseele (1798). Ørsted never became an uncritical partisan of Schellingianism. Commenting on Schelling’s works, he said, “they are worthy of attention on account of the beautiful and great ideas that are discovered in them, but owing to the not very rigorous method by which the author intermingles them with empirical propositions without sufficiently distinguishing them from a priori propositions, the book is much deprived of its value, in particular because the empirical propositions which he adduces are often utterly wrong.”46 As the readers of Ørsted’s philosophical and literary legacy, The Spirit in Nature,47 are well aware, his bond with the so-called “romantic trend” in German philosophy was never totally severed.48 By 1811, however, he had already developed a philosophy of science of his own, where he combined experimental discipline and respect for facts with intellectual inventiveness and creativity. Here, once more, Ørsted has recourse to Kant’s philosophy, now not in the way of a philosophical epigone or pupil who listens to everything that the teacher chooses to say, but as a working chemist and physicist. In his character of a scientist he brings to the fore the procedure outlined above. It would therefore seem that his introduction of the term “Gedankenexperiment” in philosophic and scientific discourse, and his analysis of the procedure designated by that term was Ørsted’s greatest philosophical achievement, so much the more as it was crowned by the epoch-making “real” experiment from 1820. This outlook is developed in the period following 1807. It is fair to say that in this period Ørsted virtually takes leave of Kantian apriorism, “romantic speculation” and “wild experiments” as performed by the Hungarian experimentalist, Jacob Joseph Winterl, and his Ger-

45 46 47 48

NS 1, p. 77. NS 1, p. 77. Hans Christian Ørsted Aanden i Naturen, Copenhagen 1850. F.J. Billeskov Jansen “Aanden i Naturen. H.C. Orsteds naturmetafysiske system” in Oversigt over Det Kongelige Danske Videnskabernes Selskabs Virksomhed, 19701971, pp. 127-137.

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man colleague, Johann Wilhelm Ritter. Already in a lecture-essay from 1807, “Reflections on the History of Chemistry,”49 a radical change is manifest. Here Ørsted sets forth a conception of intellectual development and truth, closely related to the doctrine of development and the idea of successive approximation to truth originating in Leibniz, and in some respects expanded by Schelling. Adding the Kant-Schelling conception of “conflicting forces” as a motive power of development, Ørsted creates a philosophy of his own. It is within the framework of this philosophy that the thought experiment is discovered as a specific procedure and consciously applied. In this new vision the history of chemistry, and the history of science in general, is “a true development from the first origin to a complete organization.”50 This outlook maintains that scientific truth is relative, or that “even in errors some truth still lay hidden.”51 On the other hand, the study of the history of science teaches us that “in the numerous contradictions that the history of science holds out to the uneducated spectator…an eternal truth is traceable.”52 This eternal truth is contained in the assertion that the course of development of science is not accidental but goes on in accordance with “an inviolable law.”53 The core of this law is the conception that a definite scientific theory always contains the design for a subsequent theory,54 or that any step taken in the process of scientific cognition is made obligatory by the preceding step; that means that any theory in science makes a subsequent theory necessary. Owing to “the nature of the human spirit that works in intermittent expansions and contractions,” “the activity of our spirit is divided into two operations: creating and forming.”55 These operations are founded in two faculties of cognition: “intrinsic creative power” or imagination, in virtue of which the genius creates new ideas,56 and understanding, that subjects the ideas and the empirical material to rules and order. This important essay was hardly appreciated by contemporaries and later seems to have fallen into oblivion. It is understandable that 49

50 51 52 53 54 55 56

Hans Christian Ørsted “Betragtninger over Chemiens Historie, en Forelæsning” in Det skandinaviske Literaturselskabs Skrifter vol. 2, 1807, pp. 1-54. NS 1, p. 333. NS 1, p. 324. NS 1, p. 329. NS 1, p. 339. NS 1, p. 334. NS 1, p. 340. NS 1, pp. 340-341.


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Ørsted complains in 1828: “The author [i.e. Ørsted] does see now, after the lapse of twenty years, that he has not accomplished much through his essay, and he perceives, moreover, that the elaboration of the text did not justify the expectations which he cherished when he published it. But he has also learned that many readers have read it badly.”57 To the modern reader it would seem that Ørsted in his essay already had some presentiment of the thought experiment and of the correspondence argument as well. Be that as it may, through his historical studies and further by a series of successful experiments performed in the same period,58 Ørsted acquired a new insight into the interplay of theoretical ideas, conjectures and experiments. Endowed with this new intellectual and experimental proficiency, Ørsted arrived at the outlook presented in the essay from 1811. Here, again, he has recourse to Kant’s philosophy of science, now from quite a new angle. In his Autobiography he offers the following comment: “In this little publication he made every effort to present with all the lucidity at his disposal the philosophy of natural science that he had worked out himself as the product of the reflections to which he was prompted by the competing philosophical systems of his age, combined with empirical natural science.”59 From Kant’s philosophy of physical science Ørsted borrowed the idea of “conflicting forces,” acting according to the attraction/repulsion pattern. From Kant and Schelling he took possession of the idea of “unity of physical forces.” Through his studies of the history of science he became familiar with the idea of conceptual development and relativity of truth. And under the influence of Kant’s theory of cognition, he developed the procedure in physics which he baptized “Gedankenexperiment.” This procedure was used in an analysis that began around 1812. It reached its climax in 1819-20 with the discovery of electromagnetism. At the basis of Kant’s dynamical doctrine of matter lay the assumption that the forces of attraction and repulsion urge bodies to move along the connecting lines or links between mass-points. According to the idea of the “unity of physical forces,” Ørsted assumed “that all phenomena are produced by the same original force.”60 These assump57

58 59

H.C. Ørsted’s “Autobiografi” in H.A. Kofod’s Conversations-Lexicon vols. 1-28, Copenhagen 1816-28; vol. 28, p. 527. NS 2, p. 11-34. H.C. Ørsted “Autobiografi,” op. cit., p. 529.

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tions were the basis for analysis of the concepts which Ørsted already had of physical objects. Hence, if all phenomena were produced by the same original force, it would seem that mechanical, electrical, chemical and magnetic forces obey the same laws, that is, that they act along the connecting lines or links between mass-points, electrical poles, acids and alkalis, magnetic north pole and south pole, respectively. In a treatise on the chemical laws of nature, published in Germany in 1812, under the title Ansichten der chemischen Naturgesetze, and translated into French in 1813 under the title Recherches sur l’identité des forces chemiques et électriques, Ørsted endeavored to establish a general chemical theory in harmony with the principle quoted above. In this work he attempted to prove that not only chemical affinities, but also heat and light are produced by electrical and chemical forces, adding the claim “that the magnetic effects were produced by the same forces.”61 In a retrospect on his analytical enterprise Ørsted informs us: The reasons for and against an essential resemblance between magnetism and electricity might, before the discovery of electromagnetism, seem to be nearly balanced. The most striking analogies were that each of them consists of two forces, or directions of forces, of an opposite nature, submitted to the same laws of attraction and repulsion; that the magnetic action on bodies, fit to receive it, is analogous with the electrical action; that the distribution of forces in a body, which has an electrical charge, and still more a series of bodies charged by cascade, differs very little from the distribution of the forces in a magnet.62

However, soon Ørsted became aware of the fact that heat and light, having been produced as effects of an electrical current, go out in all directions from the conductor. This fact is of course incompatible with the Kantian assumption that the basic forces of nature, attraction and repulsion, whether mechanical, electrical, chemical or magnetic, act along the connecting line or link between mass-points or poles. This incompatibility of assumptions and facts gave a new turn to Ørsted’s analysis. For since there was no experimental evidence in favor of the assumption that a magnetic effect could be produced by electricity in the direction of the current, Ørsted suggested that such effect, if any, might be produced in a way similar to that in which heat and light were produced as effects of an electrical current. He was even of the opinion that a possible effect on a magnet would be inextricably con60 61 62

NS 2, p. 356. NS 2, p. 356. NS 2, pp. 352-353.


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nected with the heat and light effect. This view found support in the observation that heat influences the magnetism of iron. Ørsted gives the following report on his analysis: His researches upon this subject were still fruitless until the year 1820. In the winter 1819-20 he delivered a course of lectures on electricity, galvanism, and magnetism, before an audience that had been previously acquainted with the principles of natural philosophy. In composing the lecture, in which he was to treat of the analogy between magnetism and electricity, he conjectured, that if it were possible to produce any magnetic effect by electricity, this could not be in the direction of the current, since this had been so often tried in vain, but that it must be produced by a lateral action. This was strictly connected with his other ideas; for he did not consider the transmission of electricity through a conductor as a uniform stream, but as a succession of interruptions and re-establishments of equilibrium, in such a manner, that the electrical forces in the current were not in quiet equilibrium, but in a state of continual conflict.63

Often Ørsted described the electrical current as the outcome of a “conflict of opposites,” i.e. as a conflict between positive and negative electricity (conflictus electricus). Continuing his report he says: “Since the luminous and heating effect of the electrical current goes out in all directions from a conductor, which transmits a great quantity of electricity, he thought it possible that the magnetic effect could likewise eradiate. The observations, recorded above, of magnetic effects produced by lightning, in steel needles not immediately struck, strengthened him in his opinion.”64 Ørsted refers to “a very remarkable case of this kind, mentioned in Philosophical Transactions, vol. XI, no. 127, p. 647,” that seems to be the earliest on record. “It is there related that a vessel, whose mast was struck by lightning, had the poles of the needles in all its compasses inverted, yet the compasses themselves were not struck.”65 In Ørsted’s report we discover a fair description of the first phase of his thought experiment, viz. the phase where he analyzes the concepts which he already has of the physical objects under discussion. The phase is important because it constitutes a decisive break with Kant’s interpretation and Schelling’s misapprehension of classical physics. It would seem that Ørsted was the first chemist or physicist, introduced to physics by way of Kant’s philosophy of nature, to rescue himself from its spell. It is remarkable, however, that he did so by using the analytical tool furnished by Kant in the Critique, and that he could

63 64 65

NS 2, pp. 356-357. NS 2, p. 357. NS 2, p. 353.

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offer an alternative to the Kantian conception of nature by scrutinizing or questioning the conceptual system at hand. In the second phase of his thought experiment Ørsted works out a plan for asking nature questions. In accordance with Kant’s requirements, he constructs his concepts in intuition or makes experiments with mental images. In the essay on Thermo-Electricity quoted above we read the following report on his procedure: “The plan of the first experiment was to make the current of a little galvanic trough apparatus, commonly used in the lectures, pass through a very thin platinum wire, which was placed over a compass covered with glass.”66 The thin platinum wire was suggested because it was supposed that the magnetic effect would not take place unless heat and light were produced by the galvanic current. This assumption could not be tested in a thought experiment. The test required “real” experiments. And in fact it was falsified after a series of “real” experiments, about which Ørsted makes the following report: The effects were still feeble in the first repetitions of the experiment, because he employed only very thin wires, supposing that the magnetic effect would not take place, when heat and light were not produced by the galvanical current; but he soon found that conductors of a greater diameter give much more effect; and then he discovered, by continued experiments during a few days, the fundamental law of electromagnetism, viz. that the magnetic effect of the electrical current has a circular motion round it.67

These experiments were described in the classical treatise from 1820, Experimenta circa effectum conflictus electrici in acum magneticam (Experiments on the Effect of a Current of Electricity on the Magnetic Needle).68 In an essay on Ørsted’s discovery of electromagnetism, the Danish physicist, Mogens Pihl, gives a summary of Ørsted’s report from 1820: (1) The effect of the current on the poles of the magnetic needle is lateral to the direction of the current, and a rule for the direction of the force is specified. (2) The force is independent of the physical nature of the objects situated between the magnet and the conductor. (3) The magnitude of the force depends on the distance from the magnet, the power of the battery, and the quality of the conducting wire. (4) The electrical conflict is not limited to the conductor itself, but expands simultaneously in the surrounding space, and even rather far; and it has supposedly a circular motion around the conductor; the planes of this motion are at right angles to the conductor.69

66 67 68

NS 2, p. 357. NS 2, p. 358. NS 2, pp. 214-218.


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In this point of view there is, according to Pihl, a vague presentiment of the field conception, developed by Faraday. It is remarkable, on the other hand, that Ørsted did not take pains to make experiments concerning the quantitative relationships between the force that the current exerts and the behavior of the poles of the magnetic needle. Such investigations were carried out by the French investigators Biot and Savart, who, at a session on October 30, 1820 in Paris, established and formulated the law known by their names. It was Arago and Ampère, however, who continued the study of electromagnetism to the point where the discovery of electromagnetic induction by Faraday began. In his attempts to give the laws which he discovered a mathematical form, Ampère, in contradistinction to Ørsted, made use of trigonometrical functions. In particular Ampère discovered that two parallel electrical currents attract, whereas two anti-parallel currents repulse each other. These laws were presented already on September 25, 1820 and published in the collection Recueil de Mémoires, notices, extraits de lettres ou d’ouvrages périodiques sur les sciences, relatifs à l’action mutuelle de deux courans électriques, sur celle qui existe entre un courant électrique et un aimant ou le globe terrastre, et celle de deux aimans l’un sur l’autre (1822).70 Ampère not only presented these laws with continual reference to and due regard for Ørsted’s discovery, but also used the thoughtexperimental method recommended by Ørsted as well. In “Notice sur les Experiences électromagnétiques de MM. Ampère et Arago, lue à Seance publique de l’Académie royale des sciences de Paris, le 2 avril 1821,”71 Ampère gave an illuminating report on the experiments and reflections, leading to “the discoveries that made him the Newton of electricity.”72

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70 71 72

Mogens Pihl “Hans Christian Ørsted og hans opdagelse af elektromagnetismen” in Betydningsfulde danske bidrag til den klassiske fysik, (Festskrift udgivet af Københavns Universitet i anledning af universitetets årsfest, november 1972), ed. by Morgens Pihl, Copenhagen: Bianco Lunos Bogtrykkeri 1972, pp. 32-41, especially, pp. 38-39. André Marie Ampère Recueil de mémoires, notices, etc., Paris 1822. Ibid., pp. 109-112. Mogens Pihl, op. cit., p. 39.

Kierkegaard’s Contribution to the Danish Discussion of “Irony” By K. Brian Söderquist Most Kierkegaard scholars are aware of the major themes in Kierkegaard’s dissertation, The Concept of Irony. These include both his unique interpretation of Socrates as an ethically disinterested “ironist” whose only aim is the destruction of culturally inherited standards of truth and his critical treatment of the world-view associated with the German literary movement known as “irony” – later called early romanticism. Kierkegaard criticizes romanticism as a philosophical confusion which, when applied to practice, leads to an egoistic isolation from the world and, ultimately, an isolation from one’s own unique self or nature. Scholars have long recognized that Kierkegaard’s treatment of Socrates and German Romanticism in The Concept of Irony resembles Hegel’s treatment of the same issues, though there is disagreement about whether the relationship is positive or negative.1 Kierkegaard’s early journals, however, reveal that during his preparation for his dissertation, several years before he began a concentrated study of Hegel, he was already occupied with a host of other works dealing with irony.2 Among the authors he names, one finds references to sev1

2

Niels Thulstrup is the major representative of a tradition which views Kierkegaard’s use of Hegel in The Concept of Irony as an ironic move which undercuts the very philosophy he appears to be relying on. More recently, Jon Stewart has argued that Hegel’s influence in The Concept of Irony is more complicated, and that Kierkegaard borrows freely from Hegel’s analyses of Socrates and the German Romantics. See Niels Thulstrup Kierkegaard’s Relation to Hegel, Princeton: Princeton University Press 1980, and Jon Stewart Kierkegaard’s Relations to Hegel Reconsidered, New York: Cambridge University Press 2003. The Journals BB and DD in particular, written primarily in 1837, reveal that Kierkegaard read a number of articles by German authors dealing with the romantic understanding of “irony” including works by Carl Daub, Johann Eduard Erdmann, Johann Karl Friedrich Rosenkranz, Jean Paul, and Johann Georg Hamann in addition to Friedrich Schlegel and Ludwig Tieck. See SKS K17, DD.

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eral local figures familiar to Kierkegaard researchers, such as philosophy professor Poul Martin Møller, playwright Johan Ludvig Heiberg, and the young theologian Hans Lassen Martensen. A closer inspection of these named sources reveals that prior to the time Kierkegaard wrote The Concept of Irony, a wider discussion about the literary merits and practical implications of the ironic movement in Germany was going on in the scholarly journals in Copenhagen. Despite its centrality for understanding the nuances of Kierkegaard’s dissertation, the Danish discussion of irony has never been treated in detail in the secondary literature.3 Though Kierkegaard does not cite the discussion explicitly in The Concept of Irony,4 perhaps because he presupposed that his readers were familiar with the views expressed there, I believe nonetheless that an exploration of this discussion reveals that Kierkegaard is indeed in dialogue with his Danish contemporaries. In this study, then, I will take a step toward reconstructing a lost horizon of understanding, a horizon which I believe is particularly important for those interested in Kierkegaard’s understanding of irony. I hope to show that Kierkegaard’s aim of providing a “thorough and coherent development”5 of the concept irony comes not only as a philosophical response to a debate in the German intellectual world but also as an existential response to practical problems addressed by his own professors and associates. Just as importantly, this horizon suggests what kinds of issues were at stake with romantic irony and perhaps why Kierkegaard perceived romanticism to be a problem worthy of refutation at all. In particular, I believe that the Danish scholars address psychological concerns that are not readily apparent in Hegel’s criticism, and bringing these concerns into view allows a reader to return to Kierkegaard’s text and find implicit 3

4

5

Important exceptions include: George Pattison The Aesthetic and the Religious, London: Macmillan Press 1992; “Beyond the Grasp of Irony” in International Kierkegaard Commentary: The Concept Of Irony, ed. by Robert L. Perkins, Macon: Mercer University Press 2002, pp. 347-363. Bruce Kirmmse “Socrates in the Fast Lane: Kierkegaard’s The Concept of Irony on the University’s Volocifère. Documents, Context, Commentary, and Interpretation” in International Kierkegaard Commentary: The Concept Of Irony, ed. by Robert L. Perkins, Macon: Mercer University Press 2002, pp. 17-99. Jon Stewart “Hegel’s Presence in The Concept of Irony” in Kierkegaard Studies. Yearbook 1999, pp. 245-277, and Eivind Tjønneland Ironie som Symptom. En Kritisk Studie av Søren Kierkegaards Om Begrebet Ironi, Afhandling for dr. philos.graden i Nordisk Litteraturvitenskap, University of Bergen 1999. An exception is his oft-cited reference to Martensen’s review of Heiberg’s Nye Digte in the concluding lines of the dissertation. See CI, p. 329 / SKS 1, 357. CI, p. 243 / SKS 1, 282.

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arguments that are not clear in an ahistorical reading. One of my tasks will be to identify the issues that are already presupposed by Kierkegaard’s audience, which will then help set Kierkegaard’s unique contributions in relief. The Danish discussion of irony is raised for the first time in the context of aesthetic theory, i.e. in the context of theatrical and literary theory. While Heiberg treats irony as a sub-genre within comedy, philosophy professor Frederik Christian Sibbern speaks of irony as the mood of an author who distances himself from his own particular experience. But it is the priest Eggert Tryde, Møller, and to a lesser degree Martensen, who move the discussion off the stage and into the sphere of practical philosophy, which in turn sets up Kierkegaard’s lengthy treatment of irony in the dissertation. These figures, each in his own way, criticize the ironic world-view as a form of nihilism. In fact, it is ultimately the problem of nihilism which drives the entire discussion: romantic irony is said to end in a world-view which refuses to see the legitimacy of any culturally mediated values and which responds with an open celebration of the emptiness of the world around one. Only the truth which the ironic subject creates for him- or herself survives. Given the number of players in this debate, it is not possible to give a full account of the nuances of the individual positions. Instead, I will focus on a few themes that reappear in Kierkegaard’s dissertation: 1) irony as the ability of an author to create a distance from his or her own actual experience, 2) the existential implications of living at a distance from actuality, and 3) the overcoming the nihilism of irony though activity in the actual world.

I. Two Aspects of Kierkegaard’s The Concept of Irony Before moving to the Danish discussion, however, let me briefly review a few major themes in The Concept of Irony which are significant in the context of this study. The first is Kierkegaard’s understanding of romantic irony as a position in which the individual stands in complete isolation from the social world that he or she has inherited, and as a result, stands in isolation from his or her own deepest self, which is inextricably bound up with a social environment. In fact, the distance that the ironist takes from the world is the defining feature of romanticism for Kierkegaard. But what does Kierkegaard mean when he writes of isolation?


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The young Kierkegaard interprets poetry as more than a mere literary genre, of course. He interprets it as a model for practice. Perhaps more correctly, irony represents to him a rival ethic or a displacement of genuine ethics. In his chapter “Irony after Fichte,” Kierkegaard describes romantic irony as a cultivated freedom from conventional life that eventually ends in nothing other than an abstract freedom. The laws, morals, habits, and ethical customs which are constitutive of the actual world cease to impose themselves as demands on the ironist. It is precisely the ironist’s insistence upon negative freedom which marks the fundamental break with his or her inherited social context: For the ironist, this context – which he would call a mere encumbrance – has no validity, and since it is not his concern to form himself in such a way that he fits into his environment, the environment must be formed to fit him, that is, not only does he poetically fashion himself, but he poetically fashions the surrounding world as well. The ironist stands proudly closed within himself, and he lets people pass by, just as Adam let the animals pass by, and finds no fellowship for himself. In doing so, he continually collides with the actuality to which he belongs. It thus becomes important for him to suspend what is constitutive in actuality, that which orders and supports it: that is, morality and ethics [Sædelighed].6

The ironic poet stands in conflict with the given world, and if his or her negative freedom is to be preserved, the poet must remain within his or her own autonomous world. Because historical actuality has been made relative through irony, interactions with other human beings which are facilitated through the cultural environment are relativized as well. The ironist “stands proudly closed within himself.” As Kierkegaard puts it, the ethical demands of actuality must be “suspended,” or relativized. This does not mean that the ironist behaves unethically, however, it means rather that he or she does not take conventional ethics seriously. The ironist has the option of allowing the given ethical order to retain some of its meaning, or he or she has the option of ignoring it. “He lives far too abstractly, far too metaphysically and aesthetically to reach the concretion of the moral and the ethical. For him, life is a drama, and what absorbs him is the ingenious complication of this drama. He himself is a spectator even when he himself is the one acting.”7 The ironic poet claims a teleological suspension of the ethical, not to a religious end, but rather to a nihilistic

6 7

CI, p. 283 / SKS 1, 318. Translation modified. CI, p. 283 / SKS 1, 319.

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one or, to anticipate Kierkegaard’s later terminology for irony, to an aesthetic one. In Kierkegaard’s view, one implication of this freedom from context is the loss of the essential element of the self: the positive freedom to become a self. This essential element is bound up with the concrete limitations imposed by one’s cultural environment, by actuality. Foreshadowing a discussion which Judge William takes up in Either/ Or II, Kierkegaard explains that actuality presents itself as a “task which wants to be fulfilled.”8 In other words, one’s personal history provides one with the conditions which direct one’s future development. The Christian, for example, understands his or her task to be the development of “the seeds which God himself has placed within,” while the Greek knows his task is to “become conscious of what is original in him.”9 Such an individual “has a definite context in which he has to fit and thus does not become a word without meaning because it is wrenched out of all its associations.”10 In the end, Kierkegaard’s assessment that irony results in a “loss of the essential self” is his strongest and most consistent critique of the romantics. This critique, however, is not the whole story. Irony also plays an important role in self-development for Kierkegaard. Another major theme I would like to call attention to is Kierkegaard’s claim that irony does indeed have a place in human life. In fact, the nihilistic lens of irony has a necessary place: but irony must be controlled with a commitment to living in the world. The isolated ironist who feels exempt from social expectations makes an important move toward locating a self precisely because so many conventional relationships exert unjustified dominion over the individual: “As certain as it is that there is much to existence which is not actuality, and that there is something in the personality which is at least momentarily incommensurable with actuality, so also it is certain that there resides a truth in irony.”11 Irony is important insofar as it clears the table of all previous misconceptions about the world. It creates a pure open space, unencumbered by human tradition. In the best case, one might say that ironic isolation creates an openness to a truth that is not simply given in culture. He apparently feels confident enough about his claim that he selects it as one of the fifteen theses which he sent to the disserta8 9 10 11

CI, p. 279 / SKS 1, 315. CI, p. 281 / SKS 1, 316. CI, p. 283 / SKS 1, 318. CI, p. 253 / SKS 1, 292. Translation modified.


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tion committee for discussion at the public defense: “Just as philosophy begins with doubt, so also a life which deserves of being called human, begins with irony.”12 And while Kierkegaard does not develop his argument for the truth of irony at length, he alludes to it in the final section of the book, “Irony as a Mastered Moment, The Truth of Irony.” There he repeats his claim: “irony as the negative is the way; it is not the truth, but the way.”13 These themes in The Concept of Irony – the isolating distance of irony and controlled irony – are the points of focus in my treatment of the Danish discussion. But it must be said that tracing the history of influence for an author, even in a small and defined context like the intellectual circles of Golden Age Denmark, is a potentially open-ended activity. One must choose a point of departure, perhaps somewhat arbitrarily. For the purposes of this study, I will begin with an 1828 journal article by playwright Johan Ludvig Heiberg14 since, to the best of my knowledge, it is the earliest Danish work on irony explicitly cited in Kierkegaard’s journals.15 In fact, Kierkegaard not only cites it, but he also diagrams its dialectical movements.16 At the same time, however, it should be noted that even though Kierkegaard reads Heiberg’s article with an eye to the question of irony, Heiberg himself is not first and foremost interested in irony but has another goal in mind, namely a critique of the poetic style of Danish poet Adam Oehlenschläger. Heiberg mentions irony only as a passing thought, and only as he provides an inventory of poetic genres. Thus with Heiberg, one does not find a straightforward discussion of irony as a practical position, but, as we will see, his understanding of irony is nonetheless helpful as a precursor to later developments of it.

12 13 14

15

16

CI, p. 6 / SKS 1, 65. Translation modified. Cf. SKS K1, 162. CI, p. 327 / SKS 1, 356. Johan Ludvig Heiberg “Svar paa Hr. Prof. Oehlenschlägers Skrift: ‘Om Kritiken i Kjøbenhavns flyvende Post, over Væringerne i Miklagard’” In Kjøbenhavns flyvende Post nos. 7-9, 10-16, 1828. Reprinted as Kjøbenhavns flyvende Post vols 1-4, ed. by Uffe Andreasen, Det danske Sprog- og Litteraturselskab, Copenhagen: Reitzels Boghandel 1981, pp. 37-76. See SKS 17, 113, BB:22-24. If one were to begin with works not mentioned by Kierkegaard, however, one could go back at least to 1812, a year before Kierkegaard’s birth, and find that a relatively young Grundtvig had already begun to criticize the early German romantics for being self-absorbed and egoistic. See Flemming Lundgreen-Nielsen’s article in this volume. See SKS 17, 113, BB:22-24.

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II. Heiberg: Poetry and Irony As the title of his article indicates – “A Reply to Professor Oehlenschläger’s Article: ‘On the Critique of The Varangians in Constantinople in Kjøbenhavns flyvende Post’” – Heiberg writes the article as a part of an on-going debate between the two poets. The issue at stake is how best to categorize Oehlenschläger’s literary genius: do his poetic intuitions capture subjective, individual experience, that is, are they “lyrical-epic”? Or do his intuitions carry an objectively identifiable, universal idea or concept, that is, are they “dramatic”? To make a long story short, Oehlenschläger suggests that his own genius can legitimately be called “dramatic,” while Heiberg argues that he lacks the genius to transcend concrete situations. Heiberg grants that Oehlenschläger can display subjective emotions and settings convincingly, but his work nonetheless never succeeds in portraying the truth in a form that triggers genuine philosophical understanding.17 Heiberg writes: The lyrical-epic poet individualizes his object as much as possible and, when possible, will express his feelings in narrative form, or tie them to actual events….When [Oehlenschläger] allows himself to make universal observations which are not grounded in something absolutely concrete, he becomes cold and trivial. I need hardly argue for this claim since even among his most ardent admirers, it is generally acknowledged that his reflective work is rarely successful.18

Perhaps it goes without saying, but according to the scheme of Heiberg’s own aesthetic categories, his assessment of Oehlenschläger is not particularly flattering. Heiberg operates with a systematic aesthetic theory which prioritizes works which contain and reveal a consciousness of the universal and ideal as opposed to the merely individual and concrete. One might say that Heiberg judges art according to a particular philosophical standard: the more a poetic work is able to express a general or universal truth, the better it is as art. This position is tied to his own unique understanding of Hegel and of course his enthusiastic application of Hegelianism to the sphere of aesthetics. As most Kierkegaard researchers know, Heiberg was one of the most provocative Hegelians in Denmark at the time,19 returning home from Germany in 1824 as a zealous convert with a mission to bring the truth to his Danish brethren. His enthusiasm was particularly evident 17 18 19

Heiberg “Svar paa Hr. Prof. Oehlenschlägers Skrift,” op. cit., p. 38. Ibid., p. 50. For a thorough discussion of Heiberg’s Hegelianism, see Stewart Kierkegaard’s Relations to Hegel Reconsidered, op. cit.


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in his discussions of art and poetry. Unlike his mentor Hegel who, with his pronouncement of the “death of art,” limited the role of art to serving as a vehicle for truth in the contemporary setting,20 Heiberg was in no doubt about the role art should play for his age. For Heiberg, good poetry could – and should – make a lazy generation aware of its destiny.21 As part of his project, he provides a classification of genres according to the degree to which this awareness is carried by the artwork; he argues that “immediate” poetry by people like Oehlenschläger is superseded by its complimentary form, tragedy, which is in turn superseded by an even higher form, comedy.22 Within this hierarchy Heiberg also finds sub-triads which move from “immediate” forms, to “reflective” forms, and then to sublated “unified” forms. In his “Reply to Oehlenschläger,” Heiberg directs most of his attention to demonstrating why Oehlenschläger’s best works remain within the sphere of subjectivity and immediacy. But after his concrete analyses, he takes the opportunity to sketch the hierarchy of poetic genres more generally, and it is in this context that irony makes its appearance. In the section that Kierkegaard would later excerpt in his journals, Heiberg argues that “the comic” – the spirit which presides over the highest poetry – appears in various forms: “Everyone who is familiar with the matters developed here will…easily perceive that [comedy] in its immediate form is playfulness, when it is reflected, it is irony, and that the unity of the two is humor.”23 Oehlenschläger’s works often create a pleasant and playful mood, says Heiberg, but this mood cannot carry an idea or concept which has universal validity. In order to say more about the world or human condition, a poet must possess the ability to step out of his own mood, to distance himself from his subjective position and perspective – this is the hallmark of irony. In an ironically governed poem, the element of “reflection” is present everywhere, he says. Irony regards the world with a critical eye, breaking the spell of immediacy. With irony, Heiberg describes a genre 20

21

22 23

See G. W. F. Hegel Aesthetics. Lectures on Fine Art vols. 1-2, tr. by T. M. Knox, Oxford: Oxford University Press 1975; vol. 1, pp. 10-11; Sämtliche Werke. Jubiläumsausgabe vols. 1-20, ed. by Hermann Glockner, Stuttgart: Friedrich Frommann Verlag 1928-41; vol. 12, pp. 31-32. (Abbreviated as Jub.) See for example Heiberg’s Indledningsforedrag til det i November 1834 begyndte logiske Cursus paa den kongelige militaire Høiskole, Copenhagen: J. H. Schubothes Boghandling 1835. Here he confidently makes his case that his generation needs a new art that can carry the “Idea.” Heiberg “Svar paa Hr. Prof. Oehlenschlägers Skrift,” op. cit., p. 61. Ibid., p. 66.

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or mood which is aware of the loss of the security found in “playfulness”: the immediate subjective perspective of playfulness, which understands itself to be the only perspective, gives way to irony’s multitude of possible perspectives. Every poetic work, writes Heiberg, makes the best impression with “a multiplicity of contradictory interests, directions, abilities, situations, etc.…”24 But irony does not merely create a distance from immediacy and offer a multiplicity of possible perspectives. For Heiberg, irony also has a gathering or controlling effect: when irony is successfully present in a work, the contradictory elements “limit each other internally.”25 Irony can organize the confusion it has brought about: “irony is precisely the consciousness of multiplicity and the proper relationship of its elements.”26 This is exactly the kind of artistic intuition the age demands, and exactly what Oehlenschläger lacks: “without irony, no one can become a dramatic poet for the current age. The presence of mind with which the poet must corral his inspiration can be almost entirely attributed to [irony]. The complete lack of irony in Oehlenschläger’s tragedies is their primary defect.”27 For Heiberg then, irony as a genre is marked by a consciousness of distance: the characters and/or narrative voice take a perspective beyond the immediate comfort of a pleasant playful comedy. Irony breaks a simple world up into confusing contrasts, and then re-organizes them again. But even if an ironic consciousness is necessary for a contemporary poet, it is not a perspective which can deliver the truth, Heiberg claims. Just as playfulness must be awakened from its slumbers, so also must irony “awaken to a greater clarity.”28 This awakening, however, has not happened for the advocates of the literary movement known as “irony,” he says. The German critics August Schlegel and Karl Wilhelm Ferdinand Solger in particular are altogether one-sided in their analyses of the virtues of the ironic consciousness. Mimicking Hegel’s critique of the German Romantics, Heiberg says that these authors make the mistake of founding an understanding of the absolute on the merely finite.29 Heiberg asserts that the romantics take their own ironic perspective – which is distanced, critical, and a source of controlled confusion – to be the final perspective. Heiberg is content to point

24 25 26 27 28 29

Ibid., p. 67. Ibid., p. 67. Ibid., p. 67. Ibid., p. 66. Ibid., p. 67. Ibid., p. 67.


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out that “the unreasonableness of [the ironic] position has been illuminated long ago,”30 perhaps alluding to Hegel’s criticisms that were already intimated in the Phenomenology of Spirit and briefly articulated in The Philosophy of Right.31 But a more developed argument for the unreasonableness of irony will reappear in connection with Heiberg’s name later when Hans Lassen Martensen takes up the issue. For now, allow me simply to name the elements of Heiberg’s irony that set the stage for the later debate and for Kierkegaard’s dissertation: 1) irony creates a distance between oneself and one’s own experience, and 2) irony is a controlling element which disciplines artistic inspiration or genius. The two basic characteristics of irony as an aesthetic category will be repeated or presupposed by the others, including philosophy professor Frederik Christian Sibbern.

III. Sibbern: Irony and the Psychology of the Artist Almost a decade before the publication of The Concept of Irony, Kierkegaard’s future dissertation director, Professor F. C. Sibbern, published a series of lectures on aesthetics that he had “held frequently both at the University and in scholarly circles.”32 In seven lectures, Sibbern outlines his view of the nature of art as well as the inner psychology involved in the creation and reception of art. For the purposes of this study, the most significant of these is the seventh (and in this volume, final) lecture33 where Sibbern examines subjectivity “with an eye to the inner conditions” for artistic creation. It is the “individual psychology” that is central, he emphasizes, not the ideal of art itself. Mirroring the categories which Heiberg used when he claimed that “presence of mind corrals inspiration,” Sibbern argues that the most important dialectical concepts for the successful crea30 31

32

33

Ibid., p. 67. See Hegel Philosophy of Right, tr. by Allen Wood, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1991, § 140, pp. 170-184 / Jub. vol. 7, § 140, pp. 204-223. Hegel Phenomenology of Spirit, tr. by A. V. Miller, Oxford: Oxford University Press 1977, pp. 211-252, pp. 364-409 / Jub. vol. 2, pp. 271-322, pp. 459-516. Frederik Christian Sibbern Om Poesie og Konst i Almindelighed, med Hensyn til alle Arter deraf, dog især Digte-, Maler-, Billedhugger-, og Skuespiller-konst; eller: Foredrag over almindelig Aesthetik og Poetik vols. 1-2, Copenhagen: Forfatterens Forlag 1834-53; vol. 1, p. iii. Sibbern published the second half of his original lecture series in a separate volume nineteen years later, in 1853.

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tion of art are “presence of mind” and “genius.” The genius of the genuine artist, which springs from an inner yet “higher” source must be brought under control by a sober mind which can position the passionate moment within a greater whole.34 In truth, Sibbern’s observations are not novel, and he is generally satisfied to review thinkers like Goethe and Schiller. But for the sake of completeness, he “cannot omit” a short review of “the irony that in recent times has been demanded of artists.”35 This sort of irony is “something more and different” than the irony one understands in an everyday sense as a witty expression. This irony is a “pure eye for the issue at hand,” a “contemplative,” observant eye. As in Heiberg, irony is said to be the ability to observe life without becoming entangled in empathetic participation, an “observant smile” which “sees the game of life dissolve into nothing.”36 The ironic glance sees that everydayness is far too often taken for granted by less reflective minds. But Sibbern is suspicious of this observant perspective. If irony alone reigns, the true objective content of the actual world vanishes and the artistic project will fail. Irony must be held in check by a warm “disposition” which recognizes the value of the world outside the subject.37 Like Heiberg, Sibbern holds that Goethe is the best example of an artist who brings both irony and personal disposition into a perfect unity.38 Sibbern, with Heiberg, calls for a dialectical balance between irony and presence of mind, and criticizes the “groundless” detached distance of pure irony. Already here, the “controlled irony” which Kierkegaard advocates in his dissertation has found a precursor. This notwithstanding, Sibbern’s contribution to the debate on irony is not so much located in his modest treatment of irony. More important is the fact that two different reviewers of the book, Pastor Eggert C. Tryde and Professor Poul Martin Møller, both single out his discussion of irony. Significantly, their concerns are more explicitly practical: irony is not just a literary genre with possible applications to existence; irony is instead said to originate in a practical existential position, a world-view that makes its way back into art. Thus, their real concern is not first and foremost the literary merits of ironic poetry but the practical life celebrated by it. 34 35 36 37 38

Sibbern Om Poesie og Konst, op. cit., vol. 1, p. 367. Ibid., p. 386. Ibid., pp. 387-388. Ibid., p. 388. Ibid., p. 388.


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IV. Tryde: Irony in Transition from Art to Life Pastor Tryde, who later became Dean at the Church of Our Lady in Copenhagen and presided over Kierkegaard’s funeral, does not treat irony extensively in his review of Sibbern’s book. Nonetheless, his analysis marks an important move in the discussion: Tryde does not just criticize irony as an aesthetic endeavor but more explicitly sees it as a rival to revealed truth. He holds that romanticism blurs the lines of aesthetic theory and practical life, that it has aspirations of making life into art and art into life. After reviewing Sibbern’s primary points, Tryde departs from the task at hand to say a bit about irony: “Since at the moment talk of irony appears so often among authors who touch upon aesthetic issues, especially in Germany,” he writes, “the reviewer will allow himself to add a more detailed explication about what they mean, since it is by no means easy to get at it straightforwardly.”39 As he sees it, the “ironic” mood which allows an author to distance himself from subjective experience is one thing, the “completely different” irony seen in “the most recent poetic productions” is another.40 For Tryde, the problem with this “different” sort of ironic poetry is that it does not aim at a portrayal of an ideal truth, or, as he puts it, irony is not interested in “emphasizing the inner ideal of an artistic object.”41 Contemporary ironic literature is not especially interested in an ideal content at all; it is instead more concerned about celebrating every imaginable aspect of the human condition, regardless of its ultimate moral or philosophical worth. Tryde objects to ironic art because it consciously resists prioritizing a higher moral or religious content. Contemporary irony assumes that an amoral rendering of life’s vicissitudes will eventually give rise to a moral “ideal.” It assumes that “every form, every gestalt, and every shape in life, the bad as well as the good, the base as well as the elevated, is a necessary condition for the appearance and existence of the ideal”; the result is a kind of art that causes injury to every “higher, infinite ideal.”42

39

40 41 42

Eggert C. Tryde “Recension af F.C. Sibbern’s Om Poesie og Konst i Almindelighed, med Hensyn til alle Arter deraf, dog især Digte-, Maler-, Billedhugger-, og Skuespillerkonst; eller: Foredrag over almindelig Aesthetik og Poetik” in Maanedskrift for Litteratur vol. 13, 1835, p. 200. Ibid., p. 200. Ibid., p. 200. Ibid., pp. 200-201.

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While it is “undeniable,” he says, that this ironic tone has universally pervaded the poetry of the age, the disconcerting thought is the fact that this unedited celebration of human experience is not limited to aesthetic fashion: “this general characteristic must have a universal ground.”43 For Tryde, this ground is the general belief that it is impossible for human beings to access a higher “ideal” at all, and in the absence of accessibility, “existence” is all that remains.44 Tryde objects to the notion that a consciousness of God is completely gone from the world and that this consciousness of radical transcendence has left philosophers and poets with no option but to celebrate a multitude of finite forms and find the divine in its shapes. In other words, the way romantic ironists deal with Kantian restrictions of the knowledge of God leads to an “indeterminate foundation in life,” which is ultimately unsatisfying for those who experience a “deeper feeling for truth.”45 Just as ironic poetry investigates all possible objects without regard to a higher binding idea, an ironic existential position is grounded in an undefined mode of life which follows no stable ideal or ethic, but knows only a fluid, continually developing ideal.46 Tryde was not alone in his observations. His concern that irony, taken as a practical guide, leads to personal dissolution finds an even clearer voice in Poul Martin Møller.

V. Poul Martin Møller: Irony as an Existential Problem As we saw with Tryde’s review, Sibbern’s formal discussion of irony is not the most interesting part of the book. Nor is it in Møller’s review. More provocative is Sibbern’s account of the “pathological phenomena” often seen in the personality of the poet. Møller praises Sibbern’s treatment and criticism of these artificial moods since, as he sees it, the individual who consciously displaces immediate emotional experience with fabricated experience effectively severs himself from his own inner life. The displacement of immediate emotion is problematic for Møller because it has psychological consequences: it brings about an inner affectation. For Møller, certain contemporary movements in art encourage the poetic transformation of feelings which can displace primitive emotional reactions. The result is an 43 44 45 46

Ibid., p. 201. Ibid., p. 201. Ibid., p. 201. Ibid., pp. 201-202.


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internal conflict in which contrived “poetic” experience severs oneself from one’s own inner life. Møller speaks critically of a one-sided inclination to be affected by poetically transfigured feelings. One can become so affected that it leads to a reluctance to give room to feelings from actual life since these grasp the mind with a less friendly authority. One can thus be tempted by the desire to live exclusively in the ethereal regions of poetry such that one acquires a disgust for actions in actuality’s coarser element.47

Møller provides more insight on this poetic flight from actual experience in an unfinished essay from 1837.48 Here he concludes that the person who has habitually adopted affected moods has incorporated a corrupt element which disrupts the personality. When one’s expressions do not conform to the actual self, he says, there is no longer a permanent core in the person’s thoughts and will, but at every moment of his life he creates a temporary personality which can be annulled in the following moment. In the end, this affected behavior leads to a total untruth in one’s personal life.49 Møller’s thoughts on the psychological consequences of an exaggerated focus on oneself mark a change in the discussion of irony. More than any other player in the Danish debate before Kierkegaard, Møller synthesizes the thoughts of his associates: the ironic distance from personal experience named by Heiberg and Sibbern is no longer an aesthetic problem alone; it is an existential problem. And it turns out that his review was just the beginning of an effort to come to terms with irony. Shortly after finishing his review of Sibbern, Møller began in earnest to work out his critique of irony in a study he entitled, “The Concept of Irony.”50 47

48 49 50

Poul Martin Møller “Recension af Sibbern’s Om Poesie og Konst i Almindelighed, med Hensyn til alle Arter deraf, dog især Digte-, Maler-, Billedhugger-, og Skuespillerkonst; eller: Foredrag over almindelig Aesthetik og Poetik” in Dansk LitteraturTidende, 1835, pp. 208-209. My translation. This review is reproduced in the second volume of Møller’s posthumous writings, Efterladte Skrifter vols. 1-3, Copenhagen: C.A. Reitzels Forlag, 1839-1843 (abbreviated ES); vol. 2, pp. 105-126. Møller “Forberedelser til en Afhandling om Affectation” in ES 3, pp. 291-313. Ibid., pp. 291-313. ES 3, pp. 152-158. This draft was published in volume three and thus Kierkegaard could not have read it prior to the publication of his own version of The Concept of Irony. In a footnote, the editors of Møller’s collected works write that they chose to include this fragment because even in its unfinished state, it was considered to be a complete piece on “moral irony.” This confirms that a debate about irony was indeed going on in Copenhagen at the time, which included, of course, Kierkegaard’s dissertation: “[the essay] deserves publication…because it makes a contribution to the history of the concept in question [irony] in our literature.”

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Interestingly, Møller’s posthumously published draft on irony offers a clue to why a discussion of romantic irony took place in Copenhagen during these particular years. The discussion of irony in Germany which Tryde alludes to is easy enough to explain. In 1835, the second edition of Schlegel’s Lucinde was published, much to the delight of a second generation of romantics referred to as “Young Germany” and “Young France.”51 Møller even suggests that in foreign lands, the ironic personality disorder has reached “epidemic proportions.”52 But the disorder was apparently also observable in Copenhagen, as a social, if not literary phenomenon. In “The Concept of Irony,” Møller confirms that the irony of the German Romantics had become a Danish phenomenon as well, even if it is not evident in Danish literature: Even with us, this aberration which was deeply grounded in the development of the time, had a weak echo, though the modesty and caution of the community have meant that few if any traces were left in our literature. But in conversation one has often heard the clear resonance of this way of viewing things, and even if it has not been articulated with full conviction and self-confidence, it has nonetheless been said to be a consequence one must accept if one allows oneself to engage in thinking that is free of prejudice.53

Møller, who was always attuned to and critical of artificial social conventions, was convinced that in Denmark, irony was first and foremost an ethical problem, not an aesthetic one. The ethical objection to irony is evident in the remainder of his essay: at the heart of romanticism lies a distanced subjectivity that views the world outside the subject as devoid of all moral and ethical authority. Making explicit use of Hegel’s critique of irony from The Philosophy of Right, Møller argues that the early romantics, most notably Friedrich Schlegel, ground their theory of literature on the subjective ethical thought of Fichte. As Møller sees it, in Fichtean idealism, “the will of the individual is identified with the moral law.”54 This autonomous will assumes that its own dictates are expressions of the highest moral principles, and consequently elevates itself above the concrete laws of the community or above all “actual content.”55 From here, Møller argues, there is a smooth transition to Schlegel’s ironic position. Schlegel has simply made the next move: he has become fully conscious of the implications of accepting a subjective moral standard. He has rec51 52 53 54 55

SKS K1, 349. ES 3, p. 156. ES 3, p. 156. ES 3, p. 154, my italics. ES 3, p. 154.


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ognized that, in practice, if objective laws are subordinated to subjective will, the subject then can consciously justify any activity whatsoever and call it moral. With this conscious awareness that the subject can construct a subjective justification for any behavior, the ironist not only concludes that the subjective will is identical with the moral law but also “places the will of the individual above the moral law.”56 He has raised himself not only above the laws of the community but above the sphere of morality entirely. The ironic way of behaving “necessarily ends in an absence of all content, in a moral nihilism.”57 At the heart of romanticism, he says, is an assumption that selfhood emerges only when the subject has extricated himself from the laws and customs of a stifling bourgeois culture and, in their stead, posited his own moods as a guide for activity in the world. The ironist takes his own subjective feelings and desires to be higher than any ethical principle. At first glance, this characterization of romanticism seems to be in keeping with his own sensitivity to the rights of the subjective, inner life. But importantly, for Møller the kind of subjectivity celebrated by the romantics is closed off not only from bourgeois culture but also from a deeper moral order through which the self is cultivated. The ironist does not want a guide for practical activity but is rather content to distance himself from an empty world and laugh at it from a position of superiority. Despite Møller’s moralistic tirade against Schlegel, he recognized that the source of the romantic problem is not merely ethical. The problem is also bound up with an understanding of the essence of art: the romantics have elevated aesthetics to the ontological ground of actuality. In another review published a year after he started the essay on irony,58 Møller articulates his critique of romantic subjectiv56 57 58

ES 3, p. 154, my italics. ES 3, p. 154. Møller “Recension af Extremerene” [by Thomasine Gyllembourg] in Maanedsskrift for Litteratur vol. 15, 1836. This review is reproduced in ES 2, pp. 126-158. Kierkegaard read the review in the Maanedsskrift in 1836 and commented upon it in his papers. See SKS 19, 99, Not3:2a. In this review Møller once again reveals that his target is not so much Schlegel, but the current generation of romantics, Young Germany and Young France, who find a primary source of inspiration in Schlegel, particularly his Lucinde. In the opening pages he argues that literary reviews have become a forum for the “coquettish wit” and “frivolous play” of “the vain and tasteless schools of Young France and Young Germany,” ES 2, pp. 128-129. While it may not be immediately obvious to today’s reader that Møller is referring to “irony” in these pages when he repeatedly speaks of wit or wordplay [Vittighed], it was certainly clear to his contemporaries. Ernst Behler, the editor of Schlegel’s collected works, notes that

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ity from an aesthetic perspective. Perhaps not surprisingly, he argues that a true aesthetic, like a true ethic, presupposes the validity of a sphere outside the individual subject. Genuine art must not tear itself away from its source, Møller writes, but must be recognized as meaningful in the social world in which it originates. If art “cuts itself loose from the interests of real life,”59 it is on its way to becoming something that has a life of its own and something which exists only for its own sake. Art is then no longer even expected to speak to the concerns of prosaic life. Even worse, Møller writes, is that recent ironic literature has consciously exaggerated the independence of art from the practical sphere: artists have begun to take each other’s work as the point of departure, and the original detachment from the actual world has thus grown exponentially. Works of art which originate in purely subjective interests become the inspiration for other artists who give expression to their private interests. When this is the case, he says, “poetry is nourished only by poetry.”60 Møller mentions Schlegel’s theory of the literary review as an example: “Schlegel made the claim somewhere that, by nature, a good review of poetry ought to be a new poem….In such a case, it will reach a state of such independence and autonomy that it could reproduce itself independently, and like the serpent which is the symbol of eternity, keep itself alive by consuming its own tail.”61 Møller’s aesthetic theory does not respect the possibility of art existing for its own sake. When the dialectical relationship of art and actuality becomes one-sidedly subjective and the artist’s own genius is the only guide for production, the resulting artworks are inevitably hollow. They lack an objective or common spiritual element that could give them life. More troubling for Møller than the divorce of art and actuality, though, is their reunification. When ironic poetry is consciously lifted out of its original literary context and given the power to define relationships in the actual world, “spiritual life, religiosity, and everyday 58

59 60 61

Schlegel uses the term Witz and Ironie interchangeably when he describes his own literary project. In fact, in Lucinde Schlegel uses “wit” almost exclusively when he describes his literary method. See Behler Studien zur Romantik und zur idealistischen Philosophie, Paderborn: Schöningh 1988, p. 24. Cited in Sanne Elise Grunnet Ironi og Subjectivitet, En Studie over Søren Kierkegaards Disputats Om Begrebet Ironi, Copenhagen: C.A. Reitzels Forlag 1987, p. 57. ES 2, p. 138. ES 2, p. 138 ES 2, p. 132.


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life” are completely hollowed out.62 This distance or isolation implies a subtle kind of hubris for Møller. Because the ironic poet is conscious of the fact that his text is not just literary play, but has become a tool for defining truth in the practical sphere, he implicitly attributes to himself a divine authority to determine what is good and bad, valuable and meaningless. As Møller sees it, the ironic author has become, like God, the creator of everything outside himself. It is perfectly consistent, Møller writes, “that F. Schlegel in his Lucinde – a book which has often been referred to as the Gospel of Irony – lets his leading character…utter the phrase: ‘he has no God who is not himself his own God.’ When an artist has brought things to such a complete irony that everything outside himself and his art, or his art and himself, are of total insignificance, his art has certainly come to an end.”63 The ironic poet is like the thinker Møller describes elsewhere who “closes himself off [indeslutter sig] in monadic self-satisfaction,” like a “perfectly restored Adam.”64 From the perspective of the ironist, says Møller, there can be nothing of significance outside “himself and his own art.” The ironist thus stands isolated on two fronts. He has replaced genuine feeling with contrived emotion on the one side, and he has replaced the actual world of human relationships with his own personal value system. With Møller’s critique of irony as a hindrance to becoming a self, the stage is set for Kierkegaard’s treatment of the same. And with Heiberg and Sibbern’s discussion of the dialectic between irony and disposition, the basic outline for Kierkegaard’s famously puzzling concluding chapter on mastered irony is in place. But one other figure ought to be named, Hans Lassen Martensen, whose review of Heiberg’s Nye Digte is cited in the cryptic concluding paragraph of The Concept of Irony.65 62 63 64

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ES 2, pp. 138-139. ES 2, pp. 139-140. Møller “Tanker over Mueligheden af Beviser for Menneskets Udødelighed, med Hensyn til den nyeste derhen hørende Literatur” in Maanedsskrift for Litteratur vol. 17, 1837. This review is reproduced in ES 2, pp. 158-272. See ES 2, p. 206. Kierkegaard also read this essay in the Maanedsskrift and refers to it in his early journals. See SKS 17, 134, BB:41. Many Kierkegaard researchers are aware of Martensen’s negative influence on Kierkegaard. Martensen is often named in Kierkegaard’s openly critical pamphlets against the Danish state church which he published during the last year of his life, and in many cases, Martensen is also the unnamed but primary target for Kierkegaard’s anti-Hegelian rhetoric in the pseudonymous works. See Stewart Kierkegaard’s Relations to Hegel Reconsidered, op. cit.

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VI. Martensen: Irony and Humor It will come as no surprise to those familiar with the Danish Golden Age that Martensen’s most important thoughts on irony are found in flattering reviews of Heiberg’s dramatic works, his so-called “speculative comedies.”66 Upon his return from a period of study among German Hegelians in 1836, Martensen was quick to recommend Heiberg’s project. Perhaps even more than Heiberg himself, Martensen saw the practical implications of theater and poetry. In a review of Heiberg’s box-office failure Fata Morgana from 1838, for example, Martensen writes a defense of the philosophically driven drama, arguing that it is time to stop the “decay in the arts” and time to change the passive philistine mentality in Danish educated circles. Part of the “solution for an age in crisis,” he says, is an art-form that can reveal the “poetic Ideal for the age,” thereby prodding people out of a contentment with their historically inherited world.67 He writes: Speculative poetry can be defined as central poetry – in contrast peripheral poetry which holds us enclosed in particular circles in life where it is as if the light of the idea only shines through the cracks, while speculative poetry, light and ethereal by nature, breaks down every barrier which robs us of a view of the infinite….Speculative poetry…takes the form of a harmonious illuminating light which transfigures life’s darkness.68

As opposed to a “peripheral” poetry that merely celebrates particularity – of which Oehlenschläger’s poetry might be an example – Martensen here suggests that Heiberg’s speculative comedy represents a “transfiguration of life’s darkness,” and that poetry itself plays an important role in the actual world. Even more explicitly than Heiberg, Martensen argues for a real effect of art on practice, and in this sense, can be placed alongside Tryde and Møller as a thinker who is oriented toward the practical function of art. But Martensen is also more explicit about how comedic art can house an illuminating Ideal. Consistent with the system Heiberg outlines, Martensen holds that comedy is a higher genre than tragedy and, in Martensen’s case, this is because comedy does not become bogged down in the conflict

66 67

68

See George Pattison’s essay in this volume. Hans Lassen Martensen’s review of “Fata Morgana, Eventyr-Comedie af Johan Ludvig Heiberg” in Maanedsskrift for Litteratur vol. 19, Copenhagen 1838, p. 361. Ibid., p. 367.


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between concrete good and evil, as does tragedy.69 A transfiguration of life can be activated by comedy because it allows the spectator to see the “vanity” of the world in its entirety rather than focusing narrowly on a particular moral conflict. And for Martensen, recognizing the vanity of the world is a condition for recognizing its redemption.70 This final redeeming world-view facilitated by comedy, can be broken down into two movements however: irony and humor. Using a definition Kierkegaard will later pick up on, Martensen writes that comedy is founded on a contrast between essence and phenomenon, a contrast which places the subject against the world he or she inhabits. Similar to Møller’s argument, Martensen holds that in comedy’s first movement, irony, the subjective distance from the world leads to the conviction that the truth is not located in the world but within the subject. The ironic world-view is essentially negative: the finite world is viewed as hollow. In and of itself, Martensen writes, this is an important insight since it rids the philistine consciousness of its complacency and trust in bourgeois everydayness.71 But there is also a danger in the ironic perspective: since the subject takes his or her own subjective nihilism to be the absolute truth of the world, it takes a position of mocking superiority to practical endeavors. Echoing Møller, he writes that this kind of comic consciousness, irony, is “in danger of becoming immoral, frivolous, and of developing into absolute irony which recognizes no God other than itself….But when this happens, the comic consciousness has annulled itself and has become unpoetic.”72 The ironic consciousness must be transformed if it is to reflect truth; it must be united in a higher unity with the very finite world it has made hollow, and the locus of truth must be extended from the subject alone into the actual world in which it had its original home. Here we see the world-view of humor for the first time. Martensen recommends Heiberg’s Fata Morgana as the realization of this higher position: an elevated humor which can bring the finite back into a relationship with the infinite.73 Martensen continues his elaboration of irony and humor three years later in another review of Heiberg, this time of Heiberg’s Nye 69

70 71 72 73

Unlike Heiberg, whose “Reply to Oehlenschläger” of 1828 was written before Hegel’s Lectures on Aesthetics were published in 1832, Martensen was able to consult Hegel, who is likely his proximal source. Martensen “Fata Morgana,” op. cit., p. 378. Ibid., pp. 378-379. Ibid., p. 380. Ibid., p. 381.

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Digte. Here Martensen articulates in more detail the transition from irony to humor. The key factor for moving from an ironic world-view to a humorous one is the recognition that it is not just the world that is empty and hollow, but it is also the subject him- or herself; the subject is a part of the hollowness. This leads to the humorous position which can laugh at itself as it laughs at the conventional world: The dialectic between comedy and tragedy will come peacefully together in humor – not just negative comedy but positive comedy – in a speculative comedy which relates to irony just as depth of mind relates to sharpness of mind. Humor, which belongs exclusively to Christianity, contains all irony, the poetic justification over the fallen world, but also the fullness of love and reconciliation….It loves this world despite its frailty, its evil, and its depravity, and just as it allows the whole of finitude to perish, and sublates the difference between great and small, so also it rescues and restores the whole of finitude, the least [together] with the greatest.74

When negative comedy, or irony, gives way to a positive comedy, or humor, the individual is in a position to recognize that the “hollow” world has been saved, and that he or she is “reconciled” to it at the same time. The “transfiguration” is made complete in Christian humor. In many ways, Martensen’s discussion of irony is a clarification of the aesthetic theories set up by Heiberg and Sibbern. He takes Sibbern’s description of irony as an ability of an author to gain distance from the world, and extends it to describe an ironic world-view in general. Martensen likewise gives a nuanced interpretation of Heiberg’s categories of irony and humor, and in his zeal to advocate an “ideal” for a new age, views the concrete implications of irony. This attentiveness to practice brings him into dialogue with Tryde and Møller as well. But a comprehensive synthesis and critical analysis of these interrelated positions arrives for the first time with Kierkegaard.

VII. Kierkegaard’s Synthesis and Contributions One of Kierkegaard’s fundamental aims in The Concept of Irony is to bring conceptual clarity to “irony” by uniting its popular connotations with academic and philosophical ones. Kierkegaard is the first to admit this is not a simple task. Though the term “irony” enjoys wide currency, he notes, it is used ambiguously. Echoing Tryde’s observation that it “is by no means easy” to get a straightforward definition of 74

Martensen’s review of “Nye Digte af J.L. Heiberg” in Fædrelandet nos. 398-400, January 10-12, 1841, column 3212.


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irony, Kierkegaard writes: “we find it mentioned again and again, suggested again and again, presupposed again and again. However, if we are looking for a clear exposition, we look in vain.”75 Kierkegaard’s interest in providing a clear exposition of irony takes him in several different directions. In the first part of The Concept of Irony, Kierkegaard neatly combines philological research with worldhistorical philosophy to demonstrate that Socrates is best interpreted as a nihilistic ironist. The much smaller second part has a more varied agenda: here Kierkegaard defines the concept “irony” for the first time, reviews a handful of German ironic authors, and briefly outlines a world-view which assigns an existentially critical role to a mastered form of irony. Nonetheless, the entire dissertation, in all its diversity, is still united under one theme, namely, irony as a nihilistic world-view. One of Kierkegaard’s first tasks then in “Part Two” of The Concept of Irony is to define irony as a concept. For the sake of thoroughness, he begins the process of definition with the most familiar conception of irony, irony as a figure of speech, and already here he uses a notion which had appeared in Martensen’s discussion, namely that irony arises when the essence and phenomenon are in opposition: “In oratorical lectures,” writes Kierkegaard, “a figure of speech frequently appears which bears the name ‘irony,’ and is characterized like this: one says the opposite of what one means. Already here we have a characteristic which is found in all irony, namely that the phenomenon is not the essence but the opposite of the essence.”76 But Kierkegaard quickly moves beyond irony as a figure of speech to irony as a position. He still retains the idea that the hidden essence is not the same as the objective phenomenon, but he describes the essence in terms of a subject vis-à-vis his or her social environment. Perhaps not surprisingly, he makes use of a description that would have been familiar to his reading audience, namely that, “according to its concept, irony is isolation.”77 The ironic individual recognizes that his or her inner world or essence is not in harmony with the surrounding actual world. The more isolation from the actual world, the closer one comes to the kind of existential irony Kierkegaard focuses on, irony as a practical position. When the ironic individual feels emancipated from the notion of truth being facilitated in the actual world, one has reached irony in its eminent sense: 75 76 77

CI, p. 243 / SKS 1, 282-283. CI, p. 247 / SKS 1, 286. Translation modified. CI, p. 249 / SKS 1, 288. Translation modified.

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Irony sensu eminentiori is not aimed at one part of existence or another, but is aimed at the entire actuality of a given time and under given circumstances. It has, therefore, an apriority in itself; it does not achieve its totalizing view by successively destroying one part of actuality after the next, but it is by virtue of its totalizing view that it destroys individual parts. It is not one phenomenon or another which is observed sub specie ironiae, but it is the totality of existence.78

In this kind of pure ironic consciousness, a distanced alienation from a social order is the hallmark. The arbitrariness and strangeness of immediate life which often only comes to conscious awareness for brief moments begins to become one’s sole guiding thought. With a definition of irony in hand, Kierkegaard turns to an analysis of the romantic ironic mind. It should be noted that, like most of the participants in the Danish debate, Kierkegaard is not categorically opposed to the counter-cultural intuitions of romanticism. In fact, he is inclined to look favorably upon romanticism’s recognition of the emptiness of conventional life, and he can appreciate the playfully ironic attacks on its foundations. Along with Martensen and Heiberg, Kierkegaard underscores the importance of overcoming the immediacy of bourgeois life.79 In his concluding section of the book, “Irony as a Mastered Moment, the Truth of Irony,” for example, Kierkegaard reiterates his assertion that the critical eye of irony plays an important role in the development of the self, claiming that “no genuinely human life is possible without irony.”80 He begins his argument by repeating Sibbern’s argument: irony is said to be a “condition for every artistic work.”81 Poets like Shakespeare, Goethe, and none other than “Professor Heiberg” manage to relate ironically to what they write in order to let an objective truth shine forth;82 they have controlled irony insofar as their own “inner-development” ties them to actuality.83 “A poet lives poetically,” Kierkegaard writes, “when he himself is oriented toward and integrated in the age in which he lives, is positively free in the actuality to which he belongs.”84 In other words, when the distancing eye of irony is brought into a dialectic with a concern for one’s own life or, as Sib-

78 79 80 81 82 83 84

CI, p. 254 / SKS 1 292. CI, p. 253 / SKS 1, 292. Translation modified. CI, p. 326 / SKS 1, 355. CI, p. 324 / SKS 1, 353. CI, pp. 324-325 / SKS 1, 352-354. CI, pp. 324-325 / SKS 1, 352-353. CI, p. 326 / SKS 1, 354.


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bern puts it, when irony is balanced with disposition,85 one has the formula for living authentically. Like Martensen, Møller and Tryde, however, Kierkegaard also holds that the nihilistic world-view of the ironist is fraught with problems if he or she takes it to be the final truth. The ironist’s recognition that the conventional outer world is empty does not necessarily mean that his or her subjective whims are a legitimate source of content. The ironic view must be examined with an even more critical eye which recognizes that subjectivity alone is just as flawed as the objective conventional world. Thus Kierkegaard’s overriding complaint with the romantic project is its assumption that the individual has the resources to autonomously and self-consciously create an authentic self. On Kierkegaard’s view, the romantic ironist presupposes a freedom to fashion a self based on his or her contrived desires and wishes, ignoring both the finite limitations bound up with natural inclination and the limitations which arise through ethical and moral responsibility. Reminiscent of Møller, Kierkegaard argues that the romantic ironist lacks two conditions needed for selfhood: 1) an authentic inner life, and 2) the world of human relationships. Let me begin with a brief look at the problem of authenticity. One of the problems with the romanticist’s attempt to create the self, says Kierkegaard, is that he loses touch with “that which is original in him, his an sich.”86 The conditions for the possibility of becoming a self are dismissed along with convention. Kierkegaard argues that as the ironist decides which self he wants be, the “original” essential self dissipates into “nothing” and is replaced by artificial “moods.”87 Unlike the serious person who allows mood to intensify a deeper “life which otherwise stirs and moves within a person,”88 the ironist lets superficial moods govern his practical activity. Echoing

85

86 87 88

When Kierkegaard repeats the idea of that “ironic distance is a condition for every artistic work,” he refers to Solger’s Lectures on Aesthetics, and Solger is likely Kierkegaard’s proximate source for the discussion on controlled irony. At the same time, there can be little doubt that Kierkegaard was attentive to Sibbern’s discussion of a controlled irony as well. Kierkegaard alludes to his Doktorvater’s treatment of irony when he writes elsewhere in The Concept of Irony: “To the extent that the subject is world historically-justified, there is a unity of genius [det geniale] and presence of mind [Besindighed]” CI, p. 264 / SKS 1, 301-302. See also Tjønneland Ironie som Symptom, op. cit., pp. 100-102. CI, p. 281 / SKS 1, 317. CI, p. 284 / SKS 1, 319. CI, p. 284 / SKS 1, 319.

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Møller’s thoughts on the importance of personal consistency, he says that the continuity which binds a healthy personality together over time gives way to arbitrariness: “As the ironist poetically fashions himself and his environment with the greatest possible poetic license, as he lives in this totally hypothetical and subjunctive way, his life loses all continuity. He succumbs completely to mood. His life is nothing but moods.”89 Underscoring that moods cannot be a source of the genuine self, Kierkegaard suggests that they are constructed artificially, under the conscious control of the subject. He writes that the ironist, poeticizes everything, poeticizes his moods too. In order genuinely to be free, he must have control of his moods; therefore one mood must instantly be succeeded by another. If it so happens that his moods succeed one another so nonsensically that even he notices that things are not quite right, he poeticizes. He poeticizes that it is he himself who evokes the mood; he poeticizes until he becomes so intellectually paralyzed that he stops poeticizing….He hides his sorrow in the superior incognito of jesting; his happiness is muffled by wailing.90

Kierkegaard’s argument looks something like Møller’s: the ironic world-view results in a series of unrelated moods which remain internally unconnected. The inner continuity which binds a self together is lacking. Furthermore, constructed moods stifle what is original in a person and cut the individual off from the conditions which could contribute to the authentic self. For Kierkegaard, this loss of the inner life is bound up with his second critique, namely the loss of genuine relationships in the outer world. Like Møller, Kierkegaard argues that the ironist breaks with ethical customs so thoroughly that he loses all sense of personal obligation to actual life-relationships. It is not only conventional values which are viewed as hollow but any practical principle which governs intersubjective activity. In the passage cited above, Kierkegaard incorporates Møller’s observation that the ironist closes himself [indeslutter sig] in self-satisfaction, like a “perfectly restored Adam”: The ironist stands proudly closed into himself, and he lets people pass by, just as Adam let the animals pass by, and finds no fellowship for himself. In doing so, he continually collides with the actuality to which he belongs. It thus becomes important for him to suspend what is constitutive in actuality, that which orders and supports it: that is, morality and ethics [Sædelighed].91

89 90 91

CI, p. 284 / SKS 1, 319. CI, pp. 284-285 / SKS 1, 320. Translation slightly modified. CI, p. 283 / SKS 1, 318. Translation slightly modified.


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For Kierkegaard, the ironist’s distance from conventional life is damning; “he finds no fellowship.” But the ironist’s isolation is made even more sure in a related move. As he suspends the ethical for the sake of his own freedom, he establishes a fictional actuality grounded only in subjective arbitrariness. “His environment must be formed to fit him – in other words, he poetically fashions not only himself, but he poetically fashions his environment also.”92 In a move reminiscent of Møller and Martensen, Kierkegaard describes this practical self-sufficiency as a kind of self-divination. As the ironist replaces binding ethical activity with subjective arbitrariness, the ironist appropriates divine powers of creation. He writes that the ironist assumes the authority to “posit and annul” any value and, alluding to Jesus’ words to Peter, assumes “the power to bind and to unbind.”93 Like his teacher, Kierkegaard holds that the romantic position ends in the illusion that the ironist is his own creator. Much of what I have outlined of Kierkegaard’s critique of romantic irony has antecedents in the Danish discussion. Like his associates, Kierkegaard holds that an unchecked nihilistic irony ends with the loss of the self. And while Kierkegaard’s discussion of controlled irony shows that he agrees that irony must be balanced with one’s own personal concerns in the actual world, he also goes beyond them and contributes something unique. In a move which combines Møller’s critique of the autonomy of art with Martensen’s discussion of a religious “transfiguration” of the world, Kierkegaard insists a religious commitment is the only way the finite world can be brought back into relationship with the individual who can see the world through ironic lenses. The isolation of the ironist can only be overcome by recognizing the truth that receives its authority beyond subjective moods and selfimposed values. It is a position of dependence that is highlighted. Kierkegaard reveals his hand in his closing arguments against Schlegel. Though the romantic subject thinks he has discovered the self via a self-conscious construction, Kierkegaard suggests that instead he is “continually outside” himself in “something other.” “Even if he enjoys the whole world, the person who enjoys poetically nevertheless lacks one enjoyment, for he does not enjoy himself.”94 Kierkegaard then underscores that a poetic construction of life cannot bring about a reconciliation with actuality. Interestingly he uses language very similar to 92 93 94

CI, p. 283 / SKS 1, 318. Matt. 16.19, 18.18; SKS K1, 342. See also CI, p. 277 / SKS 1, 312. CI, p. 297 / SKS 1, 331.

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Martensen’s – but with an important twist. As cited above, Martensen claims that Heiberg’s “speculative poetry…takes the form of a harmonious illuminating light which transfigures life’s darkness.”95 In the same vein, Kierkegaard writes: “If we ask what poetry is, we may say in general that it is victory over the world; it is through a negation of the imperfect actuality that poetry opens up to a higher actuality, expands and transfigures the imperfect into the perfect, and thereby assuages the deep pain that wants to make everything dark.”96 Martensen’s assertion that poetry illuminates life’s darkness looks to be corroborated. But Kierkegaard adds a crucial amendment to his thought: “poetry is a kind of reconciliation, but it is not the true reconciliation for it does not reconcile me with the actuality in which I am living; no transubstantiation of the given actuality takes place by virtue of this reconciliation…only the religious is able to bring about the true reconciliation because it infinitizes actuality for me.”97 According to Kierkegaard, poetry will not bring about any genuine reconciliation. In context, he is speaking of romantic poetry, particularly Schlegel’s. But maybe Kierkegaard’s use of the language of reconciliation and transubstantiation is not coincidental and at least one of his readers, Martensen, would have recognized that speculative poetry was being drawn into the same category as ironic poetry. At any rate, Kierkegaard does not make a distinction between two poetic genres, irony and Christian humor, as does Martensen; he makes a distinction between living the life of a romantic poet and living a religious life. And this distinction is the most important of all. Like Møller, Kierkegaard’s ultimate critique of the romantic project is the idea that poetic genius replaces God as the source of divine revelation, and the poet becomes his or her own creator, “closed off” from anything outside his or her subjective will. The religious consciousness is characterized as just the opposite: it is openness. He writes elsewhere in “Part Two” that the disciplined elimination of the particular will sets religion apart from irony. While the ironic mind is content to remain closed off from the divine and celebrate its own nihilistic insights, the religious mind, sets aside “all disturbing factors…and the eternally existing order comes into view…the divine will not be thrust back by its opposition but will pour itself into the mind opened by devotion.”98 95 96 97 98

Martensen “Fata Morgana,” op. cit., p. 367. CI, p. 297 / SKS 1, 330. CI, p. 297 / SKS 1, 330-331. Translation slightly modified. CI, pp. 257-258 / SKS 1, 296.


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Here, I believe, the comparison with Kierkegaard’s contemporaries becomes most helpful because this is where Kierkegaard’s own unique position becomes most clear. Kierkegaard argues that an existential “openness” to the divine is ultimately the answer to the problem of romantic nihilism. Kierkegaard can synthesize what his contemporaries have to say about irony with very little remainder. He incorporates Heiberg and Sibbern’s conception of the distanced artist; he can incorporate Tryde and Møller’s arguments about the existential dangers of living in isolated self-sufficiency. And he can use much of Martensen’s discussion about irony and a reconciliation with actuality. But Kierkegaard’s suggestion that the nihilistic break between subject and world can only be reconciled through personal religious openness is a unique approach to the problem, an approach he continued to investigate throughout his authorship.

Kierkegaard and Hegelianism in Golden Age Denmark By Jon Stewart Works on the history of philosophy often tend to paint in broad strokes. Tidy, yet distorting categories are used to characterize long periods in the history of ideas. One such category which is frequently applied to much of nineteenth century European philosophy is “Hegelianism.” There is a tendency to regard the so-called Hegelians as second-rate minds, the idea being that these thinkers simply popularized and promulgated Hegel’s thought without adding anything new or original of their own. This, however, misunderstands the nature of the Hegelian schools, which were constantly developing on the basis of new interpretations of Hegel’s thought as well as changing social and political circumstances. Thus, the Hegelian schools cannot be seen as simply a banal repetition of Hegel’s own ideas. Instead, the Hegelians in both Germany and Denmark were highly original thinkers in their own right who responded to the most important intellectual and socio-political challenges of their day. Moreover, they applied the basic principles of Hegel’s philosophy to new problems, issues and fields, often in quite original ways with novel results. Hegel’s philosophy reached Denmark in the mid-1820’s and found there a full spectrum of commentators from zealous advocates to bitter critics. The goal of this article is to sketch briefly (1) the main personalities involved in the reception of Hegel’s philosophy in Denmark and (2) their biographical relation to Kierkegaard. Although the thinkers to be examined here can be designated as “Danish Hegelians,” one must avoid regarding them as a homogeneous group since this expression is a rough and ready category by means of which a handful of thinkers with a certain family resemblance can be classified. However, one must bear in mind that each of them interpreted and reacted to Hegel in his own way based on his own education, intellectual interests and goals. Thus, it would be a mistake to

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assume that the figures that made up the movement of Danish Hegelianism all thought alike or that they made up a sort of political party or social club with some measure of solidarity. On the contrary, there was a great deal of internal strife among the Danish Hegelians about the proper interpretation and use of Hegel. Like their German counterparts, the Danish Hegelians can best be characterized not by their unanimous agreement on some specific issue but by the internal disagreement about various aspects of Hegel’s thought. When discussing these thinkers, one must thus resist the urge to regard them as uncritical parrots of Hegel (despite the fact that they are often portrayed as such).

I. The Proponents of Hegel in Golden Age Denmark Probably the leading exponent of Hegelianism in Denmark was the philosopher, poet, literary critic, and dramatist Johan Ludvig Heiberg (1791-1860).1 Heiberg was a many-sided genius who played an extremely important role in Danish intellectual history during the Golden Age. He came from a family of intellectuals and from an early age knew personalities, such as the poet Adam Oehlenschläger (17791850) and the physicist Hans Christian Ørsted (1777-1851). He graduated from the University of Copenhagen in 1817 with a degree in Spanish literature.2 From 1819-22 he lived in Paris, studying French drama. Later he went to Schleswig-Holstein, then a dukedom belonging to the Danish crown, where he taught at the University of Kiel from 1822-24. There for the first time he came into contact with Hegel’s thought through the Professor of Philosophy, Johan Erik von Berger (1772-1833).3 After having read some of Hegel’s works him1

2

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For more detailed accounts of Heiberg’s life and work see the following: Henning Fenger The Heibergs, tr. by Frederick J. Marker, New York: Twayne Publishers Inc. 1971. Harald Høffding “Heiberg og Martensen” in his Danske Filosofer, Copenhagen: Gyldendalske Boghandel, Nordisk Forlag 1909, pp. 129-137. Johanne Luise Heiberg Et liv genoplevet i erindringen vols. 1-4, 5th revised edition, Copenhagen: Gyldendal 1973. Morten Borup Johan Ludvig Heiberg vols. 1-3, Copenhagen: Gyldendal 1947-49. Paul V. Rubow Heiberg og hans skole i kritiken, Copenhagen: Gyldendal 1953. Johan Ludvig Heiberg De poëseos dramaticæ genere hispanico, præsertim de Petro Calderone de la Barca, principe dramaticorum, Copenhagen 1817. (Reprinted in Heiberg’s Prosaiske Skrifter vols. 1-11, Copenhagen 1861-62; vol. 11, pp. 1-172.) See Johan Ludvig Heiberg “Autobiographiske Fragmenter” in Prosaiske Skrifter, op. cit., vol. 11, pp. 498ff.

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self, Heiberg became so taken by them that he made a journey to Berlin in 1824 in order to meet the philosopher personally. There he attended Hegel’s lectures and met with some of the leading intellectual figures in Berlin. Inspired by Hegel, Heiberg wrote in his native Danish a treatise entitled, On Human Freedom, which he published in the same year.4 This treatise, which Heiberg claimed to be the first work in Danish on Hegel’s philosophy,5 attempted to employ a Hegelian methodology in order to treat the free will controversy, then reigning in Copenhagen, surrounding the claims of the Professor of Medicine, Frantz Howitz (1789-1826).6 Heiberg, by quoting and referring frequently to Hegel’s main works, effectively introduced him into Danish philosophy. This initial work was followed quickly by another short monograph, this time written in German, entitled, Der Zufall, aus dem Gesichtspunkte der Logik betrachtet.7 This work treated concepts such as necessity, probability, and contingency from a Hegelian perspective. It was taken as another declaration of Heiberg’s affiliation with Hegel’s philosophy.8 During this same period from 1824-25 Heiberg worked on a book in German entitled, Grundlinien zum System der Ästhetik als spekulativer Wissenschaft,9 where he attempts to work out a theory of aesthetics based on Hegel’s speculative system. Regrettably, he never published this work since he was unable to bring it to a satisfactory completion. It is interesting to note that the composition of this study antedated the publication of Hegel’s posthumous Lectures on Aesthet4

5

6

7

8

9

Johan Ludvig Heiberg Om den menneskelige Frihed. I Anledning af de nyeste Stridigheder over denne Gjenstand, Kiel 1824. (Reprinted in Heiberg’s Prosaiske Skrifter, op. cit., vol. 1, pp. 1-110.) Johan Ludvig Heiberg “Fortale” to Prosaiske Skrifter vols. 1-3, Copenhagen 1841-43; vol. 1, p. xiv. (Reprinted in Heiberg’s Prosaiske Skrifter vols. 1-11, Copenhagen 186162; vol. 10, p. 590.) See Oluf Thomsen F.G. Howitz og hans Strid om Villiens Frihed, Copenhagen: Levin og Munksgaard 1924. Johan Ludvig Heiberg Der Zufall, aus dem Gesichtspunkte der Logik betrachtet. Als Einleitung zu einer Theorie des Zufalls, Copenhagen 1825. (Reprinted in Heiberg’s Prosaiske Skrifter, op. cit., vol. 11, pp. 325-359.) Anonymous [Frederik Christian Sibbern] “Der Zufall, aus dem Gesichtspunkte der Logik betrachtet. Als Einleitung zu einer Theorie des Zufalls. Von Dr. J.L. Heiberg. Kopenhagen. Verlag von C.A. Reitzel. Druck von H.F. Popp. 1825. 30 Sider med Titelblad og alt” in Dansk Litteratur-Tidende for 1825 no. 44, p. 691. See “Heiberg an Hegel,” February 20, 1825 in Breve og Aktstykker vedrørende Johan Ludvig Heiberg vols. 1-5, ed. by Morten Borup, Copenhagen: Gyldendal 1947-50; vol. 1, pp. 162-163. See Morten Borup Johan Ludvig Heiberg, op. cit., vol. 1, p. 139.


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ics, which appeared from 1835-38.10 In preparing his manuscript, Heiberg made use of lecture notes taken by friends who were present at Hegel’s courses.11 By writing in German Heiberg hoped (in vain, as it turned out) to obtain an academic position at a German or Prussian university. He returned to Copenhagen in 1825 and authored a series of theatrical works for the Royal Theater, where he obtained a permanent post in December of 1828. This allowed him the luxury of returning to philosophy and to Hegel. In 1830 Heiberg was appointed as Lecturer in Logic, Aesthetics and Danish Literature at the newly founded Royal Military Academy,12 the closest he ever came to a university position in philosophy. In 1832 he published as a textbook for his students there his Outline of the Philosophy of Philosophy or Speculative Logic.13 This work is largely a paraphrase of Hegel’s Science of Logic. It employs Hegel’s dialectical methodology and in large part follows the structure of Hegel’s text. It was the first major work on Hegel’s logic in the Danish language and was the forerunner of a whole series of books by Danish scholars on the same subject that would appear over the next several years. Heiberg’s most important attempt to introduce Hegelianism in Denmark appeared in 1833 in the form of a short treatise under the title, On the Significance of Philosophy for the Present Age.14 This work appeared as a pamphlet and was an invitation to a series of philosophical lectures which were to be based on Hegel’s philosophy. The work caused a great controversy, above all for its statements about 10

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The three volumes of Hegel’s aesthetics appeared for the first time as a part of the first edition of Hegel’s collected writings, which was published between 1832 and 1845 by Hegel’s friends and students. Vorlesungen über Aesthetik vols. 1-3, ed. by Heinrich Gustav Hotho, Berlin 1835-38; vols. 10-1, 10-2, 10-3 in Hegel’s Werke. Vollständige Ausgabe vols. 1-18, Berlin 1832-45. See “Heiberg an Hegel,” February 20, 1825 in Breve og Aktstykker vedrørende Johan Ludvig Heiberg, op. cit., vol. 1, pp. 162-163. See Flemming Conrad Smagen og det nationale. Studier i dansk litteraturhistorieskrivning 1800-1861, Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanums Forlag 1996, pp. 150-179. Morten Borup Johan Ludvig Heiberg, op. cit., vol. 2, pp. 14-17. Johan Ludvig Heiberg Grundtræk til Philosophiens Philosophie eller den speculative Logik. Som Ledetraad ved Forelæsninger paa den kongelige militaire Høiskole, Copenhagen 1832. (Reprinted as Ledetraad ved Forlæsninger over Philosophiens Philosophie eller den speculative Logik ved den kongelige militaire Høiskole in Heiberg’s Prosaiske Skrifter, op. cit., vol. 1, pp. 111-380.) Johan Ludvig Heiberg Om Philosophiens Betydning for den nuværende Tid, Copenhagen 1833. (Reprinted in Heiberg’s Prosaiske Skrifter, op. cit., vol. 1, pp. 381-460.)

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religion. Heiberg analyzes what he perceives as the crisis of his age. He claims that religion and art have lost their once central importance in contemporary life and have been replaced by relativism and nihilism. He thus sees his age as in a period of crisis which is in the process of forming itself towards a new world-view. For Heiberg, Hegel’s philosophy alone can provide the framework with which the contemporary chaos of thought can be overcome. Only it offers a viable and stable truth in the face of the waves of relativism, alienation and nihilism. Only it can unite the various spheres of human life and activity and bring them into a unitary whole by seeing what is necessary in all of them. Like Hegel, Heiberg relegates religion to a secondary role behind philosophy, claiming that while religion grasps the truth of the world only in terms of concrete particulars, thus mistakenly taking the particular for the universal, philosophy grasps the universal or the essential as it is in itself. No doubt due to its controversial nature, this work had a popular appeal and introduced Hegel to a general public beyond trained academics.15 In 1835 Heiberg published his Introductory Lecture to the Logic Course at the Royal Military College,16 which was more ambitious than his previous work on logic, although it is considerably shorter. Here Heiberg makes a general case for the truth of idealism, claiming that universal categories of thought underlie all transitory experience. He tries to demonstrate that all human experience ultimately must refer back to thought. Given that thought is the basis of all experience, logic, as the discipline that examines the forms of thought, must be foremost among the sciences. In this work Heiberg picks up on some of the main motifs from On the Significance of Philosophy for the Present Age. He claims that only the abstract categorial structure of thought, can provide the stability which is lacking in the chaotic present age. In 1837 Heiberg published the first number of a journal under his direction called Perseus, Journal for den speculative Idee. This review, to which Kierkegaard had a subscription, was conceived by Heiberg as a forum for Hegelian philosophy in Denmark. There is evidence that Kierkegaard originally planned to publish in this journal his bookreview of the novel by Hans Christian Andersen (1805-75), Only a Fid15 16

Henning Fenger The Heibergs, op. cit., pp. 132-134. Johan Ludvig Heiberg Indlednings-Foredrag til det i November 1834 begyndte logiske Cursus paa den kongelige militaire Høiskole, Copenhagen 1835. (Reprinted in Heiberg’s Prosaiske Skrifter, op. cit., vol. 1, pp. 461-516.)


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dler;17 the review was eventually published as an independent monograph under the title From the Papers of One Still Living. Although Heiberg’s journal saw only two numbers, it was profoundly influential and occasioned much controversy. In the second number of Perseus, which appeared in August of 1838, Heiberg published an article entitled, “The System of Logic.”18 This text contains the first twenty-three paragraphs of a Hegelian system of logic and thus overlaps with the first part of his aforementioned Outline of the Philosophy of Philosophy or Speculative Logic. This article was a response to criticisms of the pretensions of Hegel’s logic to begin without presuppositions with the category of pure being. In 1839 Heiberg was involved in a debate concerning another aspect of Hegel’s logic. Bishop Mynster had written an article entitled, “Rationalism, Supernaturalism,” in which he criticized Hegel’s principle of mediation and his critique of the law of excluded middle.19 Heiberg responded to this with an article entitled, “A Remark on Logic in Reference to the Right Reverend Bishop Mynster’s Treatise on Rationalism and Supernaturalism,” which defends the Hegelian principle of mediation against Mynster’s criticisms.20 This debate attracted much attention, and many of Copenhagen’s leading intellectual figures were involved in it. Heiberg’s Hegelianism focused primarily on two themes which for him were closely bound together: logic and aesthetics. His interest in applying Hegelian philosophy to aesthetics clearly comes from his long-standing interest in poetry and drama. He found in Hegel’s system a way to understand these art forms as representing a higher philosophical truth. He wrote and lectured on logic several times, and all of his works on logic freely make use of examples from the arts. He indicates that his Outline of the Philosophy of Philosophy or Speculative Logic and his “The System of Logic” are intended to provide the 17

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See Johnny Kondrup “Tekstredegørelse” to Af en endnu levendes Papirer in SKS K1, 68-72. See also Henning Fenger Kierkegaard: The Myths and their Origins, op. cit., pp. 138-141. Johan Ludvig Heiberg “Det logiske System” in Perseus, Journal for den speculative Idee no. 2, 1838, pp. 1-45. (Reprinted in Heiberg’s Prosaiske Skrifter, op. cit., vol. 2, pp. 113-166.) Jakob Peter Mynster “Rationalisme, Supranaturalisme” in Tidsskrift for Litteratur og Kritik no. 1, 1839, pp. 249-268. (Reprinted in Mynster’s Blandede Skrivter vols. 16. Copenhagen 1852-57; vol. 2, pp. 95-115.) Johan Ludvig Heiberg “En logisk Bemærkning i Anledning af H. H. Hr. Biskop Dr. Mynsters Afhandling om Rationalisme og Supranaturalisme i forrige Hefte af dette Tidsskrift” in Tidsskrift for Litteratur og Kritik no. 1, 1839, pp. 441-456. (Reprinted in Heiberg’s Prosaiske Skrifter, op. cit., vol. 2, pp. 167-190.)

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background for his theory of aesthetics.21 He clearly gives aesthetics a more central role in his philosophical thinking than Hegel does. Moreover, he had no qualms about making emendations to Hegel’s system to suit his own purposes. In his works on logic, he makes slight changes, for example, altering the initial triad – being, nothing and becoming – from Hegel’s original scheme, grouping together being and nothing as the first category, with becoming as the second, and adding determinate being (Tilværen) as the third.22 Thus, while Heiberg generally follows Hegel’s sequence, he weights the individual categories somewhat differently. Likewise, in his response to Oehlenschläger,23 he, apparently unknowingly, diverges from Hegel’s ordering of the poetic arts (presumably since he did not have Hegel’s Lectures on Aesthetics at his disposal): while Hegel placed epic first, as the immediate form of poetry, and lyric second as mediated, Heiberg treats lyric as immediate and epic as one of three forms of romantic poetry, which are all mediated.24 Heiberg was able to exercise a considerable influence on the Danish-speaking public since he was one of the leading public figures in diverse aspects of Copenhagen’s intellectual and cultural life throughout the 1820’s and ’30’s. It would be a distortion to think of him merely as one of the Danish Hegelians since his intellectual activity went far beyond merely promulgating Hegel’s philosophy. He was an elegant spokesman for Hegel’s philosophy due precisely to the fact that he was able to put it in a comprehensible and attractive form. In a letter dated from 1843, Nikolai Fogtmann (1788-1851), Bishop of 21

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See Johan Ludvig Heiberg “Det logiske System” in Perseus, Journal for den speculative Idee no. 2, 1838, p. 3. (Reprinted in Heiberg’s Prosaiske Skrifter, op. cit., vol. 2, pp. 115-116.): “The author allows himself to present herewith the first contribution to the working out of a long nourished plan, namely to expound the system of logic…. Furthermore, he has the goal with the present exposition and its continuation to clear the way for an aesthetics, which he for a long time has wished to write, but which he cannot send out into the world without ahead of time having given it the support in logic upon which it can rest.” This deviation from Hegel was criticized by Adler in his review of the work. Adolph Peter Adler “J.L. Heiberg, Det logiske System, a) Væren og Intet, b) Vorden, c) Tilværen, i Perseus Nr. 2, Kjøbenhavn 1838” in Tidsskrift for Litteratur og Kritik no. 3, 1840, pp. 474-482. Johan Ludvig Heiberg “Svar paa Hr. Oehlenschlägers Skrift: ‘Om Kritiken i Kjøbenhavns flyvende Post, over Væringerne i Miklagard’ ” in Kjøbenhavns flyvende Post nos. 7-8, 10-16, 1828. (Reprinted in Heiberg’s Prosaiske Skrifter, op. cit., vol. 3, pp. 194-284.) See Henning Fenger The Heibergs, op. cit., p. 136.


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Aalborg, writes the following to Mynster: “The most important support for Hegelianism among us [in Denmark] is without doubt Prof. Heiberg because he is clever and knows how to give everything that he treats a smooth and shiny appearance.”25 It is difficult to evaluate the degree to which Heiberg can properly be considered a Hegelian or even the degree to which he considered himself one. On the one hand, in his earliest Hegelian period immediately after meeting Hegel in Berlin he seems to reject the notion that he is a follower of Hegel. He writes the following in a letter à propos of his recently published work On Human Freedom: I have indeed in this treatise drawn attention to Hegel, without whom a controversy of this kind does not seem to me to be able to take place, but it has not been my intention to declare myself a Hegelian. (I have, moreover, quite a lot against all -ians, regardless of what first name they put before this, their family name, which an etymologist perhaps might think to derive from “asinus.”) My presentation is, as far as I know, quite my own and even different from Hegel’s, at least in the method, although indeed in the main point it is in agreement with the Hegelian thought.26

From this it is clear that Heiberg does not want to claim the title “Hegelian” and indeed is critical of those who do. Moreover, the many deviations from Hegel’s works that Heiberg allows himself suggest that he regards himself as an independent thinker inspired by, but not a slave to, Hegel. On the other hand, in his “Autobiographical Fragments” written in 1839, Heiberg describes his encounter with Hegel’s philosophy in almost evangelical terms. He recalls how, upon his return trip from Berlin after meeting Hegel, he suddenly grasped the essence of the Hegelian system in a kind of revelation: While resting on the way home in Hamburg, where I stayed six weeks before returning to Kiel, and during that time was constantly pondering what was still obscure to me, it happened one day that, sitting in my room in the König von England with Hegel on my table and in my thoughts, and listening at the same time to the beautiful psalms which sounded almost unceasingly from the chimes of St. Peter’s Church, suddenly, in a way which I have experienced neither before nor since, I was gripped by a momentary inner 25

26

“Letter from Bishop Fogtmann to Mynster, Aalborg, 1843” in Af efterladte Breve til J.P. Mynster, ed. by C.L.N. Mynster, Copenhagen 1862, p. 227. See “J.L. Heiberg til H.C. Ørsted,” March 25, 1825 in Breve og Aktstykker vedrørende Johan Ludvig Heiberg, op. cit., vol. 1, pp. 164-165. In the same letter Heiberg expresses reservations about his own aptitude and disposition for presenting Hegel’s philosophy to others: “But with what concerns me, I dare not give myself credit for a sufficient knowledge of this system to discharge such a difficult task, and I likewise do not know how far I would be successful in an undertaking of this kind since I feel a greater inclination to present my own ideas than to set myself into a foreign train of thought so completely, which would be necessary for this.” Ibid., p. 167.

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vision, as if a flash of lightning had illuminated the whole region for me and awakened in me the theretofore hidden central thought. From this moment the system in its broad outline was clear to me, and I was completely convinced that I had grasped it in its innermost core, regardless of however much there might be in the details which I still had not made my own and perhaps will never come to make my own.27

Moreover, the fact that Heiberg felt obliged to defend Hegel against the criticisms leveled by Mynster and others seems to speak for his Hegelianism as being a part of his self-understanding. Finally, in Copenhagen at the time it seems to have been generally known that Heiberg was a Hegelian. Given these ambiguities in his relation to Hegel, the label “Hegelian” cannot be applied to Heiberg without some qualifications. Kierkegaard’s relation to Heiberg was by no means transparent. Despite his later criticisms, Kierkegaard seems in fact to have been something of a follower of Heiberg for a period.28 As a student, he read Heiberg and seems to have been anxious to win his approbation and to be accepted into the Heiberg circle of aesthetics and criticism.29 In his student days Kierkegaard published articles in Heiberg’s influential journal Kjøbenhavns flyvende Post30 and is said to have attended soirées at Heiberg’s home.31 Their relationship seems nonetheless to have been a rather formal one. Since Kierkegaard did not cultivate a deeper friendship with Heiberg, he was not obliged later to temper or qualify his criticism. What seems particularly to have turned Kierkegaard against Heiberg was a short book-review of Either/Or that Heiberg wrote in his journal Intelligensblade,32 in which he criticized the work in a rather dismissive manner. From this point

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Johan Ludvig Heiberg “Autobiographiske Fragmenter” in Prosaiske Skrifter, op. cit., vol. 11, p. 500. (Excerpts from and paraphrases of this text were originally published in Christian Molbech Dansk poetisk Anthologie vols. 1-4, Copenhagen 1830-40; vol. 4, pp. 243-300, p. 275.) See Henning Fenger Kierkegaard: The Myths and their Origins, tr. by George C. Schoolfield, New Haven and London: Yale University Press 1980, pp. 135-149. Sejer Kühle “Søren Kierkegaard og den heibergske Kreds” in Personalhistorisk Tidsskrift series 12, vol. 2, 1947, pp. 1-13. See H.P. Holst’s Letter to H.P. Barfod, September 13, 1869 in Encounters with Kierkegaard, tr. and ed. by Bruce H. Kirmmse, op. cit., p. 13. For an account of the significance of this journal, see Henning Fenger The Heibergs, op. cit., pp. 118-141. Recounted in Henrik Hertz’s diaries in Encounters with Kierkegaard, tr. and ed. by Bruce H. Kirmmse, op. cit., p. 218. Johan Ludvig Heiberg “Litterær Vintersæd” in Intelligensblade vol. 2, no. 24, March 1, 1843, pp. 285-292.


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on Kierkegaard had nothing but scorn for Heiberg. Under the name of the pseudonymous editor of the work, Victor Eremita, he first published a polemical response to this review with the title, “A Word of Thanks to Professor Heiberg.”33 In another article in his journal Urania,34 Heiberg discussed briefly Kierkegaard’s Repetition and once again evoked his anger. After writing drafts of different responses,35 Kierkegaard settled on the idea for his work Prefaces, which was his most extended polemic against Heiberg. The affectation and zeal of Heiberg’s Hegelian revelation evoked Kierkegaard’s satire. In the Concluding Unscientific Postscript, Kierkegaard’s pseudonym Johannes Climacus satirizes the account, quoted above, which he describes as Heiberg’s miraculous conversion to Hegelianism, referring to him as “Dr. Hjortespring”: “But I have no miracle to appeal to; ah, that was Dr. Hjortespring’s happy fate! According to his own very well written report, he became an adherent of Hegelian philosophy through a miracle at Streit Hotel in Hamburg on Easter morning…an adherent of the philosophy that assumes that there are no miracles. Marvelous sign of the times!”36 Kierkegaard had no patience for Heiberg’s unqualified enthusiasm for Hegel and constantly made it the object of satire. After the dispute had calmed down somewhat, Heiberg and his family remained important for Kierkegaard. In 1846 Kierkegaard published a lengthy book-review of a novel entitled Two Ages, which 33 34

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In COR, pp. 17-21 / SV1 XIII, 411-415. Fædrelandet no. 1168, March 5, 1843. Johan Ludvig Heiberg “Det astronomiske Aar” in Urania, 1844, pp. 77-160. (Reprinted in Heiberg’s Prosaiske Skrifter, op. cit., vol. 9, pp. 51-130.) Namely, “Open Letter to Professor Heiberg, Knight of Dannebrog from Constantin Constantius” in R, Supplement, pp. 283-298 / Pap. IV B 110-111, pp. 258-274. “A Little Contribution by Constantin Constantius, Author of Repetition” in R, Supplement, pp. 299-319 / Pap. IV B 112-117, pp. 275-300. CUP1, p. 184 / SKS 7, 169f. See also “Hired waiters presumably are not needed. – Yet all is not thereby past – Heiberg himself is a diplomat, before that miracle in Hamburg, where through a miracle he gained an understanding of and became an adherent of a philosophy that (remarkably enough) does not accept miracles”(FT, Supplement, p. 324 / Pap. IV B 124, in Pap. XIII, p. 364). Also in his journals he writes, “Who has forgotten the beautiful Easter morning when Prof. Heiberg arose to understand Hegelian philosophy, as he himself has so edifyingly explained it – was this not a leap? Or did someone dream it?”(JP 3, 2347 / Pap. V C 3). In the Concept of Anxiety he writes, “The system is supposed to have such marvelous transparency and inner vision that in the manner of the omphalopsychoi [navel souls] it would gaze immovably at the central nothing until at last everything would explain itself and its whole content would come into being by itself. Such introverted openness to the public was to characterize the system”(CA, p. 81 / SKS 4, 384).

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was published by Heiberg and authored anonymously by Heiberg’s mother, the gifted Thomasine Christine Gyllembourg-Ehrensvärd (1773-1856), who was one of Denmark’s leading novelists of the day. In 1847 Kierkegaard published a series of articles under the title, “The Crisis and a Crisis in the Life of an Actress,” which was about Heiberg’s wife, Johanne Luise Heiberg (1812-90), who was a celebrated actress in Copenhagen’s theater scene.37 Thus, even though the polemic with Heiberg faded in time, Kierkegaard continued to be interested in the Heiberg circle throughout his life. The second important spokesman for Hegelianism in Denmark was the theologian Hans Lassen Martensen (1808-84). Although his zeal was clearly more moderate than Heiberg’s, Martensen must be counted as one of the most important sources about Hegel’s philosophy for his fellow countrymen. One must be particularly careful not to regard Martensen as an uncritical Hegelian, although this is the picture that Kierkegaard paints of him. It must be stated that Martensen did not regard himself as a Hegelian per se and in fact offered many criticisms of Hegel throughout his career. In any case there can be no doubt about the fact that he was extremely important for the reception of Hegel’s philosophy in Denmark. Martensen was born in Flensborg, the son of a German mother and a Danish father, and thus learned the German language and culture from his earliest childhood.38 He lived in Copenhagen from 1817 to 1834 and received his degree in theology from the university there in

37

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See Johanne Luise Heiberg Et liv genoplevet i erindringen, op. cit., vol. 2, pp. 172176. Of singular importance for the details about Martensen’s life is his autobiography: Hans Lassen Martensen Af mit Levnet vols. 1-3, Copenhagen: Gyldendal 1882-83. See also the following: Skat Arildsen Biskop Hans Lassen Martensen. Hans Liv, Udvikling og Arbejde, Copenhagen: G.E.C. Gads Forlag 1932. See also Harald Høffding “Heiberg og Martensen” in his Danske Filosofer, Copenhagen: Gyldendalske Boghandel, Nordisk Forlag 1909, pp. 137-146. Josepha Martensen H.L. Martensen i sit Hjem og blandt sine Venner, Copenhagen: J. Frimodts Forlag 1918. C.I. Scharling (ed.) H.L. Martensen. Hans Tanker og Livssyn, Copenhagen: P. Haase & Søns Forlag 1928. Jens Holger Schjørring “H.L. Martensen” in his Teologi og filosofi. Nogle analyser og dokumenter vedrørende Hegelianismen i dansk teologi, Copenhagen: G.E.C. Gads Forlag 1974, pp. 27-35. For an account in English see Jens Holger Schjørring “Martensen” in Kierkegaard’s Teachers (Bibliotheca Kierkegaardiana, vol. 10), ed. by Niels Thulstrup and Marie Mikulová Thulstrup, Copenhagen: C.A. Reitzels Forlag 1982, pp. 177-207. See also the Introduction by Curtis L. Thompson in Between Hegel and Kierkegaard: Hans L. Martensen’s Philosophy of Religion, tr. by Curtis L. Thompson and David J. Kangas, Atlanta: Scholars Press 1997, pp. 1-71.


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1832. Kierkegaard knew Martensen from his early student days. In Summer Semester 1834 Martensen was his teacher at the University of Copenhagen for private tutorials on Schleiermacher’s Der christliche Glaube.39 That same year Martensen traveled to Germany in order to learn more about Hegel and German philosophy. Naturally enough, he first journeyed to Berlin where Hegelianism was still thriving.40 There he made the acquaintance of Philipp Marheineke (1780-1846), who was the dominant figure on the scene. In a letter from Berlin dated December 20, 1834, Martensen describes as follows the current state of Hegelianism: “Hegel’s philosophy still attracts the greatest interest in philosophy circles in Germany despite its many bad disciples and the many attacks which have been made on it. I do not think that it has been surpassed yet; one must fight against it until one either overcomes it or is oneself overcome by it.”41 From Berlin he continued on to Heidelberg where he met with the Hegelian theologian, Karl Daub (1765-1836), who tried to employ Hegel’s dialectical methodology to further the ends of Protestantism. Martensen went on to Tübingen and met David Friedrich Strauss (1808-74), whose Das Leben Jesu had just appeared and was causing much controversy. The next stop on his tour was Munich where he attended Schelling’s lectures and made the acquaintance of the speculative theologian Franz von Baader (1765-1841). Martensen continued to Vienna and eventually to Paris where he met Heiberg, in whom he found a friend and ally in philosophical matters.42 After these extensive travels, Martensen returned to Copenhagen in 1836 to formulate his own views on Hegelianism and speculative philosophy. He was appointed Lecturer of Systematic Theology at the University of Copenhagen, later becoming a full professor in 1840. During this period, Martensen seems to have been quite enthusiastic about Hegel’s philosophy of religion, praising Hegel for recognizing the conceptual necessity of religious thought. In 1836 in 39

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See JP 4, 3843-3844 / Pap. I C 20, in Pap. XII, pp. 126-131. See also Hans Lassen Martensen Af mit Levnet, op. cit., vol. 1, p. 78. See Hans Lassen Martensen Af mit Levnet, op. cit., vol. 2, pp. 85ff. See also Martensen’s letter to H.C. Ørsted from December 20, 1834 in Breve fra og til Hans Christian Ørsted vols. 1-2, ed. by Mathilde Ørsted, Copenhagen 1870; vol. 2, pp. 134-140. “Letter to H.C. Ørsted” from December 20, 1834 in Breve fra og til Hans Christian Ørsted, ed. by Mathilde Ørsted, op. cit., vol. 2, pp. 135. See Johanne Luise Heiberg Et liv genoplevet i erindringen, op. cit., vol. 1, pp. 281-282. See also Hans Lassen Martensen Af mit Levnet, op. cit., vol. 1, pp. 218-227; vol. 2, pp. 24-39.

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the journal, Maanedsskrift for Litteratur, Martensen reviewed Heiberg’s aforementioned Introductory Lecture to the Logic Course at the Royal Military College.43 There he gives a generally positive assessment of Hegelian philosophy, claiming that it is the greatest philosophical achievement of the modern age. He nonetheless criticizes certain aspects of Hegel’s philosophy of religion, criticisms to which Kierkegaard was attentive.44 In 1837 Martensen completed his dissertation, written in Latin, which was entitled, On the Autonomy of Human Self-Consciousness.45 There he criticized the notion of autonomy which he saw as characteristic of modern thought such as Hegel’s. At the University of Copenhagen in Winter Semester 1837-38 Martensen gave a course entitled “Introduction to Speculative Dogmatics,” which Kierkegaard attended.46 The lectures continued through Summer Semester 1838 and Winter Semester 1838-39.47 In these lectures he developed a philosophy of religion with some affinities to Hegel. In Winter Semester 1838-39 Martensen gave a survey of German philosophy under the title, “Lectures on the History of Modern Philosophy from Kant to Hegel.” Among Kierkegaard’s journals and papers there are notes to this course written in someone else’s hand.48 These lectures were popular and evoked much academic discussion and even controversy. It was the success of Martensen’s lectures that occasioned Heiberg to declare that Hegel’s philosophy had finally become a causa victrix in Danish intellectual life.49

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Hans Lassen Martensen “Indledningsforedrag til det i November 1834 begyndte logiske Cursus paa den kongelige militaire Høiskole. Af J.L. Heiberg, Lærer i Logik og Æsthetik ved den kgl. militaire Høiskole” in Maanedsskrift for Litteratur vol. 16, 1836, pp. 515-528. See Niels Thulstrup Kierkegaard’s Relation to Hegel, tr. by George L. Stengren, Princeton: Princeton University Press 1980, p. 93. Hans Lassen Martensen De autonomia conscientiae sui humanae in theologiam dogmaticam nostri temporis introducta, Copenhagen 1837. Danish translation: Den menneskelige Selvbevidstheds Autonomie, tr. by L.V. Petersen, Copenhagen 1841. English translation: The Autonomy of Human Self-Consciousness in Modern Dogmatic Theology in Between Hegel and Kierkegaard: Hans L. Martensen’s Philosophy of Religion, tr. by Curtis L. Thompson and David J. Kangas, Atlanta: Scholars Press 1997, pp. 73-147. SKS 19, 125-143, Not4:3-12. A complete list of Martensen’s lectures can be found in Skat Arildsen Biskop Hans Lassen Martensen. Hans Liv, Udvikling og Arbejde, op. cit., pp. 156-158. SKS 18, 374-386, KK:11. See also Pap. II C 27-28, in Pap. XIII, pp. 3-116. Pap. II C 25, in Pap. XII, pp. 316-331.


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At this time Martensen also betrayed his allegiance to Hegelianism with his lectures on moral philosophy, which he later published. In 1839 he, like Heiberg, defended Hegel’s critique of the law of excluded middle against Bishop Mynster’s criticism.50 He argued that the principle of mediation was the principle of Christianity since the doctrine of the incarnation could not be understood without it. Martensen was a charismatic figure who attracted many students. In the journals from 1849, Kierkegaard, looking back on his student days, describes Martensen as creating “quite a sensation”51 at the University of Copenhagen. Martensen’s popularity among the students earned him not merely Kierkegaard’s animosity but also attracted much attention in the Danish intellectual community generally. Martensen’s lectures brought him into the public eye and functioned as a sort of forum for the general debate about the legitimacy of the introduction of Hegelian philosophy into theological questions.52 As a result of his promulgation of Hegel’s doctrines among the students, he quickly became the object of public criticism by an anonymous critic in Kjøbenhavnsposten.53 Critics harped on the fundamental differences between Hegel’s speculative philosophy and Protestantism, which they claimed were ultimately incompatible. For a time Martensen made an attempt to defend himself against these criticisms and tried to maintain a Hegelian position. As late as 1841 he published a work entitled, Outline of the System of Moral Philos49

50

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Johan Ludvig Heiberg “Fortale” to Prosaiske Skrifter vols. 1-3, Copenhagen 1841-43; vol. 1, p. xv. (Reprinted in Heiberg’s Prosaiske Skrifter vols. 1-11, Copenhagen 186162; vol. 10, p. 591.) Hans Lassen Martensen “Rationalisme, Supranaturalisme og principium exclusi medii i Anledning af H. H. Biskop Mynsters Afhandling herom i dette Tidsskrifts forrige Hefte” in Tidsskrift for Litteratur og Kritik no. 1, 1839, pp. 456-473. PF, Supplement, pp. 226-227 / Pap. X 2 A 155, p. 117. Translation slightly modified. See Henning Fenger The Heibergs, op. cit., pp. 139-140. Carl Henrik Koch En Flue på Hegels udødelige næse eller om Adolph Peter Adler og om Søren Kierkegaards forhold til ham, Copenhagen: C.A. Reitzels Forlag A/S 1990, pp. 27ff. See the anonymous criticism: “Nogle Træk til en Charakteristik af den philosophiske Aand, som for Tiden findes hos de Studerende ved Kjøbenhavns Universitet” in Kjøbenhavnsposten vol. 14, no. 25, January 26, 1840, pp. 97-99. Martensen’s response: “Philosophisk Beskedenhed i Kjøbenhavnsposten” in Fædrelandet vol. 1, no. 50, January 29, 1840, pp. 259-261. The anonymous rejoinder: “Philosophiske Suffisance i Fædrelandet” in Kjøbenhavnsposten vol. 14, no. 31, February 1, 1840, pp. 121-124. Martensen’s response “Erklæring” in Fædrelandet vol. 1, no. 56, February 4, 1840, pp. 315-316. The final article, “Sidste Indlæg: Sagen contra Lector Martensen som Mandatarius for Hegel & Comp” in Kjøbenhavnsposten vol. 14, no. 41, February 11, 1840, pp. 161-163.

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ophy,54 which bears a decidedly Hegelian stamp.55 But in 1842, however, he experienced a crisis as a result of new publications by some of the left Hegelians who were unapologetically critical of religion and Christianity in particular. Ludwig Feuerbach’s Wesen des Christentums56 and Strauss’ Die christliche Glaubenslehre57 claimed to be furthering Hegel’s philosophy, yet the Danish theologian could recognize in their positions nothing of his own notion of Christianity. When this anti-Christian tendency began to emerge in certain forms in Denmark,58 Martensen felt obliged to modify his position, lest he be associated with the radicals. In 1842 he openly criticized Strauss and took a stand on the side of orthodoxy in an article, “The Present Religious Crisis.”59 Moreover, at the end of 1842 he refused an invitation from the German philosopher and theologian Eduard Zeller (1814-1908) to submit an article for the newly founded journal, the Theologische Jahrbücher, in which Strauss was also involved. At the beginning of 1843 he refused a similar invitation from Marheineke to join a philosophical society dedicated to Hegel’s thought.60 54

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56 57

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Hans Lassen Martensen Grundrids til Moralphilosophiens System, Copenhagen 1841. English translation: Outline to a System of Moral Philosophy, in Between Hegel and Kierkegaard: Hans L. Martensen’s Philosophy of Religion, tr. by Curtis L. Thompson and David J. Kangas, Atlanta: Scholars Press 1997, pp. 245-313. See the review: Peter Michael Stilling “Grundrids til Moralphilosophiens System, udgivet til Brug ved academiske Forelæsninger af Dr. H. Martensen. Reitzels Forlag. 109 S. 8º. Kjøbenhavn 1841. (Priis 1 Rbd.)” in Theologisk Tidsskrift, Ny Række vol. 7, 1843, pp. 88-115. See the discussion in Bruce H. Kirmmse Kierkegaard in Golden Age Denmark, Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press 1990, pp. 172-175. Ludwig Feuerbach Das Wesen des Christentums, Leipzig 1841. David Friedrich Strauss Die christliche Glaubenslehre vols. 1-2, Tübingen 1840-41. Danish translation: Fremstilling af den christelige Troeslære i dens historiske Udvikling og i dens Kamp med den moderne Videnskab vols. 1-2, tr. by Hans Brøchner, Copenhagen 1842-43. See Jens Holger Schiørring’s mention of “the examination scandal” and “Frederik Andreas Beck” in his article “Martensen” in Kierkegaard’s Teachers, ed. by Niels Thulstrup and Marie Mikulová Thulstrup, op. cit., p. 192. See Leif Grane “Det Teologiske Fakultet 1830-1925” in Københavns Universitet 1479-1979 vols. 1-14, ed. by Leif Grane et al.; vol. 5, Det Teologiske Fakultet, Copenhagen: G.E.C. Gads Forlag 1980, pp. 366-367. S.V. Rasmussen Den unge Brøchner, Copenhagen: Gyldendal 1966, pp. 16-26. See also Harald Høffding “Hans Brøchner” in his Danske Filosofer, op. cit., pp. 196-206. Hans Lassen Martensen “Nutidens religiøse Crisis” in Intelligensblade vol. 1, no. 3, 1842, pp. 53-73. For an account of both of these episodes, see Jens Holger Schjørring Teologi og filosofi. Nogle analyser og dokumenter vedrørende Hegelianismen i dansk teologi, op. cit., pp. 27-35.


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Martensen’s Hegelian period did not impede his professional advancement. Even during the controversy regarding Hegel’s principle of mediation he remained on the best of terms with Hegel’s critic, Bishop Mynster. In a letter dated June 18, 1839, Mynster writes: “Moreover, yesterday I had a long philosophical discussion with Martensen; naturally, regardless of this dispute, we are the best of friends.”61 In 1845 Martensen became a royal chaplain despite relatively scant experience in preaching. In 1849 he published his best-known work on theology, Christian Dogmatics,62 which cannot be considered straightforwardly “Hegelian,” although it is clearly a piece of systematic theology with some Hegelian strands. By this time Martensen’s initial burst of enthusiasm for Hegelianism had clearly waned, and he had backed off considerably from its most provocative aspects.63 Martensen was never a full-fledged devotee of Hegelianism,64 and the issue of how Hegelian he was after the entire course of his intellectual development remains open. In his autobiography Martensen denies that he was ever a Hegelian at all. He explains his goal as a teacher of Hegel’s philosophy as follows: I had to, if possible, get [the students] enthused about Hegel, and yet I had to oppose him and bring them to oppose him. Whether I always succeeded in this to the same degree I must leave undecided. But I can assert with certainty that all the way through I have maintained my theonomic standpoint in contrast to Hegel’s autonomic, that the intuitive view of faith and revelation was for me the principal thing in contrast to the autonomic in Hegel. I could not agree with a thinking which wanted to produce its own content. I sought only a second-order reflection on that which is given in revelation. When it is often said that during this my initial period at the University I was a representative of Hegelianism, then this is a most uncritical assertion which totally ignores my explicit and justified declarations in my dissertation, and which has been refuted by each of my literary works.65

One should, of course, be wary of taking autobiographical statements made years after the fact at face value, but nonetheless there is some 61

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“Mynster to his eldest son Joachim,” June 18, 1839 in Nogle Blade af J.P. Mynster’s Liv og Tid, ed. by C.L.N. Mynster, Copenhagen 1875, p. 404. See also p. 69. Hans Lassen Martensen Den christelige Dogmatik, Copenhagen 1849. See Helweg’s assessment: Hans Friedrich Helweg “Hegelianismen i Danmark” in Dansk Kirketidende vol. 10, no. 51, December 16, 1855, pp. 827-828. One author tells us, “Martensen, apart from a brief period around 1833-34 was not actually a Hegelian, but rather he wanted to use Hegel’s method to create a speculative theology.” Leif Grane “Det Teologiske Fakultet 1830-1925,” op. cit., p. 363. See Hans Lassen Martensen Af mit Levnet, op. cit., vol. 2, pp. 4-5. Quoted from Between Hegel and Kierkegaard: Hans L. Martensen’s Philosophy of Religion, tr. by Curtis L. Thompson and David J. Kangas, op. cit., p. 8. See also vol. 2, pp. 5-7. See vol. 1, pp. 146-147 where Martensen says that he broke with Hegel.

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support for Martensen’s claim. In a letter from as early as 1836 Martensen indicates that he is no longer satisfied with the “autonomic principle” of Hegel’s philosophy, which is precisely the criticism he recalls in his autobiography almost a half a century later.66 In a part of his review of Perseus, Sibbern portrays Martensen not as a Hegelian but rather as one of the great critics of Hegel.67 In a letter from 1839 Mynster notes that Martensen was “not nearly such a strict Hegelian as Heiberg.”68 Even during the period when Martensen had the most success among the students, it is not clear that he was universally regarded as a Hegelian. In a letter from 1841, Fogtmann writes to Mynster in a way that implies that he distances Martensen from the real Hegelians: “I have recently read much in Prof. Martensen’s theological writings and have found a great interest in them. He is certainly, as Your Holiness once remarked, a true Christian theologian, who is not bound by Hegelian formulations.”69 This seems to indicate that Martensen was not generally regarded as the most convinced or dogmatic Hegelian at the time. Moreover, Martensen did indeed offer criticisms of Hegel in each of his works which have been designated as “Hegelian.” Martensen was also critical of the subordination of religion to philosophy in Hegel’s thought and was more interested than Hegel in the concept of a personal God.70 He also criticizes Hegel’s philosophy for dismissing as unscientific anything that cannot be reduced to its categories. At the end of his “Lectures on the History of Modern Philosophy from Kant to Hegel,” he offers a number of criticisms of Hegel’s philosophy and notes some of the leading contemporary critics. He enumerates three points which to his mind remain unanswered in Hegel: the notion of 1) a personal God, 2) a personal Christ, and 3) the immortality of the individual.71 With these points of divergence, one can see 66

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“Letter from Martensen to Sibbern,” March 19, 1836 in Breve fra og til F.C. Sibbern vols. 1-2, ed. by C.L.N. Mynster, Copenhagen: Gyldendalske Boghandel 1866; vol. 1, pp. 181-183. See Frederik Christian Sibbern “Perseus, Journal for den speculative Idee. Udgiven af Johan Ludvig Heiberg. Nr. 1, Juni 1837. Kjøbenhavn. Reitzels Forlag. XIV og 264 S. 8. Priis 1 Rbd. 84 Skill. – (Med stadigt Hensyn til Dr. Rothes: Læren om Treenighed og Forsoning. Et speculativt Forsøg i Anledning af Reformationsfesten.)” in Maanedsskrift for Litteratur vol. 20, 1838, Article VIII pp. 405-449. See especially p. 406. “Mynster to his eldest son Joachim,” June 18, 1839 in Nogle Blade af J.P. Mynster’s Liv og Tid, ed. by C.L.N. Mynster, Copenhagen 1875, p. 404. “Letter from Bishop Fogtmann to Mynster, Aalborg, 1841” in Af efterladte Breve til J.P. Mynster, ed. by C.L.N. Mynster, Copenhagen 1862, p. 221. See Hans Lassen Martensen Af mit Levnet, op. cit., vol. 1, pp. 103ff. Pap. II C 25, in Pap. XII, p. 328. See also p. 331.


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that Mynster’s assessment seems to be correct: Martensen’s Hegelianism was more qualified and less zealous than Heiberg’s. Despite this, it does seem that Martensen was at least perceived to be a Hegelian by some people. Otherwise it would not make sense for the aforementioned Eduard Zeller to solicit his work in the service of a Hegelian journal or for Marheineke to invite him to become a member of a Hegelian society.72 Moreover, his response to the anonymous critic in Kjøbenhavnsposten has the look of a Hegelian. Although Martensen is, of course, at pains there to defend himself against the charge that he has corrupted the students at the University of Copenhagen, he is also quite anxious to defend Hegel’s philosophy against both misunderstanding and criticism. Kierkegaard’s criticism of Martensen is more aggressive than his criticism of Heiberg due perhaps to the fact that Martensen was only a few years older than Kierkegaard and thus was regarded as more of a threat by him.73 While Heiberg was perceived as a mentor, Martensen was perceived as a rival. In many journal entries Kierkegaard compares himself and his work with that of Martensen. As was noted above, Kierkegaard in his student days attended Martensen’s tutorials and apparently was at that time favorably impressed by the command of German philosophy and theology that Martensen displayed. However, Kierkegaard seems to have lost much of his respect for him when Martensen returned from Germany in 1836 and began to advocate Hegelianism and proclaim that he had gone beyond it. In his journals Kierkegaard writes, Some teach that eternity is comic, or more correctly, that in eternity a person will perceive a comic consciousness about the temporal. This wisdom we owe especially to the last three or four paragraphs of Hegel’s Aesthetics. Here [in Denmark] it has been presented in one of the journals by Professor Martensen. Although the professor, after his return [from Germany], and since his first appearance in the Maanedsskrift for Litteratur, has invariably assured us that he has gone beyond Hegel, he certainly did not go farther in this case.74 72

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Jens Holger Schjørring Teologi og filosofi. Nogle analyser og dokumenter vedrørende Hegelianismen i dansk teologi, op. cit., p. 27. For Kierkegaard’s relation to Martensen see M. Neiiendam “Martensen, Mynster og Kierkegaard” in C.I. Scharling H.L. Martensen. Hans Tanker og Livssyn, op. cit., pp. 94-127. CA, Supplement, p. 207 / Pap. V B 60, p. 137. Translation slightly modified. See also CA, Supplement, p. 213 / Pap. V B 72.33: “The whole wisdom of the superiority of the comic we owe to the three or four last paragraphs in Hegel’s Aesthetics, although it has also been presented with bravura by one who long since has gone beyond Hegel; and while he astonished women and children with his discourse, he would not as much as intimate that it was Hegel’s.” See also JP 6, 6947 / Pap. XI 3 B 57, p. 107: “Professor Martensen ‘goes further’ – that is to be expected of Prof. M.”

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This claim of “going beyond Hegel” is one that Kierkegaard returns to again and again throughout his career. Expressions like this seem to have been common during this period.75 In his autobiography, Martensen recalls, “I had to lead my listener through Hegel; we could not stop with him, but rather, as was said, we had to go beyond him.”76 This expression seems to refer to the then recent sequence of famous German philosophers, Kant, Fichte, Schelling and Hegel, who displaced one another in succession. Each new philosopher started from the premises of his predecessor and reworked them in a new, original manner, thus incorporating and surpassing the previous system. In this way each of these philosophers was said to “have gone beyond” his predecessor. After Hegel’s death the question that resounded during the 1830’s was who would pick up the torch and go beyond Hegel.77 In his memoirs one of Martensen’s students, the later priest and author Johannes Fibiger (1821-97) describes the way in which one regarded the intellectual task of the age: “One had to imitate [Hegel’s philosophy] and bring it even further; one was supposed to build one’s own system and go beyond Hegel and become the great man of the scholarly world.”78 Kierkegaard was critical of Martensen and others for their pretensions to have unseated Hegel and to have assumed the role of his successor in this distinguished series of thinkers. As has been noted, Kierkegaard became increasingly incensed by what he perceived as Martensen’s base attempt to profit from Hegel’s genius. Kierkegaard speaks positively of Hegel in this regard and negatively of his parrots and emulators. He writes, for example, “Those who have gone beyond Hegel are like country people who must always give their addresses as via a larger city; thus the addresses in

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See commentary to “at gaae videre” in SKS K4, 259-260. See Hans Lassen Martensen Af mit Levnet, op. cit., vol. 2, p. 4. See Frederik Christian Sibbern “Perseus, Journal for den speculative Idee. Udgiven af Johan Ludvig Heiberg. Nr. 1, Juni 1837. Kjøbenhavn. Reitzels Forlag. XIV og 264 S. 8. Priis 1 Rbd. 84 Skill. – (Med stadigt Hensyn til Dr. Rothes: Læren om Treenighed og Forsoning. Et speculativt Forsøg i Anledning af Reformationsfesten.)” in Maanedsskrift for Litteratur vol. 19, 1838, Article I, p. 313; Sibbern Bemærkninger og Undersøgelser, op. cit., p. 31: “Few seem to be aware that to correctly make use of the great content discussed here [sc. of Hegel’s philosophy]…one must go beyond it.” Johannes Fibiger Mit Liv og Levned som jeg selv har forstaaet det, ed. by Karl Gjellerup, Copenhagen 1898, p. 73.


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this case read – John Doe via Hegel.”79 Many years later he writes in his journals, naming Martensen explicitly, “Professor Martensen…is only an insignificant thinker and essentially only a reporter and correspondent for German thinkers and professors.”80 Another reason for Kierkegaard’s animosity was a straightforward jealousy. In 1837 Martensen published an article on a new version of Faust by Nicolaus Lenau,81 a pseudonym for the Austro-Hungarian poet Niembsch von Strehlenau (1802-50). The article appeared in Heiberg’s review, Perseus, and in a sense served to make Martensen the protégé of Heiberg and to give notice to the academic community that he was the up and coming young scholar in Danish intellectual life. Kierkegaard himself had tried to get into the good graces of Heiberg and his circle, but he was quickly displaced by the new academic star, Martensen. What was worse, the theme of Faust was one that fascinated Kierkegaard in particular at that time. In his early journals one finds many long discussions of it, and it seems clear that he was planning a manuscript of some kind on it.82 He was thus startled and upset when Martensen’s article appeared since it undercut his own plans for a study of the subject. He became bitter and envious of Martensen’s success,83 and this initiated a lifelong enmity on Kierkegaard’s part, an enmity which, it should be noted, was reciprocated by Martensen. Kierkegaard’s criticism became all the more bitter when he saw Martensen’s lectures become popular. During his most productive period of work between 1843 and 1846, Kierkegaard often caustically criticizes Martensen’s positions without 79

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JP 2, 1572 / SKS 18, 109, FF:176. In an apparent reference to Martensen from 1836, Kierkegaard writes, “The Hegelian cud-chewing involving three stomachs – first, immediacy – then it is regurgitated – then down once more; perhaps a successor mastermind could continue this with four stomachs etc., down again and then up again. I do not know whether the master-mind understands what I mean.” JP 2, 1566 / Pap. I A 229. Pap. X 6 B 103. See also JP 3, 3034 / Pap. X 2 A 117. CUP1, p. 195f. / SKS 7, 180f. JP 2, 1570 / SKS 17, 50, AA:40. JP 2, 1573 / SKS 17, 262, DD:141. JP 2, 1576 / SKS 18, 14, EE:26. JP 2, 1738 / SKS 19, 375, Not12:7. JP 6, 6460 / Pap. X 1 A 588. Hans Lassen Martensen “Betragtninger over Idéen af Faust med Hensyn paa Lenaus Faust” in Perseus, Journal for den speculative Idee no. 1, 1837, pp. 91-164. JP 5, 5100 / SKS 17, 18-30, AA:12. JP 2, 1177 / Pap. I A 88. JP 2, 1178 / Pap. I A 104. JP 4, 4387 / Pap. I A 122. JP 1, 795 / Pap. I A 150. JP 2, 1671 / Pap. I A 154. Pap. I A 274. SKS 18, 78, FF:19. SKS 17, 205-207, CC:14-18. JP 5, 5077 / Pap. I C 46. JP 2, 1179 / SKS 19, 94, Not2:7. JP 5, 5110 / Pap. I C 61. JP 5, 5111 / SKS 19, 94f., Not2:10. JP 5, 5160 / Pap. I C 102. JP 3, 2703 / SKS 17, 104-106, BB:14. Pap. I C 114. See JP 5, 5225 / Pap. II A 597. See also JP 2, 1183 / SKS 17, 49, AA:38. JP 5, 5226 / SKS 18, 83, FF:38.

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mentioning his name as, for example, in the Philosophical Fragments and the Concluding Unscientific Postscript.84 From journal entries it is clear that Kierkegaard felt slighted by some of Martensen’s remarks in the Introduction to his Christian Dogmatics.85 In his autobiography, Martensen describes Kierkegaard’s animosity thus: In the beginning his [Kierkegaard’s] relation to me had been friendly, but it assumed an increasingly hostile character. He was moved to this in part by the differences in our views and in part by the recognition I enjoyed from the students and the public, a recognition which he clearly viewed – nor did he attempt to conceal it – as an unjustified overestimation…I was now chosen to be the object of his attack, and he sought to disparage me, my abilities, and my work in many ways. He sought to annihilate and extinguish every bit of activity that emanated from me.86

Kierkegaard remained a critic of Martensen until the end of his life. His journals from the years 1849-50 are full of criticisms of Martensen’s Dogmatics.87 In Kierkegaard’s attack on the Danish Church in the last year of his life, Martensen, then having been elected Bishop of Zealand, was the target of much of his critique. Indeed, it was Martensen’s eulogy to his predecessor Mynster, in which he said that the deceased bishop had been a witness to the truth, that set off Kierkegaard’s campaign of criticism in the first place.88 Kierkegaard’s animosity towards Martensen stayed with him his whole life and lies behind much of his anti-Hegelian polemics. Another important, yet generally forgotten, figure in the movement of Danish Hegelianism is the philosopher and theologian Rasmus Nielsen (1809-84).89 Nielsen is particularly important since he at 84

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See Arild Christensen “Efterskriftens Opgør med Martensen” in Kierkegaardiana no. 4, 1962, pp. 45-62. Pap. X 6 B 113, p. 143. JP 6, 6636 / Pap. X 6 B 137. Martensen mentions this in his autobiography: Af mit Levnet, op. cit., vol. 2, p. 146. Hans Lassen Martensen Af mit Levnet, op. cit., vol. 2, p. 140. Cited from Encounters with Kierkegaard, tr. and ed. by Bruce H. Kirmmse, op. cit., pp. 196-197. Translation slightly modified. Pap. X 6 B 103-193, pp. 129-193. See “Was Bishop Mynster a ‘Truth-Witness?’” and the others articles in The Moment: “Var Biskop Mynster et ‘Sandhedsvidne,’ et af ‘de rette Sandhedsvidner’ – er dette Sandhed?” in Fædrelandet no. 295, December 18, 1854; M, pp. 3-8 / SV1 XIV, 5-10. For accounts of Nielsen’s life and thought see the following: V. Klein, and P.A. Rosenberg (eds.) Mindeskrift over Rasmus Nielsen, Copenhagen: Det Schønbergske Forlag 1909. Eduard Asmussen Entwicklungsgang und Grundprobleme der Philosophie Rasmus Nielsens, Flensburg 1911. P.A. Rosenberg Rasmus Nielsen. Nordens Filosof. En almenfattelig Fremstilling, Copenhagen: Karl Schønberg’s Forlag 1903. Harald Høffding Danske Filosofer, Copenhagen: Gyldendalske Boghandel, Nordisk Forlag 1909, pp. 184-195.


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least for a period was Kierkegaard’s friend at a time when Kierkegaard was long since alienated from Heiberg and Martensen. He was educated in Viborg and began his studies in theology at the University of Copenhagen in 1832. In 1840 he defended his dissertation, The Use of the Speculative Method in Sacred History.90 Nielsen worked as Privatdocent until 1841 when he received the professorship in philosophy that was vacant after Poul Martin Møller’s death. He became professor ordinarius in 1850 and enjoyed an impressive university career that lasted until 1883, a year before his death. At the beginning of the 1840’s Nielsen was one of the most enthusiastic supporters of Hegel’s philosophy. He was awarded the professorship at the same time as Martensen, and the two together represented the younger generation on the faculty. Together they promulgated the latest philosophical ideas above all from German thought. In 1841 Nielsen published a biblical commentary, animated perhaps in some small measure by a Hegelian spirit under the title Paul’s Letter to the Romans.91 He wrote two works on logic, which bear a remarkable resemblance to Hegel’s Science of Logic. The first was his Speculative Logic in its Essentials,92 which appeared in four installments from 1841-44; the second was the Propaedeutic Logic from 1845.93 These works were accompanied by public lectures and were doubtless intended as textbooks for his auditors. He also published a work on Church history which shows signs of Hegel’s influence.94 The relationship between Kierkegaard and Nielsen is extremely complex.95 At least three distinct stages can be discerned: an original alienation, a rapprochement and even friendship, and finally a revived hostility. During Kierkegaard’s years as a student, he regarded Nielsen, like Martensen, with great suspicion. When Sibbern encouraged Kierkegaard to apply for an academic position at the University of Copenhagen, Kierke-

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Rasmus Nielsen De speculativa historiæ sacræ tractando metodo, Copenhagen 1840. In Danish as Om den spekulative Methodes Anvendelse paa den hellige Historie, tr. by B.C. Bøggild, Copenhagen 1842. Rasmus Nielsen Pauli Brev til Romerne, Copenhagen 1841. Rasmus Nielsen Den speculative Logik i dens Grundtræk, Copenhagen 1841-44; 1. Hæfte 1841, pp. 1-64; 2. Hæfte 1842, pp. 65-96; 3. Hæfte 1843, pp. 97-144; 4. Hæfte 1844, pp. 145-196. Rasmus Nielsen Den propædeutiske Logik, Copenhagen 1845. Rasmus Nielsen Forelæsningsparagrapher til Kirkehistoriens Philosophie. Et Schema for Tilhørere, Copenhagen 1843. See Helge Hultberg “Kierkegaard og Rasmus Nielsen” in Kierkegaardiana no. 12, 1982, pp. 9-21.

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gaard expressed reservations, stating that he did not feel adequately prepared. Hans Brøchner recounts the exchange in his recollections: Once he [Kierkegaard] told me that Sibbern had suggested he apply for a position as a lecturer in philosophy. Kierkegaard had replied that in that case he would have to insist on a couple of years in which to prepare himself. “Oh! How can you imagine that they would hire you under such conditions?” asked Sibbern. “Yes, of course, I could do like Rasmus Nielsen and let them hire me unprepared.” Sibbern became cross and said: “You always have to pick on Nielsen!”96

When Nielsen got wind of this, he refused to be a reader on Kierkegaard’s dissertation committee, even though Sibbern asked him personally and even though he would have been the logical choice.97 This animosity between Kierkegaard and Nielsen lasted until 1846 when a rapprochement was effected between the two men.98 After reading Philosophical Fragments and other works, Nielsen became more and more interested in Kierkegaard’s conception of Christianity. He made overtures towards Kierkegaard, and the two entered into a friendship, with the older Nielsen taking on the role of something of a follower of Kierkegaard. Brøchner reports that during this time Kierkegaard had a generally positive assessment of Nielsen: “At a later point, when Nielsen had allied himself with Kierkegaard, he [Kierkegaard] spoke of him with more interest and acknowledged his talents. Once he said: ‘Nielsen is the only one of our younger authors of this general tendency who may amount to something.’”99 During a period in 1848, when Kierkegaard was convinced that his death was imminent,100 he conceived of Nielsen as his eventual literary executor.101 96

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Hans Brøchner “Erindringer om Søren Kierkegaard” in Det Nittende Aarhundrede, Maanedsskrift for Literatur og Kritik, March, 1876-77, § 21. English translation cited from Encounters with Kierkegaard, tr. and ed. by Bruce H. Kirmmse, op. cit., p. 235. See Carl Weltzer “Omkring Søren Kierkegaards Disputats” in Kirkehistoriske Samlinger, Sjette Række, ed. by J. Oskar Andersen and Bjørn Kornerup, Copenhagen: G.E.C. Gads Forlag 1948-50, p. 286. For an account of the relation between Kierkegaard and Nielsen during this period, see Thulstrup’s “Martensen’s Dogmatics and its Reception” in Kierkegaard and the Church in Denmark (Bibliotheca Kierkegaardiana, vol. 13), by Niels Thulstrup, Copenhagen: C.A. Reitzels Forlag 1984, pp. 191-197. Hans Brøchner “Erindringer om Søren Kierkegaard” op. cit., § 21. English translation cited from Encounters with Kierkegaard, tr. and ed. by Bruce H. Kirmmse, op. cit., p. 235. Pap. IX A 178. Pap. X 6 B 102. See the account in Skriftbilleder. Søren Kierkegaards journaler, notesbøger, hæfter, ark, lapper og strimler, by Niels Jørgen Cappelørn, Joakim Garff and Johnny Kondrup, Copenhagen: G.E.C. Gad 1996, pp. 30-42, 64-65, 69.


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The period of familiarity between the two men lasted until 1849. In that year Nielsen published his lectures on the life of Christ in which he criticized speculative philosophy along the same lines as Kierkegaard.102 In the same year Nielsen published a joint review of Kierkegaard’s Postscript and Martensen’s Christian Dogmatics.103 It was in particular this review that alienated Kierkegaard. As in the work on the life of Christ, Nielsen presented a number of Kierkegaard’s positions as if they were his own.104 Yet what was worse in Kierkegaard’s eyes was the fact that Nielsen’s overt and straightforward criticism of Martensen demonstrated an ignorance of the strategy of indirect communication, which was of course so essential for Kierkegaard. This occasioned him to distance himself from Nielsen.105 Kierkegaard’s comments about Nielsen after this period are generally negative, although in the final number of The Moment he writes, “The only one who on occasion has said more or less true words about my significance is R. Nielsen.”106 After Kierkegaard’s death, Nielsen continued to remain true to what he perceived to be Kierkegaard’s views. He edited a volume of Kierkegaard’s articles107 and authored other essays on his person and his work.108 From the late 1850’s to his retirement in 1883, Nielsen was profoundly productive, penning a number of books on, among other things, philosophy, religion, art. Another important advocate of Hegelianism in Denmark was the priest, Adolph Peter Adler (1812-69).109 Adler was almost the same age as Kierkegaard, and his father, like Kierkegaard’s, belonged to the nouveau riche in Copenhagen’s high society. Adler began his studies in theology at the University of Copenhagen in 1832. In 1837 he traveled abroad to Germany, Italy, Switzerland and France. In Germany he was 102

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Rasmus Nielsen Evangelietroen og den moderne Bevidsthed. Forelæsninger over Jesu Liv, Copenhagen 1849. Rasmus Nielsen Magister S. Kierkegaards Johannes Climacus og Dr. H. Martensens Christelige Dogmatik. En undersøgende Anmeldelse, Copenhagen 1849. Pap. X 1 A 343. Pap. X 6 B 83-102. See LD pp. 208-210 / B&A 1, pp. 228-230. M, p. 345 / SV1 XIV, 354. Rasmus Nielsen S. Kierkegaard’s Bladartikler, med Bilag samlede efter Forfatternens Død, udgivne som Supplement til hans øvrige Skrifter, Copenhagen 1857. E.g. Rasmus Nielsen “Om S. Kierkegaards ‘mentale Tilstand’” in Nordisk Universitet-Tidskrift vol. 4, no. 1, 1858, pp. 1-29. For Kierkegaard’s relation to Adler see: Carl Henrik Koch En Flue på Hegels udødelige næse eller om Adolph Peter Adler og om Søren Kierkegaards forhold til ham, Copenhagen: C.A. Reitzels Forlag A/S 1990. Leif Bork Hansen Søren Kierkegaards Hemmelighed og Eksistensdialektik, Copenhagen: C.A. Reitzels Forlag 1994.

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able to familiarize himself with Hegel’s thought. He returned to Denmark in 1839, and on the basis of his studies abroad he wrote his dissertation, The Isolated Subjectivity in its Most Important Forms,110 which he completed in 1840, a year before Kierkegaard’s dissertation. His official opponents at the oral defense were Sibbern and Martensen. Directly thereafter in Winter Semester 1840-41, he gave lectures on Hegel’s philosophy which became the basis for his book, Popular Lectures on Hegel’s Objective Logic.111 This work was an important source for Kierkegaard’s understanding of Hegel’s logic and the object of criticism in The Concept of Anxiety. In addition, Adler wrote reviews of the works on speculative logic by Heiberg and Rasmus Nielsen.112 After his dissertation, Adler was appointed priest on the Danish island of Bornholm in 1841. Up until this point he had been a full-fledged Hegelian. While many Danish intellectuals in the 1830’s and ’40’s experienced a Hegelian period and then later came to reject Hegel due to one reason or another, this rejection was nowhere so dramatic as in the case of Adler. After his appointment as priest Adler claimed to have experienced a revelation, and this event marked his turn away from Hegelianism. He purported to have been visited by Christ personally in December of 1842. According to the account that Adler gives in the Preface to his collection, Some Sermons,113 Christ came to him one evening while he was writing and dictated sacred verses to him. Moreover, he was commanded by Christ to destroy his writings on Hegel’s philosophy. Needless to say, these claims, once made public, were a great embarrassment to the Danish Church, which after some inquiries suspended and ultimately fired the priest. Adler continued to write on a number of other topics, but his days as a Hegelian and as a controversial public figure were over after this episode. Kierkegaard knew Adler personally: they attended the same school at the same time, and both studied theology at the University of Copenhagen, Kierkegaard starting in 1830 and Adler a year later. 110

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Adolph Peter Adler Den isolerede Subjectivitet i dens vigtigste Skikkelser, Copenhagen 1840. Adolph Peter Adler Populaire Foredrag over Hegels objective Logik, Copenhagen 1842. Adolph Peter Adler “J.L. Heiberg, Det logiske System, a) Væren og Intet, b) Vorden, c) Tilværen, i Perseus Nr. 2, Kjøbenhavn 1838” in Tidsskrift for Litteratur og Kritik no. 3, 1840, pp. 474-482. Adolph Peter Adler En Anmældelse, egentlig bestemt for Tidsskrift for Litteratur og Kritik, Copenhagen 1842. Adolph Peter Adler Nogle Prædikener, Copenhagen 1843, pp. 3-4. See A, Supplement, pp. 339-340.


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Kierkegaard followed closely the controversy surrounding Adler’s suspension and dismissal by the Church. In Hans Brøchner’s recollections of Kierkegaard, he recounts how after the revelation Adler came to visit Kierkegaard some time in the latter half of 1843.114 Kierkegaard was so taken by Adler that he planned a book on him which he began work on in the summer of 1846. This so-called Book on Adler was never published, perhaps out of respect or personal feeling for Adler, and was found among Kierkegaard’s papers and eventually published posthumously. What fascinated Kierkegaard was what he perceived as the obvious contradiction between Adler’s Hegelianism and his revelation, and this constitutes the centerpiece of Kierkegaard’s analysis. I have mentioned here the most important advocates of Hegel’s philosophy in Denmark, but it would be misleading to give the impression that Danish Hegelianism consisted only of these few personalities. Indeed, there were a host of other thinkers in Denmark in the 1830’s and ’40’s whose names were associated with Hegelianism at one time or another, names such as Carl Weis (1809-72), Peter Michael Stilling (1812-69), Andreas Frederik Beck (1816-61), Carl Emil Scharling (1803-77), Christian Fenger Christens (1819-55), Rudolf Varberg (1828-69), Ditlev Gothard Monrad (1811-87), and the brothers Frederik Christian Bornemann (1810-61) and Johan Alfred Bornemann (1813-90). There is a tendency in Kierkegaard scholarship to convey the idea that Hegelian philosophy represented the scholarly status quo at the time and that the Danish academy was dominated by Hegelians. This is indeed sometimes the impression that one receives when reading Kierkegaard himself. But from the very presence of the critics, which constitute the subject of the next section, it is clear that Hegelianism never enjoyed a position of undisputed hegemony in Danish intellectual life. Moreover, apart from Heiberg, one cannot really speak of full-fledged Hegelians, let alone an intellectual community dominated by them. Indeed, while Heiberg exercised a great influence for a time in literary and dramatic criticism, he never held a university position in philosophy. As one intellectual historian concludes, “In spite of Heiberg’s efforts, Hegel did not catch on in Denmark.”115 A number 114

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Hans Brøchner “Erindringer om Søren Kierkegaard,” op. cit., § 20. English translation cited from Encounters with Kierkegaard, tr. and ed. by Bruce H. Kirmmse, op. cit., pp. 234-235. Leif Grane “Det Teologiske Fakultet 1830-1925,” op. cit., p. 363. See also Skat Arildsen Biskop Hans Lassen Martensen. Hans Liv, Udvikling og Arbejde, op. cit., p. 163.

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of Danish intellectuals passed through a brief Hegelian phase, but these phases were usually fairly short-lived, and the individuals involved never formed an organized or coherent school. Thus, one can hardly speak of Hegelianism as being a dominant school in Denmark during this or any other period. This said, I pass now from the advocates of Hegel’s philosophy in Denmark to the critics.

II. The Critics of Hegel in Golden Age Denmark After Heiberg, Martensen and others had introduced Hegel into academic life in Denmark, a handful of anti-Hegelians rose up in opposition to the new trend. Just as those thinkers usually assigned to the category “Hegelians” are not to be conceived as uncritical, unoriginal parrots of Hegel, so also those assigned to the category of “anti-Hegelians” cannot be said to have rejected Hegel’s thought entirely. On the contrary, many of the so-called Hegel critics themselves experienced a Hegelian period. Moreover, many co-opted specific aspects of Hegel’s thought in their mature views, even while criticizing other aspects. Thus, one must be cautious about the use of these general categories. Among those usually classified as anti-Hegelian was Frederik Christian Sibbern (1785-1872), a jurist and philosopher at the University of Copenhagen.116 Sibbern was an interestingly ambivalent figure. He was profoundly influenced by German thought and from the earliest days had a number of essentially Hegelian proclivities, such as the desire to overcome traditional dualisms, e.g. freedom and necessity, individual and state, etc. But despite these seemingly Hegelian views, Sibbern is usually numbered among the Hegel critics in Denmark. He is particularly important because of both his personal relation to Kierkegaard and his role as the towering figure on the Danish philosophical scene of the day. After completing his doctoral dissertation in Copenhagen in 1811, Sibbern made an extended trip to Germany where he came into contact with the leading minds of the age. At this time Hegel had yet to achieve any great reputation, and Fichte and Schelling were regarded as the major figures in the German philosophical milieu. Sibbern 116

See Harald Høffding “Frederik Christian Sibbern” in his Danske Filosofer, op. cit., pp. 97-117. Jens Himmelstrup Sibbern, Copenhagen: J.H. Schultz Forlag 1934. Poul Kallmoes Frederik Christian Sibbern. Træk af en Dansk Filosofs Liv og Tænkning, Copenhagen: Ejnar Munksgaards Forlag 1946.


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returned to the University of Copenhagen in 1813 to assume a professorship. This was the beginning of a long and distinguished university career that would last until 1870. During his career he published major treatises on every area of philosophical inquiry. Despite the fact that Sibbern has been consistently categorized as a Hegel critic, there are many signs, particularly in his early works, that indicate that he had a rather favorable opinion of Hegel’s philosophy. For example, as early as 1822 (i.e. two years before Heiberg’s On Human Freedom purportedly introduced Hegel into Denmark), Sibbern in his On Knowledge and Enquiry refers to Hegel’s Encyclopaedia of the Philosophical Sciences by way of illustration.117 Moreover, he alludes to the Science of Logic, calling it “both profound and penetrating.”118 In 1825 Sibbern anonymously reviewed Heiberg’s treatise on contingency.119 At the time Sibbern was already an established professor of philosophy, whereas Heiberg was just beginning to write philosophical works. This review, like On Knowledge and Enquiry, does not give the impression that its author is an anti-Hegelian. Sibbern briefly alludes to Heiberg’s earlier treatise, On Human Freedom, in order to indicate its continuity with the work under review. The point of continuity is that both works are written from a Hegelian perspective: The author shows himself in the present work, just as in the previous one, to be a resolute follower of Hegel’s philosophy. He is not intimidated but perhaps rather attracted by its difficulty and has read his way well into it. We also believe him to be in a position to be able to give some excellent contributions to elucidate these speculations, which certainly deserve to be studied and pursued, and to make them more attractive than they are in Hegel’s own difficult, rough, and rather unhappily expressed language.120

The tone here is indicative of the measured criticism of the review. Sibbern alludes to Hegel’s difficult style but unhesitatingly agrees that his philosophy is worthy of careful consideration. Moreover, it is clear that Sibbern welcomes Heiberg’s attempts to explain Hegel’s philosophy and to make it better known. In the body of the review Sibbern explicitly lauds Heiberg for his use of Hegel’s speculative methodology. This short review, which shows a very positive disposition 117

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Frederik Christian Sibbern Om Erkjendelse og Granskning. Til Indledning i det academiske Studium, Copenhagen 1822, p. 21. Ibid., p. 82. [Anonymous] Frederik Christian Sibbern “Der Zufall, aus dem Gesichtspunkte der Logik betrachtet. Als Einleitung zu einer Theorie des Zufalls. Von Dr. J.L. Heiberg. Kopenhagen. Verlag von C.A. Reitzel. Druck von H.F. Popp. 1825. 30 Sider med Titelblad og alt” in Dansk Litteratur-Tidende for 1825 no. 44, pp. 689-702. Ibid., p. 691.

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towards both Heiberg and Hegel himself, stands in sharp contrast to Sibbern’s later criticism. In the series of articles published in 1829-30 under the title Philosophical Review and Collection, Sibbern quotes and refers to Hegel on a couple of occasions.121 In one passage he defends Hegel against unjust criticisms. It would be a mistake, he says, to condemn Hegel on account of his dry, indeed graceless language and his difficult presentation without respecting the truly great value which lies in it and which in truth has naturally enough been very attractive to the speculative minds of the day, both the older and the younger ones, especially the latter, who in the richest period of the inner development of the Idea are entirely correct to find something as stimulating, as refreshing and delightful in the most abstract movements in the speculative train of thought as in poetry’s soul-elevating, -expanding, and -liberating effects.122

Here as in the review of Heiberg’s treatise on contingency, Sibbern refers to Hegel’s difficult style, but, while criticizing this style, he clearly is positively disposed towards the actual content of Hegel’s thought. Needless to say, this encomium does not square with Sibbern being a tireless critic of Hegel. In 1838 in the Maanedsskrift for Litteratur, Sibbern published a long review of the first number of Heiberg’s aforementioned Hegelian journal, Perseus.123 This work represents one of the major documents in the history of the Danish Hegel reception. In a letter Sibbern indicates that the long review was intended not just as a criticism of Heiberg’s journal but as a general assessment of Hegel’s philosophy.124 Sibbern’s reputation as anti-Hegelian comes primarily from this work. This review, which was longer than Heiberg’s journal, was later in part republished as a monograph under the title, Remarks and Investigations Primarily Concerning Hegel’s Philosophy.125 In it Sibbern takes issue with any 121

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Frederik Christian Sibbern Philosophiskt Archiv og Repertorium vols. 1-4, Copenhagen 1829-30; vol. 1, p. 5, pp. 25-26fn. Ibid., vol. 2, p. 116. Frederik Christian Sibbern “Perseus, Journal for den speculative Idee. Udgiven af Johan Ludvig Heiberg. Nr. 1, Juni 1837. Kjøbenhavn. Reitzels Forlag. XIV og 264 S. 8. Priis 1 Rbd. 84 Skill. – (Med stadigt Hensyn til Dr. Rothes: Læren om Treenighed og Forsoning. Et speculativt Forsøg i Anledning af Reformationsfesten.)” in Maanedsskrift for Litteratur vol. 19, 1838, Article I, pp. 283-360; Article II, pp. 424-460; Article III, pp. 546-582; 20, 1838, Article IV, pp. 20-60; Article V, pp. 103-136; Article VI, pp. 193-244; Article VII, pp. 293-308; Article VIII pp. 405-449. “Letter from Sibbern to Zeuthen,” September 12, 1837 in Breve fra og til F.C. Sibbern, ed. by C.L.N. Mynster, op. cit., vol. 2, pp. 192-193. Frederik Christian Sibbern Bemærkninger og Undersøgelser, fornemmelig betreffende Hegels Philosophie, betragtet i Forhold til vor Tid, Copenhagen 1838.


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number of things in Hegel’s philosophy, i.e. his logic, his philosophy of religion, and his general philosophical methodology. Sibbern is particularly critical of Heiberg’s criticism of what the latter believed to be the sad state of philosophy in Denmark and of the concomitant belief that Hegel’s philosophy was urgently required to improve the situation. As was mentioned, for all his anti-Hegelianism, Sibbern remained a somewhat ambivalent figure. For example, he had a notion of the harmony of the universe or the idea of God which corresponds rather straightforwardly to what Hegel called “absolute knowing” or “the absolute Idea.” Moreover, he shared with Hegel an organic conception of the world and the notion of a developmental progression of concepts. Given Sibbern’s many positive statements about Hegel and their profound agreement on many issues, one is led to the conclusion that what has been taken as his criticism of Hegel is in fact in large part a criticism of Heiberg. As was noted, Sibbern’s only real anti-Hegelian treatise, indeed the one work from which he received the reputation for being anti-Hegelian, is his review of Heiberg’s Perseus. But this work is primarily a criticism of Heiberg. While, to be sure, Sibbern indicates his disagreement with Hegel on individual points, he is careful to point out to the reader that Heiberg’s presentation of Hegel is often incorrect and that Hegel’s own position is much more reasonable than that presented by Heiberg. Sibbern calls Heiberg a dilettante in philosophy126 and writes in the very first article of the review, “Indeed, I would hope that no one will make Professor Heiberg’s Hegelian statements the foundation for his judgment of Hegel’s philosophy. That would be to run the risk of doing a great injustice to Hegel.”127 The tone of this clearly indicates a respect for Hegel, despite whatever philosophical differences Sibbern might have had with him. Given Sibbern’s early positive statements about Hegel and his later negative ones about both Hegel and Heiberg, one can perhaps infer that Sibbern, like Kierkegaard was particularly incensed at Heiberg’s evangelizing for Hegelianism. That this comes to expression in a critical review of Heiberg’s journal is no accident since the journal was intended as an organ for the promulgation of Hegel’s philosophy in Denmark.

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Frederik Christian Sibbern “Perseus, Journal for den speculative Idee. Udgiven af Johan Ludvig Heiberg. Nr. 1” in Maanedsskrift for Litteratur, vol. 19, 1838, Article I, p. 290. Bemærkninger og Undersøgelser, op. cit., p. 8. Frederik Christian Sibbern “Perseus, Journal for den speculative Idee. Udgiven af Johan Ludvig Heiberg. Nr. 1,” op. cit., p. 335. Bemærkninger og Undersøgelser, op. cit., p. 53.

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Kierkegaard knew Sibbern personally and, as a young man, seems to have been on good terms with the popular teacher. Indeed, for a time Kierkegaard was a regular guest at the Sibberns’ home. Sibbern seems also to have played the role of a sort of chaperon, at times accompanying Kierkegaard on his visits to Regine Olsen.128 With respect to intellectual matters, Sibbern acted as mentor to him during the years of Kierkegaard’s studies. Kierkegaard attended many courses which Sibbern offered on various subjects.129 Sibbern was the first reader on Kierkegaard’s dissertation committee and in this capacity advised the young candidate on the work. During his stay in Berlin, Kierkegaard wrote a letter to Sibbern which evinces both familiarity and warmth.130 Although in time Kierkegaard became estranged from Sibbern,131 he seems to have shared his mentor’s criticisms of Hegel. Indeed, many of Sibbern’s criticisms of Hegel in the review of Perseus prefigure Kierkegaard’s own. Nonetheless there were differences; for example, Kierkegaard clearly came to reject Sibbern’s speculative approach to philosophy and did not share with Sibbern the search for a unity or harmony in the universe. Also classified among the Hegel critics was Poul Martin Møller (1794-1838),132 a poet and professor of philosophy at the University of Christiania (today Oslo) and later, from 1830, in Copenhagen. Like Sibbern, Møller cannot properly be classified as a Hegel critic without qualification, for he was, even more so than Sibbern, ambivalent towards Hegel.133 Like many intellectuals in Denmark, Møller experi128 129

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See Encounters with Kierkegaard, tr. and ed. by Bruce H. Kirmmse, op. cit. 1996, p. 37. Valdemar Ammundsen Søren Kierkegaards Ungdom. Hans Slægt og hans Udvikling, Copenhagen: Universitetstrykkeriet 1912, pp. 77-107. LD, p. 55 / B&A 1, p. 83. Cf also LD, p. 49 / B&A 1, pp. 71-73. LD, p. 51 / B&A 1, pp. 75-77. See also Hans Brøchner “Erindringer om Søren Kierkegaard,” op. cit., § 35. English translation: Encounters with Kierkegaard, tr. and ed. by Bruce H. Kirmmse, op. cit., p. 241. See JP 6, 6196 / Pap. IX A 493. Pap. VI B 201. Pap. X 1 A 446. See F.C. Olsen “Poul Martin Møllers Levnet” in Møller’s Efterladte Skrifter vols. 13, Copenhagen 1839-43; vol. 3, pp. 1-115. Vilhelm Andersen Poul Møller, hans Liv og Skrifter, Copenhagen: Gyldendal 1894. Ludvig Daae “Fra Poul Møllers Liv som Professor i Christiania” in Historiske Samlinger, ed. by Den Norske Historiske Kildeskriftkommission, vol. 3, no. 1, 1908, pp. 1-20. Johannes Brøndum-Nielsen Poul Møller Studier, Copenhagen: Gyldendalske Boghandel, Nordisk Forlag 1940. For Møller’s relation to Hegel, see Arne Löchen “Poul Möller og Hegels Filosofi” in Nyt Tidsskrift, Ny Række 3. Årgang, 1894-95, pp. 447-456. Uffe Andreasen Poul Møller og Romanticismen, Copenhagen: Gyldendal 1973, pp. 17-43. Vilhelm Andersen Poul Møller, hans Liv og Skrifter, 3rd edition, Copenhagen: Gyldendal 1944, pp. 302-316, 359-372. See Harald Høffding “Poul Møller” in his Danske Filosofer, op. cit., pp. 119-121.


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enced a period in which he was infatuated by Hegel. He made a study of Hegel during his time in Christiania, and it was when he returned to Copenhagen in 1830 that his pro-Hegel period can be said to begin. During this time he and Heiberg seem to have been generally regarded as Denmark’s foremost representatives of Hegelianism.134 Indeed, one commentator from the period suggests that Møller was the first Hegelian in Denmark.135 Møller’s course from 1834-35, published posthumously under the title Lectures on the History of Ancient Philosophy, is written in a Hegelian tone. For example, in his Introduction he calls the history of philosophy, “the history of human consciousness.”136 There he lauds Hegel as follows: “With extraordinary genius and unusual learning, Hegel strove to grasp reason’s eternal history in the actual development of philosophy and has executed this plan…with a strength with which no other has executed it.”137 Predictably these lectures owe much to the first volume of Hegel’s posthumous Lectures on the History of Philosophy, which appeared in 1833.138 But later Møller came to reject Hegel. Critical elements are already present as early as 1835 in Møller’s review of Sibbern’s work On Poetry and Art.139 The break was complete with his long article in 1837, “Thoughts on the Possibility of Proofs of Human Immortality.”140 This work was a response to the discussions among the Ger134 135

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See Frederik Ludvig Bang Zeuthen Et Par Aar af mit Liv, Copenhagen 1869, p. 44. Hans Friedrich Helweg “Hegelianismen i Danmark” in Dansk Kirketidende vol. 10, no. 51, December 16, 1855, pp. 825-837, and December 23, 1855, pp. 841-852. See pp. 826-827. Poul Martin Møller “Forelæsninger over den ældre Philosophies Historie” in Møller’s Efterladte Skrifter, op. cit., vol. 2, p. 284. Ibid., p. 285. The three volumes of Hegel’s Lectures on the History of Philosophy appeared for the first time as a part of the first edition of Hegel’s collected writings, which was published between 1832 and 1845 by Hegel’s friends and students. Vorlesungen über die Geschichte der Philosophie vols. 1-3, ed. by Karl Ludwig Michelet, Berlin 183336; vols. 13-15 in Hegel’s Werke. Vollständige Ausgabe vols. 1-18, Berlin 1832-45. Poul Martin Møller “Om Poesie og Konst i Almindelighed, med Hensyn til alle Arter deraf, dog især Digte-, Maler-, Billedhugger- og Skuespillerkonst; eller: Foredrag over almindelig Æsthetik og Poetik. Af Dr. Frederik Christian Sibbern, Professor i Philosophien. Første Deel. Kiøbenhavn. Paa Forfatterens Forlag, trykt hos Fabritius de Tengnagel. 1834” in Dansk Literatur-Tidende for 1835 no. 12, pp. 181-194; no. 13, pp. 205-209. (Reprinted in Møller’s Efterladte Skrifter, op. cit., vol. 2, pp. 105-126.) Poul Martin Møller “Tanker over Mueligheden af Beviser for Menneskets Udødelighed” in Maanedsskrift for Litteratur vol. 17, Copenhagen 1837, pp. 1-72, 422-53. (Reprinted in Møller’s Efterladte Skrifter, op. cit., vol. 2, pp. 158-272.)

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man Hegelians regarding the question of whether or not Hegel had a doctrine of personal immortality. Friedrich Richter (1807-56), in Die Lehre von den letzten Dingen,141 argued that Hegel denied the immortality of the soul as a mistaken belief, whereas the right Hegelian Karl Friedrich Göschel (1784-1861) argued that in fact proofs for the existence of God could be derived from Hegel’s philosophy.142 Other leading figures such as Immanuel Hermann, the younger, Fichte (17971879) and Feuerbach were also involved in the debate. It was around this issue that the schools of right and left Hegelianism separated and took form. In the article Møller claims that nowhere in Hegel’s philosophy can one find a doctrine of the personal immortality of the soul which is in harmony with that taught by Christianity. He thus argues, contrary to the right Hegelians, that Hegel’s philosophy is not consistent with Christianity. Further, he argues, in a way that anticipates Kierkegaard, that speculative philosophy remains incomplete since it consists only of abstract concepts which cannot take account of individual experiences, which remain outside the system. Møller’s rejection of Hegel in this article was regarded by Heiberg, his comrade-in-arms, as an act of treason against Hegel’s philosophy. In an article in the first number of Perseus, Heiberg refers to Møller anonymously as a deserter.143 In response to Heiberg’s comment, Sibbern in his review of Perseus, claims that it was impossible for such an active and original thinker as Møller to remain a Hegelian 141

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Friedrich Richter Die Lehre von den letzten Dingen; vol. 1, Eine wissenschaftliche Kritik aus dem Standpunct der Religion unternommen, Breslau 1833; vol. 2, Die Lehre von jüngsten Tage. Dogma und Kritik, Berlin 1844. Karl Friedrich Göschel Von den Beweisen für die Unsterblichkeit der menschlichen Seele im Lichte der spekulativen Philosophie, Berlin 1835. Johan Ludvig Heiberg “Recension over Hr. Dr. Rothes Treenigheds- og Forsoningslære” in Perseus, Journal for den speculative Idee no. 1, 1837, p. 33. (Reprinted in Heiberg’s Prosaiske Skrifter, op. cit., vol. 2, pp. 41-42.) “I might add I know well that this utterly simple solution to the task will not satisfy everyone, in particular those who are interested in the most recent fermentation in philosophy. But it has still not been shown whether the striving, which is in itself laudable, among these most recent men of this movement, that is, their striving after progress beyond the present circle of philosophy, is not unwittingly a regress; whether the system, which they just left, does not contain what they now are looking for outside it, in which case they would have gone over the stream after water. Yet it does not seem that these deserters would ever come to make up their own corps; for their goal is too indeterminate, for if they also could name something or another for which they are searching, for example, a future world-view, then they cannot say anything about the way which leads there, but it is just that which is at issue in philosophy, which cannot be served by having its property on the moon.”


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for long.144 In a footnote in the Concluding Unscientific Postscript, Kierkegaard himself describes Møller’s relation to Hegelianism: “Poul Møller, when everything here at home was Hegelian, judged quite differently…for some time he first spoke of Hegel almost with indignation, until his wholesome, humorous nature made him smile, especially at Hegelianism.”145 Kierkegaard attended Møller’s lectures and was by all accounts fond of him. He was attracted by Møller’s poetical side and by his love for the Greek and Roman classics. It was Møller’s interest in irony which apparently in part inspired Kierkegaard to write on the same theme for his dissertation.146 Møller’s premature death in 1838 robbed Denmark of one of its potentially greatest minds and Kierkegaard of an important mentor and ally. In 1844 Kierkegaard dedicated The Concept of Anxiety to his memory.147 According to some biographers,148 it was Møller’s criticism of Kierkegaard’s general polemical attitude, that helped the young Kierkegaard out of what has been regarded as his period of perdition between 1836 and 1838. In a draft of the dedication to The Concept of Anxiety, Møller is referred to as “the mighty trumpet of my awakening.”149 Scholars have noted that Møller’s influence on many aspects of Kierkegaard’s thought has been profound,150 and it seems almost inconceivable that Møller’s assessment of Hegel was not important for Kierkegaard’s developing views. 144

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Frederik Christian Sibbern “Perseus, Journal for den speculative Idee. Udgiven af Johan Ludvig Heiberg. Nr. 1,” op. cit., Article I, p. 336. Frederik Christian Sibbern, Bemærkninger og Undersøgelser, op. cit., p. 54. CUP1, p. 34fn. / SKS 7, 41fn. Among Møller’s posthumous works there is a fragment entitled, “On the Concept of Irony,” which was written in 1835 and published in the second edition of his posthumous writings. Poul Martin Møller “Om Begrebet Ironie” in Efterladte Skrifter vols. 1-6, ed. by Christian Winther, F.C. Olsen, Christen Thaarup and L.V. Petersen, Copenhagen 1848-50; vol. 3, 1848, pp. 152-158. Socratic irony is also treated in his “Forelæsninger over den ældre Philosophies Historie” in Efterladte Skrifter vols. 1-3, Copenhagen 1839-43; vol. 3, pp. 363ff. See SKS 17, 225-226, DD:18. See detailed account in H.P. Rohde “Poul Møller” in Kierkegaard’s Teachers, ed. by Niels Thulstrup and Marie Mikulová Thulstrup, op. cit., pp. 91-108. See also Frithiof Brandt Den unge Søren Kierkegaard, Copenhagen: Levin & Munksgaards Forlag 1929, pp. 336-446. Frithiof Brandt Den unge Søren Kierkegaard, op. cit., p. 432. Walter Lowrie Kierkegaard, London: Oxford University Press 1938, pp. 143-149. CA, Supplement, p. 178 / Pap. V B 46. E.g. Poul Lübcke “Det ontologiske program hos Poul Møller og Søren Kierkegaard” in Filosofiske Studier vol. 6, 1983, pp. 127-147.

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One of the most important and the most consistent of the Hegel critics in Denmark was the theologian and Bishop Jakob Peter Mynster (1775-1854).151 Hegel’s philosophy never occupied a central place in his thought, but Mynster did play an important role as a critic of some of Hegel’s Danish followers. Mynster was awarded his degree in theology at the extraordinarily young age of nineteen. He then worked for some years as a private tutor, during which time he read the German philosophers, Kant, Schelling and Jacobi. In 1802 he became a pastor and received his first parish in a rural town in southern Zealand. In 1811 he was awarded a prestigious position as curate in Copenhagen’s Cathedral Church of Our Lady. Thus, by the time the issue of Hegelianism reached Denmark, Mynster was already an established priest and theologian.152 Unlike the other Danish scholars mentioned here, Mynster was of the same generation as Hegel himself and thus experienced first-hand the rise of Hegelian philosophy. He seems to have been suspicious of the new intellectual trend from the very beginning, even if he only spoke out on the subject later. In his autobiography he describes the new movement and his reaction to it as follows: Philosophy had been dormant in Germany for many years; now with Hegel it was again brought to life, but in a form in which it did not attract me at all, regardless of the extraordinary talents the originator had. Since Hegel’s appointment in Berlin, his philosophy had become regarded as the end all, and the arrogance of his followers knew no limits. I was indeed convinced that it would not last long, but I was disappointed in the expectation that it would all be over with Hegel’s death, for on the contrary it only really began to be dominant then.153

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For Mynster’s biography and thought see the following: Jakob Peter Mynster Meddelelser om mit Levnet, ed. by F.J. Mynster, Copenhagen: Gyldendal 1854, 1884. O. Waage J.P. Mynster og de philosophiske Bevægelser paa hans Tid i Danmark, Copenhagen: C.A. Reitzel 1867. C.L.N. Mynster (ed.) Nogle Blade af J.P. Mynster’s Liv og Tid, Copenhagen 1875. C.L.N. Mynster Nogle Erindringer og Bemærkninger om J.P. Mynster, Copenhagen: Gyldendalske Boghandels Forlag 1877. Niels Munk Plum Jakob Peter Mynster som Kristen og Teolog, Copenhagen: G.E.C. Gad 1938. Jens Rasmussen J.P. Mynster. Sjællands Biskop 1834-1854, Odense: Odense Universitetsforlag 2000. Bruce Kirmmse “Piety and Good Taste: J.P. Mynster’s Religion and Politics” in his Kierkegaard in Golden Age Denmark, op. cit., pp. 169-197. For an account of Mynster’s view of Hegelianism see O. Waage “Hegelianismens Fremkomst i Danmark og Mynsters Forhold til denne Retning” in his J.P. Mynster og de philosophiske Bevægelser paa hans Tid i Danmark, op. cit., pp. 104-117. Jakob Peter Mynster Meddelelser om mit Levnet, op. cit., 1884, p. 239.


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Here Mynster indicates his irritation with Hegel’s followers, while admitting his admiration for Hegel himself. But generally he seems to regard his own role as something of a spectator to the whole matter. Mynster’s anti-Hegelian polemics began with an article from 1833 entitled, “On Religious Conviction,”154 in which he took issue with Heiberg’s On the Significance of Philosophy for the Present Age. Mynster concentrated his critique on Heiberg’s interpretation of Hegel’s philosophy of religion, criticizing Heiberg for reading Hegel as a secular thinker. Thus, the criticism is ultimately of Heiberg’s interpretation of Hegel and not of Hegel himself. Mynster quotes Hegel’s Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion in order to show that to Hegel’s mind Christianity is still true and influential, contrary to Heiberg’s claims. (This provides an instructive example for the difficulty of assigning the various thinkers to the one or the other side of the Hegel debate. Here the purportedly anti-Hegelian Mynster defends Hegel’s philosophy of religion against the claims made by the purportedly pro-Hegelian Heiberg.) Shortly after this debate, in 1834 Mynster was appointed bishop and spent the rest of his life in this service. Mynster, who was of course personally acquainted with both Heiberg and Martensen, was the instigator of the aforementioned debate about Hegel’s criticism of the law of excluded middle. The debate began in 1839 with the publication of his article, “Rationalism, Supernaturalism,”155 in which he responds to the claim of the Hegelian, Johan Alfred Bornemann, that rationalism and supernaturalism are antiquated standpoints.156 In his initial response Mynster concentrates on demonstrating that the positions of rationalism and supernaturalism are in fact still relevant in contemporary theology. At the end of his article he notes that the two views, being opposites, cannot both be antiquated at the same time since if the one were antiquated then the other would then be prevailing. Thus, unless the law of excluded middle is no longer valid, then at least one of these views must still be alive and well. In this context Mynster refers to Hegel’s criticism of the law of excluded middle and his claim that opposites can be medi154

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Jakob Peter Mynster “Om den religiøse Overbevisning” in Dansk Ugeskrift vol. 3, no. 76-77, 1833, pp. 241-258. (Reprinted in Mynster’s Blandede Skrivter vols. 1-6, Copenhagen 1852-57; vol. 2, pp. 73-94.) Jakob Peter Mynster “Rationalisme, Supranaturalisme” in Tidsskrift for Litteratur og Kritik no. 1, 1839, pp. 249-268. (Reprinted in Mynster’s Blandede Skrivter, op. cit., vol. 2, pp. 95-115.) Johan Alfred Bornemann “Af Martensen: de autonomia conscientiae. Sui humanae” in Tidsskrift for Litteratur og Kritik no. 1, 1839, pp. 1-40. See p. 3.

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ated. Mynster does little more than sketch Hegel’s position and note his disagreement with it, and with this the article ends. This article evoked the responses, mentioned above, from Heiberg and Martensen, who felt called upon to come to Hegel’s defense. In 1842 Mynster took up the issue again in what purported to be a review article of two related works about the issue by Johann Friedrich Herbart (1776-1841)157 and the younger Fichte.158 Mynster’s article, later for the sake of simplicity given the title, “On the Laws of Logic,”159 examines in detail the laws of identity, contradiction and excluded middle in order to evaluate Hegel’s criticisms. Mynster criticizes the Hegelian principles of mediation and Aufhebung, which eliminate strict distinctions, such as that between rationalism and supernaturalism in theology. He makes a defense of the Aristotelian law of excluded middle against Hegel’s criticism. Despite what seems to be a fundamental disagreement with Hegelianism, Mynster never dedicated a large portion of his energy to combatting it.160 Indeed, he did not view himself as a major critic of Hegel. In his autobiography he describes his overall relation to Hegelian philosophy as follows: [Hegelianism] was the one aspect of the age which left me cold and showed me how little I, as long as this trend lasted, could expect to find an entry with my scholarly efforts, which in no way would fit with the prevailing tone. I felt neither the inclination nor the ability to step forth to battle against the Hegelian philosophy. I only engaged in a few skirmishes, which, however, were perhaps not wholly without effect. Thus, in 1833 on occasion of a remark by Heiberg, I wrote an article, “On Religious Conviction” (Dansk Ugeskrift III, 241); but it did not evoke any further treatises. Only several years later in 1839 when, on occasion of a remark by another author, I wrote “Rationalism, Supernaturalism” (Tidsskrivt for Literatur og Kritik I, 249) did Heiberg and Martensen come forth as opponents, which again occasioned me, albeit after a few years, to write a bookreview, “On the Laws of Logic” (ibid. VII, 325).161 157

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Johann Friedrich Herbart De principio logico exclusi medii inter contradictoria non negligendo commentatio, qua ad audiendam orationem…invitat, Göttingen 1833. Immanuel Hermann Fichte De principiorum contradictionis, identitatis, exclusi tertii in logicis dignitate et ordine commentatio, Bonn 1840. Jakob Peter Mynster “De principio logico exclusi medii inter contradictoria non negligendo commentatio, qua ad audiendam orationem…invitat. Jo. Fr. Herbart. Gottingae 1833. 29 S. 8º, De principiorum contradictionis, identitatis, exclusi tertii in logicis dignitate et ordine commentatio. Scripsit I.H. Fichte. Bonnae 1840. 31 S. 8º” in Tidsskrift for Litteratur og Kritik no. 7, 1842, pp. 325-352. (Reprinted as “Om de logiske Principer” in Mynster’s Blandede Skrivter, op. cit., vol. 2, pp. 116-144.) For Mynster’s view on Hegelianism see Leif Grane “Det Teologiske Fakultet 18301925,” op. cit., p. 360. Jakob Peter Mynster Meddelelser om mit Levnet, op. cit., (1884), pp. 240-241.


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It is perhaps something of an overstatement to cast him in the role of an outspoken Hegel critic, especially given the fact that his antiHegelian corpus amounts to only three essays, and by far the better part of these is directed against Heiberg and Bornemann. What is, however, characteristic of Mynster’s position vis-à-vis Hegel is his consistency. Unlike most of the other thinkers mentioned here, Mynster never had a Hegelian period but rather seems to have rejected Hegel’s philosophy from the beginning and never to have substantially modified his opinion. Kierkegaard knew Mynster from his earliest childhood and was confirmed by him in 1828.162 His father was moved by Mynster’s sermons, which he attended regularly. Kierkegaard himself also went to hear Mynster and seems to have maintained a favorable opinion of him until 1838 when his father died. There is evidence that individual analyses in Either/Or, Philosophical Fragments and the Concluding Unscientific Postscript are intended to support Mynster’s position in the debate about the principle of mediation. Throughout the years Kierkegaard became more and more estranged from Mynster, who embodied for him the prototypical representative of the official Church of Denmark, which in his view departed greatly from the Christianity of the New Testament. Despite this estrangement, Kierkegaard remained on more or less cordial terms with Mynster throughout his life, often paying him visits and sending him his newly published works. Kierkegaard’s criticism was tacit during Mynster’s lifetime, but when Mynster died in 1854, neither politeness nor discretion remained to temper it any longer. In the article entitled, “Was Bishop Mynster a Witness to the Truth,”163 Kierkegaard begins his public criticism of Mynster which became increasingly bitter in a series of essays.

III. Kierkegaard and the Danish Hegelians The gallery of personalities and events mentioned here is important for an understanding of Kierkegaard’s picture of Hegel since he followed the debates in Denmark surrounding Hegelianism in conjunction with or in lieu of reading the primary texts. Thus, the picture that 162 163

LD, p. 4 / B&A 1, p. 4. “Var Biskop Mynster et ‘Sandhedsvidne,’ et af ‘de rette Sandhedsvidner’ – er dette Sandhed?” in Fædrelandet no. 295, December 18, 1854; M, pp. 3-8 / SV1 XIV, 5-10.

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he received was largely shaped by these discussions which were in the public eye at the time. Figures such as Martensen and Heiberg are thus of crucial importance for Kierkegaard’s understanding of Hegel since it was their interpretation of Hegel and their discussion of the consequences of Hegel’s philosophy that Kierkegaard became familiar with. Often what Kierkegaard criticizes as “Hegelian” is in fact a specific appropriation or misappropriation of Hegel by people like them. Likewise, the criticisms put forth by Sibbern, Møller and Mynster, by pointing to controversial issues in different aspects of Hegel’s thought, offered a model of critique for the young Kierkegaard. Thus, an appreciation of the context of the debate about Hegelianism in Denmark that reigned in Kierkegaard’s time is imperative if one wishes to understand correctly Kierkegaard’s view of Hegel and if one is not to assume uncritically that what he says about Hegelian philosophy, as he knew it, is the same as what is to be found in the writings of Hegel himself. In his article, “Hegelianism in Denmark” from shortly after Kierkegaard’s death, Hans Friedrich Helweg (1816-1901) lists the common set of names associated with Danish Hegelianism. Somewhat surprisingly, Kierkegaard plays a central role in his account. Helweg notes the ambiguity of Kierkegaard’s relation to Hegel as follows: “I have heretofore not mentioned S. Kierkegaard in this overview of Hegelianism in Denmark, and yet he stands in the most intimate relation to it, although one can indeed be in doubt about whether one should say that he belonged to it or rather that he rejected it, and to what extent the end of his life was in accordance with the beginning of his career.”164 Here Helweg correctly notes that Kierkegaard’s relation to Hegel and Hegelianism is not an easy matter to form a final judgment about. It is ambiguous, contradictory and deeply differentiated. Moreover, Helweg implies that Kierkegaard’s relation to Hegel changed over the course of his life. This is in accordance with the thesis of Helweg’s article, namely, “Hegelianism came to an end in Kierkegaard, and yet he never completely rejected Hegel.”165 At first Helweg’s comments might strike one as unexpected since one is accustomed to thinking of Kierkegaard’s relation to Hegel as being one that is wholly unambiguous, i.e. as being wholly negative. But after this brief account of the reception of Hegel’s philosophy in 164

165

Hans Friedrich Helweg “Hegelianismen i Danmark” in Dansk Kirketidende vol. 10, no. 51, December 16, 1855, p. 829. Ibid., p. 829.


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Denmark, one can see that this history of reception is itself full of ambiguity. On the one hand, it is almost impossible to assert without qualification that anyone, even Heiberg, Hegel’s most enthusiastic follower, was straightforwardly a Hegelian. So-called Hegelians, such as Martensen, rejected the label with some justice. For virtually all of the purported Hegelians, the period of their pro-Hegel affiliation was short-lived, and, as they matured intellectually, they came to reject Hegel’s philosophy. On the other hand, the purported critics of Hegel, such as Sibbern, were profoundly influenced by certain aspects of Hegel’s thought. Many of the critics, such as Møller, themselves had a Hegelian period. Even the most consistent anti-Hegelian, Mynster, admits that he has great respect for Hegel himself, although he disdains the excesses of some of Hegel’s followers. Given all this, it is highly misleading to speak of Hegel advocates and Hegel critics as if these were two straightforward and unambiguous categories. Instead it is better to speak of the general discussion of the reception of Hegel’s philosophy in Denmark and to resist the urge to place the individual figures into neat categories, which are invariably misleading. The ambiguity in the reception of Hegel’s philosophy in Denmark can be used as a clue for understanding Kierkegaard’s relation to Hegel. Given that most of the leading names in Danish intellectual life of the period were all quite taken with Hegel’s philosophy for a period and then came to reject it as their thought developed further, it seems quite plausible that Kierkegaard as well could conceivably have experienced the same development. His own teachers and mentors, Heiberg, Møller and Sibbern were all highly influenced by Hegel; it seems almost inconceivable that this positive influence would not also have been formative for Kierkegaard. Later when some of these thinkers came to reject Hegel, their criticisms were carefully studied by the young Kierkegaard, who then reformulated them in accordance with his own intellectual agenda. It is thus conceivable that Kierkegaard too came to reject the Hegelian trend in the same manner as the others. All of this points to a development in his thought and not to a single static relation to Hegel.

II. Theology

The Golden Age in an Earthen Vessel: The Life and Times of Bishop J.P. Mynster By John Saxbee The religious heart of Golden Age Copenhagen beat in the breast of Jakob Peter Mynster (1775-1854). This holds true whatever the value placed on his particular legacy to the life and culture of mid-19th century Denmark. By some he will be seen as a major contributor to the flowering of literary and artistic genius which characterized the cultural elite between 1800 and 1850 in the country’s capital and beyond. By others he will be seen as a somewhat cynical manipulator of the intellectual spirit of the age in support of an absolutist monarchy, a class structure and an established Church to which he was wedded by temperament and ideology. By yet others he will be seen as a well-meaning and harmless conservationist motivated by a positive desire to mediate between extremes in the interests of moderation and stability. Indeed, he may have been all these things in turns, and this guarantees him his place as a significant figure in Copenhagen during the Golden Age. The fact that Mynster is capable of being evaluated in such varied ways points to one of the main difficulties confronting those who want to know more about him in order to form an objective judgment about the man and his ministry. Quite simply, we have little to go on except three somewhat prejudicial sources: first of all, Mynster’s own recollections and autobiography; secondly, the memories and tributes of his family and friends; thirdly, accounts of his skirmishes with theological and political adversaries, often written by those adversaries themselves. It is a fact that those who have shown any interest at all in Mynster since his death in 1854 have done so only because of a prior interest in someone else. Most often the prior interest is Søren Kierkegaard, but it could just as well be Oehlenschläger or Grundtvig or Henrik Nikolaj Clausen or Hans Lassen Martensen. The portrait we have of him is usually filtered through tinted spectacles, and it is not easy to get to the man himself.

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In these few pages we will offer an account of his life and career which will attempt to locate him within the ebb and flow of Golden Age cultural, social and theological developments as well as attempting some evaluation of his contribution to Copenhagen as one of the capital’s leading priests, and presiding Prelate. By and large, Mynster’s childhood was not happy. He was born on the 8th of November 1775, but just two years later his father, who held a position of great responsibility in the Royal Frederiks Hospital in Copenhagen, died of consumption. His mother was not alone for long because she soon married Doctor Frederik Ludvig Bang, Superintendent at the same hospital, and he took on the charge of Jakob Peter and his elder brother Ole. Only two more years were to pass before their mother died, also of consumption. From her letters we know her to have been a woman of great piety and perspicacity who quickly recognized her younger son’s inclination towards stubbornness and self-sufficiency. Bang remarried, but again it was but two years before he was alone once more. He took a third wife, a teenager, who was to bear him nine children of whom only four survived infancy. Her domestic inefficiencies resulted in Bang inviting her mother and two sisters to live in and run the house. Within the limits imposed by such a matriarchy, Mynster could not enjoy the full advantages of a normal family life, and the picture we have of him at this time, notwithstanding his mother’s earlier estimation, indicates a small, weak-voiced, introverted youth who desperately needed a stimulus to self-assertion. Furthermore, and of more lasting significance, was Bang’s extreme pietism which cast a bleak shadow over the household with each minor misdemeanor expanded into a grave sin. Mynster was to react strongly against such pietistic stringency when he came to head up a household of his own, and we cannot help but see his later reactions to pietism in 19th century Denmark against the backdrop of this early experience. Bang saw it as his duty to decide categorically upon the professions his charges should pursue, and he judged Jakob Peter to be worthy of nothing better than a living as a country parson, whilst Ole was destined for a brilliant career as a physician. Mynster felt a profound sense of inferiority, and he was constantly in the shadow of his more extrovert older brother. After early years spent under the guidance of home tutors, Mynster was enrolled at the University to study theology, and he took his degree just four years later at the age of nineteen. Reflecting on his early life, Mynster observes that “all the eulogies over the pleasures of

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youth are to a large extent illusory. It is individual hours and days which are projected on to the whole.”1 Certainly there were good times, especially in the company of the likes of Henrik Steffens who formed something of a cultured circle around his brother Ole. He did not lack the wit and biting sarcasm which are so much the ingredients of such student exchanges, but he remained a far more introverted personality when compared to his fellows. Bruce Kirmmse describes him as “an uncertain and insecure youth who was not wholly satisfied by the politics or religion of the radical Enlightenment, but who was also haunted by a feeling that he was unable to give himself wholly to Christianity.”2 His first paid post would do nothing to excite any radical tendencies in Mynster. He was appointed as home tutor to the son of Count Joachim Moltke at Bregentved Castle in central Zealand, with winters spent with the family in Copenhagen. Here Mynster had time to indulge his instincts for study in English, French, Italian and German languages as well as Romantic literature and the philosophy of Kant and Schelling. He also cultivated the mores and manners appropriate to civilized society, and he clearly felt drawn towards the lifestyle of the ruling class which dictated good taste in Copenhagen on the eve of the Golden Age. In 1801 his pupil passed with credit the examinations for which Mynster had been preparing him, and Moltke appointed him to be pastor of the small country living of Spjellerup and Smerup in south Zealand. There was reluctance on Mynster’s part to accept the offer, partly because he was unmarried and so he would feel lonely and unsupported, but largely because he had real doubts about his faith in the simple Gospel which he would be expected to preach and teach as a rural pastor. He had been touched by rationalist critiques of the Gospels and challenges to their historicity. He felt obliged to preach orthodox Christianity but could not do so out of genuine conviction. Still, after Ordination, he took the post and stuck to it, even though confessing to doubts, ambition and vanity nurtured in Copenhagen, and now frustrated in the relatively uncouth countryside. Within two years he underwent a spiritual crisis. Whilst he was commended for his diligence in performing the tasks allotted to him, and for his dedication as a pastor and teacher, his mind was in a state of 1 2

Jakob Peter Mynster Meddelelser af mit Levnet, Copenhagen 1854, p. 38. Bruce H. Kirmmse Kierkegaard in Golden Age Denmark, Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press 1990, p. 100.

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turmoil and, unable to settle on a firm spiritual foundation, he lapsed into the state of deep depression which preceded what has been described as his great “breakthrough.” This religious experience is described at some length in Mynster’s autobiography: Now it happened one day in the Summer of 1803 when I sat alone on my settee, towards evening, reading Jacobi’s writing on Spinoza…there tore through my soul something like a light from on high, and I clearly said: “If conscience is not a meaningless illusion – and in this respect I had no doubt at all – and if you follow it in some things, then you must follow it in all things, without exception, doing and saying what is in accordance with your duty as you recognize it and are able to fulfil it. You must remain quite unconcerned about the world’s judgment, be it praise or criticism. And if there is a God – and neither was I in any doubt about this – and you do not refuse to bow before his will in some things, then you shall do likewise in all things, without reservation, and entirely commit yourself and all that is yours into his paternal hands. Be scrupulous with the talents he has allotted to you and endure without complaint the burden he imposes upon you.”3

Whilst there are good reasons to think that this “breakthrough” was rather less dramatic and somewhat more complicated in its development than Mynster recalled in later life, still it was decisive for his determination to remain in the ordained ministry and to defend orthodox Christianity. Kirmmse follows Olesen Larsen in questioning whether Mynster’s theology ever advanced beyond a kind of baptized rationalism, and a selective reading of his sermons can produce evidence to suggest that “the stoicism and natural religion so characteristic of the Enlightenment” features more prominently than “Pauline notions of…radical transformation.”4 However, even Kirmmse acknowledges that “we must view as sincere Mynster’s sense of having broken with his past and his surroundings.”5 He wrote to his brother “I now possess a truly historical Christ and walk more and more in a personal relationship to him…I have a God and a Savior,”6 and an early biographer enthuses that the breakthrough “rose like a mountain and established itself as the boundary between that which had been, and that which was to come.”7 He stayed at Spjellerup for ten more years even though he was restless at times and hankered after the cultural sophistication of Copenhagen. He simply did not identify with the peasants, and he 3 4 5 6 7

Jakob Peter Mynster Meddelelser af mit Levnet, op. cit., p. 151f. Kirmmse, op. cit., pp. 107-108. Ibid., p. 108. Jakob Peter Mynster Meddelelser af mit Levnet, op. cit., p. 157. H. Schwanenflügel Jakob Peter Mynster. Hans Personlighed og Forfatterskab vols. 1-2, Copenhagen: Det Schubotheske Forlag 1900; vol 1, p. 68.


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found the land-owning farmers arrogantly indifferent to his preaching. He wrote poetry and gained intellectual and societal stimulus from his contacts with Kamma Rahbek who invited him to participate in her literary salon where Peter Andreas Heiberg, together with her husband Knud Lyne Rahbek, were amongst the leading lights. Here he could bask in the reflected glory of stars in the Copenhagen cultural firmament, and he got a taste for it. He was also admired for his intellect and conversation, and he found such appreciation beguiling. The Rahbek’s paper Minerva carried Mynster’s first real literary work – a robust rejoinder to Bishop Boisen’s Plan for the Improving of Public Worship.8 Spjellerup was now becoming tiresome, and Copenhagen beckoned. There he looked forward to mixing with those who were now emerging as the giants of the Golden Age, and there he believed his abilities as a public preacher and speaker would find a more refined public than he found confronting him week by week in his country parish. Conveniently enough the position of Kapellan with Frue Kirke in Copenhagen became vacant and, by using Moltke’s good influence with the King, Mynster was duly appointed in 1811. Somewhat disingenuously, Mynster declared that this was the one and only post he sought after – all the others came and sought him.9 Mynster was now well placed to make his mark and to carve out for himself a place in the relatively small but highly influential circle of haute bourgeoisie who controlled taste and, to a large extent, dictated the socio-political agenda in Golden Age Copenhagen. He delivered his first sermon on the 7th of February 1812, and the press received it well. On the next occasion he had a full Church. More importantly, the Church was full of the intelligentsia and people of influence who could secure his future in both Church and State. Amongst those who flocked to hear him was the Kierkegaard family, and both Peter Christian and Søren were subsequently confirmed by him. In spite of the plaudits, Mynster writes in his memoirs of “a bitter peace” which troubled him from time to time. Schwanenflügel attributes this to Mynster’s disquiet at having to work alongside the rationalist Dean of Copenhagen, Henrik Georg Clausen. But Schwanenflügel is generally more inclined to talk up Mynster’s evangelical orthodoxy than, say, Larsen or Kirmmse, and Mynster’s recol8

9

Peter Dutzen Boisen Plan til Forbedring ved den offentlige Gudsdyrkelse, et Forsøg, Copenhagen 1806. Jakob Peter Mynster Meddelelser af mit Levnet, op. cit., p. 187.

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lections provide no evidence to support such an explanation. We may more reliably look to Mynster’s sense of insecurity and inferiority which had been with him since his youth and which still dogged him in his more reflective moments. A source of great joy to Mynster, however, was his marriage in 1815 to Fanny Münter, the nineteen-year-old daughter of the Bishop of Zealand. Although, when Mynster later became Bishop himself, people liked to joke at his expense about marrying into the job, we need not be so cynical. A very real affection existed between them, and they possessed well-matched temperaments. By virtue of his marriage, Mynster came into contact with the most influential group in Copenhagen, comprising wealthy business men such as Constantin Brun who, with his wife, ran soirées for poets and promising personalities in the capital. Furthermore, Moltke used his influence to secure Mynster’s appointment as a member of the board for the supervision of Grammar Schools. He was now subject to praise from all sides. His sermons were widely read and held in very high regard so that even the German historian F.C. Dahlmann was moved to comment: “We have no one in Germany who can touch him.”10 He was offered the post of tutor to the young Prince Frederik, and also a Professorship in Theology at Oslo. These he declined, but he did agree to teach psychology at the Pastoral Seminary when a post fell vacant there. Meanwhile, in 1815, he obtained his doctorate from Copenhagen University. Bishop Münter had great faith in his son-in-law, commissioning him to prepare a new edition of Luther’s Small Catechism, and to be part of the team charged with producing a revised translation of the New Testament. In addition, he published a treatise on Lessing’s Nathan the Wise, some New Testament monographs and several sermons. In the mid-1820’s he impressed many by his role as mediator in the bitter dispute between H.N. Clausen and N.F.S. Grundtvig. Somehow Mynster managed to attack Grundtvig’s pietism using the tools of Clausen’s rationalism, yet without compromising his reputation as a staunch guardian of Christian orthodoxy. He was clearly demonstrating qualities which were to make him an obvious choice for high ecclesiastical office, and in 1826 he was appointed Court Chaplain at Christiansborg and also Confessor to King Frederik. These duties left him time for some significant theological writing, and by far his most popular work was Observations on the Doctrines of the Christian Faith 10

Schwanenflügel, op. cit., vol. 1, p. 137.


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published in 1833.11 Mynster was now upwardly mobile in no uncertain terms, and when Bishop Münter died in 1830 there was some expectation that Mynster would succeed his father-in-law. Mynster was resistant to the idea, fearing charges of nepotism and genuinely feeling that he was not yet ready for such preferment. There was real relief in the Mynster household when Peter Erasmus Müller was appointed, though the fact that Müller was ailing even then gave Mynster every reason to hope and expect that his moment would not be long delayed. In fact, it was on the 9th of September 1834 that he was named Bishop of Zealand and therefore Primate of the Danish Church. He retained the posts of Court Chaplain and Royal Confessor. It is certain that Otto Laub was echoing the thoughts of many Danes, especially in Copenhagen, when he wrote in his diary on hearing of Mynster’s appointment: “What an excellent development! Who could be Zealand’s Bishop other than he? Who could carry on in the Slotskirke, in preaching to the capital, the students, the priests and the whole country, what he has begun, other than himself?”12 Niels Thulstrup comments: As bishop, Mynster was first and foremost a prompt and meticulous administrator with a sharp eye for both strong and weak points in the people and situations he had to deal with. This quality is clearly apparent in his detailed notes of his visitations in the Diocese….Mynster inspected thoroughly clergy and teachers, congregations and school children, church buildings, rectories and their gardens, school buildings etc. He published three collections of his many sermons at Ordination, from which it is evident that his ideal priest was fundamentally himself.13

In spite of his own sense of satisfaction at his accession to the Primacy, and the obvious good will which greeted his appointment, Mynster’s years as Bishop were not the happiest of his life. Denmark was at war with itself both theologically and constitutionally; and Mynster’s conservative views in the face of Grundtvig’s and Clausen’s extreme demands brought him constantly into conflicts of the times. Whether the issues under debate concerned education, Church ritual, the prayer-book, the separatist “awakenings,” the Baptists, the hymnbook, the constitutional position of the King, the power of the priest’s 11

12

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Jakob Peter Mynster Betragtninger over de christelige Troeslærdomme vols. 1-2, Copenhagen 1833. Nogle Blade fra J.P. Mynster’s Liv og Tid, ed. by C.L.N. Mynster, Copenhagen: Den Gyldendalske Boghandel 1875, pp. 290. Kierkegaard’s Teachers (Bibliotheca Kierkegaardiana, vol. 10), ed. by Niels Thulstrup and Marie Mikulová Thulstrup Copenhagen: C.A. Reitzels Forlag 1982, pp. 24-25.

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conventicles or the correct interpretation of Luther’s Catechism, Mynster by virtue of his office could not avoid becoming heavily committed. We have already discussed Mynster’s inclination towards mediation in Church conflicts, and we have seen how, in the friction which arose between H.N. Clausen and Grundtvig, he was prepared to see the issues in as dispassionate a way as possible, and to condemn histrionics – even when the opinions thus presented had some validity in his eyes. But this is not to imply that Mynster was prepared to compromise his basic beliefs. Before becoming a Bishop, that is before he had to make ultimate decisions, he could afford to enjoy the role of a dispassionate observer. But now it was up to him to promote future Church policy, and it is certain that one of the factors which produced the experience of disillusionment climaxed by his closing of Meddelelser in 1847, must be traced to the failure to materialize of many of his plans for the State Church in Denmark. L. Koch suggests that Mynster, towards the end of his life, failed to keep up with the pace of events and the consequent shifts of opinion and perspective. Insofar as this is in fact the case, it is a direct result of his refusal to compromise. In Schwanenflügel’s words “No one felt more strongly than him that ‘we shall not serve the times, but the Lord!’”14 Thulstrup tends to endorse Mynster’s theological integrity with this summary of his episcopate: On the basis of his general ecclesiastical standpoint, Mynster was a definite champion of traditional values and forms not, essentially, just for their own sake, but primarily because he thought they provided the best defence for the individual’s personal freedom and inwardness, that life in God’s peace, which for him was the goal of his life. It was precisely the fixed forms of the State Church that, in his view, protected inwardness and individuality against party spirit and all outward fashions, which more or less consciously made externalities into something essential. Mynster was not High Church, with the emphasis on office and sacraments. The impression he made was not due to the dignity of his office, but to that of his own manner, which had to some extent been acquired, though not as a mere role. Mynster’s theological, ecclesiastical and political conservatism, for which he is best known by posterity, frequently brought him into conflict with new trends and their spokesmen, but he always stood firm as long as he possibly could.15

However, Kirmmse sees Mynster as motivated as much by sociopolitical considerations as theological ones: in 1834 Mynster’s brilliant rise from insecure orphan to Primate of Denmark had been completed. He had long since become the spokesman of educated, urban upper middle14 15

Schwanenflügel, op. cit., vol. 1, p. 140. Kierkegaard’s Teachers, ed. by Niels Thulstrup and Marie Mikulová Thulstrup, op. cit., p. 25.


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class religious sensibilities: devout, yet tasteful and not excessive. The remaining twenty years of his life were given in untiring service as Bishop of Zealand and Primate of the Danish State Church (later the Danish People’s Church), where he continually defended the Golden Age mainstream’s conservative and apolitical vision of a hierarchical society married to Christianity – “Christendom” – the stable, serviceable synthesis of religion and society that had characterized the absolutist regime….As the influence which the old, elitist, urban veneer of Golden Age Copenhagen exercised over the changing agrarian society of “the common man” became weaker and weaker, a major portion of Mynster’s career consisted of fighting rear-guard actions in order to defend the religious-political status quo which during the later 1830’s and 1840’s increasingly came under attack, often by those within the Church itself. Excepting for the gratifications derived from the tightly knit society of his urban admirers, Mynster’s twenty year primacy was a tempest-ridden and thankless task for him.16

This extended quotation reflects Kirmmse’s overall aim to politicize the Golden Age in order to throw into stark relief Kierkegaard’s own political agenda which issued in the so-called “Attack upon Christendom.” It paints Mynster as primarily conservative with the protection of privileged and elitist minority interests as the controlling objective of his life and work. This is surely to overstate the case. Mynster was more a conservationist than a conservative. In the face of relatively rapid change in Church and State he defended what he believed to be of lasting value against the predations of ideological iconoclasm. He would have sympathized with Lord Falkland’s assertion that “what it is not necessary to change, it is necessary not to change.” But Kirmmse is right to link Mynster’s anxieties about radical politics with his fundamental understanding of what it might mean for the Kingdom of God to come on earth as it is in heaven: “the most striking feature of Mynster’s politics is his simple assertion that ‘a people’s welfare’ – in the sense of orderly social conditions (the absence of crime, etc.) – is quite naturally assumed to constitute a portion of ‘the Kingdom of God in the external sense.’”17 The test of good government was whether it ensured good order in society as a precondition for the establishing of the Kingdom of God. An absolutist monarchy presiding over a feudal stratification of society, and a Church co-terminus with the State, seemed to deliver this, and so Mynster would have no truck with movements from the liberal left nor, presumably, the fascist right which might threaten the King’s peace. Mynster would have seen himself as a moderate man of reason and good sense for whom the more radical elements of Golden Age politics spelled disintegra-

16 17

Kirmmse, op. cit., p. 119. Kirmmse, op. cit., p. 129.

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tion and a degree of lese-majeste against both the King of Denmark (especially his beloved patron Frederik VI) and the Kingdom of God. Of course, it was this very moderation in Mynster which attracted the ire of his critics on the one hand, and the approbation of his admirers on the other. The new situation emerging out of the theological and political turmoils of mid-19th century Denmark demanded an openness to change, an awareness of the limitations of old solutions in the face of new and revolutionary problems which it is doubtful whether Mynster possessed. A new form of government was emerging and with it a new kind of authority which put little value on the traditional structures of power and authority in Church and State. But Mynster could not adapt himself readily to this change, and his very real grief expressed at the death of Frederik VI can be seen to symbolize his heart-felt concern at the passing of the old order and the emergence of new conditions which he felt able neither to accept nor adequately control. When he proposed a vote of thanks to the King for his graciousness in allowing the creation of the Assembly of Roskilde Estates in 1835, he was quickly made to realize that not thanks but demands were the order of the day. On the other hand, he could be seen as speaking for the majority of clergy and people in his battle with the Grundtvigians over revision of the Prayer Book, and, somewhat less surprisingly, a ballot of the Clergy in 1838 on the subject of the loosening of the parish bonds had shown a majority in favor of his advocacy of the status quo. Koch offers the following summary: One might say that around the year 1840, Mynster’s reputation reached its zenith. It is true to say that for 25 years he had been an outstanding priest for the Danish Church as a whole. When he expressed his opinion, the great majority followed him, and he had still never really been at variance with public opinion – not because he had adapted himself to it, but because it had reverently bowed beneath his clarity of mind, his many talents and his overwhelming eloquence.18

This is too effusive, but it does capture something of the high regard in which Mynster was held at this particular moment in his career. From then on, the events of the 1840’s outstripped Mynster’s capacity to hold the line against change, and we see him steadily losing his grip on moderation. This is exemplified by the most bitter dispute of Mynster’s episcopate. The argument centered upon whether children whose parents, out of Baptist conviction, refuse to take them to be baptized should be baptized nevertheless, against the parents’ wishes and beliefs. Myn18

H.L. Koch Den Danske Kirkes Historie i Aarene 1817-54, Copenhagen 1883, p 161.


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ster believed that as Baptists refused to accept children as members of their congregation before they are of an age to make personal profession of faith for themselves, such children must be treated as other neglected infants and be baptized into the congregation of the State Church. The dispute reached a head when Peter Christian Kierkegaard (Kierkegaard’s brother) sought advice on what he should do with the children in his parish of Pedersborg whose parents refused to bring them to be baptized. Although Kierkegaard felt it against his conscience to enforce baptism against the parents’ will, Mynster nevertheless asserted that this was just what should be done. But the opposition proved too strong, with H.N. Clausen, Monrad, Martensen, A.S. Ørsted and even his own son-in-law Paulli standing over against him on this issue. The King himself now began to waver, and finally he transferred his favors from Mynster to the “pro-Baptist” camp. The case finally terminated around the year 1848 with the Baptists being recognized as a valid religious group in Denmark. This move towards toleration thwarted all Mynster’s efforts to repress the lay awakenings and other bids for freedom from bondage to the State Church, which were strongest in the rural areas but also impacted upon the towns and even Copenhagen itself. Although Mynster could marshall a range of theological arguments to support his opposition to populist pietism, there is no escaping the fact that protection of bourgeois class interests entered into the struggle and Mynster’s persistence in defence of those interests does him little credit. The fact that most of the literati of the Golden Age, and the relatively small circle of people who read them, would have agreed with Mynster in his defence of absolutism does nothing to mitigate a sense of disappointment at his failure to show prophetic courage or give a moral lead. This was a low point in Mynster’s episcopate, and it is hardly surprising that, in 1847, he closed his memoirs in a spirit of great despondency. He had allowed himself to be driven into a corner and to become identified with ultra-conservative positions, and the whipping boy of the national-liberal opposition. He hoped not to live much longer. But it is a tribute to his tenacity of will and sense of purpose that he re-opened his memoirs in 1852 declaring “that which occasioned this despondency is now past.”19 He believed that the more intelligent members of society, including the clergy, had seen through the new order of things and were now minded to see that Mynster had been right all along. He read a great deal into the widespread demonstration of good will and 19

Jakob Peter Mynster Meddelelser af mit Levnet, op. cit., p. 254.

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respect shown on the occasion of his Jubilee in the Priesthood (1851), and many sincere tributes were paid to him in the years leading up to his death in 1854. Furthermore, he chose to interpret the readiness of the post-1848 regime to accept the continued validity of the “People’s Church” as essential to the well-being of the nation and the common good of all citizens as a vindication of his own stance. As Kirmmse puts it: “The new liberal and democratic age had found it impossible not to enshrine in its constitution an understanding of the Christian State – of ‘Christendom’ – which expressed continuity with Mynster’s assumptions and with those of the Golden Age.”20 So it was in a spirit of contentment and vindication that Mynster lived through his twilight years. He remained alert and fairly active right up to the end, although his eyesight was failing and in early 1854 Martensen expressed concern about his ability to carry out his duties as required. He died on the 30th of January 1854, after catching a chill, and was buried eight days later. But it was Martensen’s eulogy, delivered on the Sunday between Mynster’s death, and his burial which ignited the spark which Søren Kierkegaard was to fan into a flame. Martensen declared that: “From the man whose precious memory fills your hearts, your thought is led to the whole line of witnesses to the truth which like a holy chain stretches through the ages from the days of the Apostles.”21 We can only speculate as to the probable nature of Mynster’s historical reputation, had Kierkegaard kept his thoughts to himself; but we can be sure that since the launch of that broadside which became known as the “Attack Upon Christendom,” Mynster has been known as the Bishop whom Kierkegaard attacked rather than the Bishop whom Martensen praised. There is not space here to enter upon a full account of the long and somewhat tortuous relationship between Kierkegaard and Mynster which issued in the “Attack.” Suffice it to say that the real point at issue was Mynster’s readiness to admit that being a Christian in Christendom, with its accretions of establishment and respectability, fell far short of the self-sacrificial ideal appropriate to a genuine “witness to the truth.” Relative to such a standard, Kierkegaard described Mynster as “pleasure-loving” and “self-indulgent.” If only he would acknowledge how much he fell short – and it is this quest for an honest “admission” which governs Kierkegaard’s dialectical dance with 20 21

Kirmmse, op. cit., p. 135. Hans Lassen Martensen Prædiken holdt i Christiansborg Slotskirke paa 5te Søndag efter Hellig Tre Konger, Copenhagen 1854, p. 6.


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Mynster throughout his episcopate – then the full Lutheran emphasis on God’s grace could be invoked and appropriately proclaimed by the Danish Primate. But notwithstanding a few hints from Mynster in response to Kierkegaard’s books, which he seems seldom to have fully understood, and a series of rather stilted conversations between Kierkegaard and “my father’s priest,” such an admission was not forthcoming. So Kierkegaard saw no option but to press ahead with providing a corrective to Mynster’s compromised and compromising corruption of Christian ideality. Kierkegaard had his own philosophical, theological and socio-political agenda to pursue, and Mynster was but a player in a drama which Kierkegaard saw more in terms of eternity than time – even a time as rich in drama as the Golden Age. But that helps us to a proper evaluation of Mynster, because there is a sense in which he was always but a player on a stage peopled with literary, cultural and philosophical stars by whom he was consistently overshadowed. Kirmmse believes that he deliberately tempered his assessment of, for example, Oehlenschläger’s poem The Life of Jesus Christ Repeated in the Annual Cycle of Nature in order to maintain “collegiality and cultural solidarity” with the Golden Age “elite,”22 and it does indeed appear to be the case that a degree of sycophancy characterized Mynster from the days of the Kamma Rahbek circle through until the eve of the 1848 “revolution.” His reluctance to make the admission Kierkegaard demanded was based to some extent on an inferiority complex which had dogged him since his days under the domination of Dr. Bang. He was prepared to take on the likes of Grundtvig, Clausen, and thrusting Hegelians, but only to a certain extent, and there does seem to be evidence of his reluctance to pit himself against them to the point of risking his privileged status in Copenhagen’s cultural milieu. He also courted and coveted popularity amongst the clergy and those in Danish Church life he would have considered significant on account of their social or intellectual standing. He enjoyed being a popular preacher in the years before he became Bishop, and we have seen how his desire to be vindicated in the eyes of such people stayed with him until his dying days. This occasionally caused him to be in conflict with the liberal nationalism which marked the spirit of the 1840’s, and he was skilful in his deployment of diplomatic and rhetorical skills in order to minimize damage to his reputation whilst remaining true to his convictions.

22

Kirmmse, op. cit., p. 115.

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All this points to real flaws in Mynster’s character which show him to be very much an earthen vessel at the heart of the Golden Age. His tendency to overcompensate for his sense of inferiority was not helped by a degree of insecurity which might be traced back to his disturbed childhood. He was without doubt a caring pastor, an eloquent preacher, an able scholar, a man of diligence and good taste, but he lacked security and sought that in the patronage of the King, the middle classes and the status quo. In terms of his private life and lifestyle we have no reason to question his son’s estimate of him as one who “demanded nothing more of himself or of others than serious conscientious effort and… opposed comfort and indolence in outward things.”23 Apparently he objected to comfortable armchairs because they “pampered” people! However, the image is rather tarnished by the suggestion that Mynster overindulged his guests with four or five course meals because he was anxious not to separate himself too much from the ruling class in such things.24 This desire to temper quite astringent inner convictions with socially acceptable outward appearances reflects Mynster’s theology which, in spite of the apparent drama of his “breakthrough,” remained finely balanced between spiritual renunciation and social respectability. Also, his attitude to the relationship between Church and State – to “Christendom” – never deviated too far from a cowed subservience on the part of the former and a respectful deference on the part of the latter. By no means least, his attitude to the intelligentsia of the Golden Age reflects his desire to challenge a dilettante approach to Christian discipleship, whilst retaining his place in the favored circle and his influence with the bourgeoisie. His commitment to mediation and moderation made him fearful of all moves towards political and ecclesiastical freedom which he thought would lead to the laity undermining clerical authority and the revivalists threatening social stability. Above all, he fought to defend what Niels Thulstrup has called “the cultural Protestantism of his small homeland, whose provincial capital was ‘The King’s Old Copenhagen.’”25

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C.L.N. Mynster Nogle Erindringer og Bemærkninger om J.P. Mynster, Copenhagen: Gyldendalske Boghandels Forlag 1877, p. 33f. C.L.N. Mynster Nogle Erindringer, ibid., p. 14. Kierkegaard and the Church in Denmark (Bibliotheca Kierkegaardiana, vol. 13), ed. by Niels Thulstrup and Marie Mikulová Thulstrup, Copenhagen: C.A. Reitzels Forlag 1984, p. 10.


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There are those who would argue that when Savanarola asserted that in the early Church the chalices were made of wood and the bishops of gold, but that today it is the other way round, he had the likes of Mynster prophetically in mind. That would be too harsh a judgment. Indeed, Mynster was an earthen vessel whose talent was parasitic on the culture of the Golden Age Copenhagen which fed both his elitist and conservationist instincts. But he can be credited with an extensive literary legacy of works in theology, psychology and philosophy, together with sets of sermons which still have value today. He also saw the Danish Church and State through some difficult years, and succeeded in mediating between extremes when such moderation was in order. He was more ambitious than he was prepared to admit, but his ambition was as much for his city and country as for himself. He lived long enough to see Danish Christendom survive what he would have seen as the worst excesses of Golden Age flippancy and liberal democracy, and to that extent he saw his ambitions realized. It was left to Kierkegaard and others to test at the bar of public opinion the claims of Christendom against the claims of Christ, and the virtues of Mynster against those of “a genuine witness to the truth.”

H.L. Martensen’s Theological Anthropology By Curtis L. Thompson Those who have had the opportunity to delve into the rich cultural life of Copenhagen in the 1840’s appreciate the burst of creativity exploding from that setting. An intriguing figure within the culture of Golden Age Denmark is Hans Lassen Martensen (1808-84).1 If culture is the arena of creative self-expression, then Martensen assumes his rightful place amidst significant contributors to the culture of the Danish Golden Age of the mid-nineteenth century. Like Paul Tillich a century after him, Martensen saw culture’s creativity of the self as closely related to morality’s constitution of the self and to religion’s transcendence of the self. Martensen would have seen his creativity as 1

The first stage of Martensen scholarship included the following: V. Nannestad H.L. Martensen. Nyt Bidrag til en Charakteristik af Dansk Prædiken i det nittende Aarhundredes sidste Halvdel, Copenhagen: Schønberg 1897. Josepha Martensen H.L. Martensen i sit Hjem og blandt sine Venner, Copenhagen: J. Frimodts 1918. C.I. Scharling H.L. Martensen. Hans Tanker og Livssyn, Copenhagen: P. Haase & Sons 1928. Skat Arildsen H.L. Martensen. Hans Liv, Udvikling og Arbejde, Studier i det 19. Aarhundredes Danske Aandsliv, Copenhagen: G.E.C. Gad 1932. J. Oskar Andersen “Biskop H.L. Martensens Ungdom” in Kirkehistoriske Samlinger Series VI, I, 1933, pp. 130-237. The second stage of secondary literature on Martensen includes, besides Thulstrup’s work, the following: Leif Grane “Det teologiske Fakultet 1830-1925” in Københavns Universitet 1479-1979 vols. 1-14, ed. by Leif Grane, et. al., Copenhagen: G.E.C. Gad 1980; vol. 5, Det teologiske Fakultet, pp. 325-499, and especially pp. 328381 which is on “The Era of Clausen and Martensen.” Jens Schjørring Teologi og Filosofi. Nogle Analyser og Dokumenter vedrørende Hegelianismen i Dansk Teologi, Copenhagen: G.E.C. Gad 1974, and his “Martensen” in Kierkegaard’s Teachers (Bibliotheca Kierkegaardiana, vol. 10), ed. by Niels Thulstrup and Marie Mikulová Thulstrup, Copenhagen: C.A. Reitzel 1982, pp. 177-207. Hermann Brandt Gotteserkenntnis und Weltentfremdung: Der Weg der spekulativen Theologie Hans Lassen Martensens, Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht 1971. Robert Leslie Horn Positivity and Dialectic: A Study of the Theological Method of Hans Lassen Martensen, (Ph.D. dissertation, Union Theological Seminary, New York 1969). Bruce H. Kirmmse Kierkegaard in Golden Age Denmark, Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press 1990, pp. 169-197.

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having been made possible and empowered by the divine reality who bestows freedom upon humans while at the same time luring them to potentiate their freedom to its most creative heights by giving freedom a theonomous rather than an autonomous form. The purpose of this essay is to elucidate Martensen’s understanding of the Godhuman relation. I believe Martensen’s theological anthropology holds import for our time and culture as it did for the time and culture of Golden Age Denmark.

I. At the heart of Martensen’s theological anthropology is his distinction between the natural relatedness of God to the human and the religious relationship of the human with God. Throughout his authorship, which spanned a half a century from 1833 to 1883, one finds his view that the human by nature is related to God.2 This God-relatedness is conceived as being metaphysical or ontological in character. However, metaphysical relatedness, or that which is ideally or essentially the case within the human, must be actualized in existence. Thus, ontological gift entails a religious task. Natural God-relatedness presents an ideal which awaits fulfillment in religious relationship. What is true essentially must become true existentially. Just as the more explicit manifestation of religion is centered in a subjective experience of the religious relationship between God and the human being, so too the metaphysical God-relatedness enables one to speak of human beings as possessing natural religious needs, thoughts, and imperatives. For Martensen, then, religion encompasses both of these aspects of the God-human relation. The stages of religion, however, are three and not two in number, for the “religious relationship” aspect of religion may be of a natural or a Christian sort. Therefore, in looking at Martensen’s reflections on religion, it is helpful to differentiate three types of religiousness: Religiousness 1 refers to that essential ontological God-relatedness which is intrinsic to human nature; Religiousness 2

This essay only focuses on some of Martensen’s writings from 1837 to 1841, which I regard as his period of philosophy of religion directed to the public of the academy. This period is to be distinguished from his period of dogmatic theology (1842-50) which is addressed to the public of the church and from his period of practical theology (1851-83) in which his writings are addressed primarily to the public of society. For my understanding of public theology I am indebted to the work of David Tracy. See his The Analogical Imagination, New York: Seabury 1981, especially chapters 1 and 2.

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2 refers to that existential religious (but non-Christian) relationship of the human with God; and Religiousness 3 refers to that existential religious (Christian) relationship of the human with God. This essay will focus primarily on the status of Religiousness 1 in Martensen’s thought. A brief look at the views of religion of two Danish thinkers (in section II) will be followed by a treatment of Martensen’s conception of religion (III) and mysticism (IV), then by a discussion of the impact of these conceptions on his understandings of human cognition (V) and human volition (VI), and finally by a word on the relevance of Martensen’s theological anthropology for today (VII).

II. Martensen’s theological anthropology bears the marks of many influences. As a result of his two-year study trip abroad in 1834-36, Martensen had learned much from the likes of Baader, Schelling, and Daub as well as from his readings in the medieval mystics. Also influential on him were the Danes Grundtvig and Mynster. As early as 1806, N.F.S. Grundtvig in dependence on Schelling defines religion as “the communion of the finite with the eternal.”3 He claims that whether one turns to Greek, Jewish, or Scandinavian history, one encounters a golden age when the gods wandered on earth and when the heavenly and the earthly coincided in one Idea. Grundtvig explains that by “the golden age” he means the actuality of the eternal Idea under the conditions of time, a real state of innocence: That golden age is designated here with the very suitable name the state of innocence; for the earthly must be pure and uninfected in order to be able to flow together with the heavenly. God’s image designates that communion we called religion, for it designated something essential in the human which could not be lost except by the human’s metamorphosis; but as such, it necessarily had to be lost by eating fruit from the tree of knowledge. The communion with the eternal necessarily had to cease as soon as humanity sought knowledge and made the distinction between good and evil, for by this existence was given a peculiar importance, and the human was [existentially], after the first expression of freedom, no longer necessarily what he was [essentially]; but an issuance of choice.4

3

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Nicolai Frederik Severin Grundtvig “Om Religion og Liturgi” in Værker i Udvalg vols. 1-10, ed. by Georg Christensen and Hal Koch, Copenhagen: Gyldendal 1940ff.; vol. 1, pp. 103-139. Ibid., p. 109.


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So here Grundtvig in developing his view of religion affirms a distinction between essence and existence that is the result of the actualization of human freedom. The Fall is the dividing line between Religiousness 1 and Religiousness 2-3 in the early Grundtvig. Even more influential on Martensen was Mynster. Mynster’s theology was clearly grounded in his anthropology. Plum has described the anthropological basis of Mynster’s theology: “It [the arena where God meets the human] revolves around finding the stages on the way forward to faith. In the presentiment of something higher and the longing towards it, the inclination towards God, the need which consists of fear and love in indissoluble connection, God is conceived by reason and conscience; the will grasps that which is known and then we have faith. And faith wants to pass into sight, but that belongs essentially to eternity.”5 Mynster’s theological anthropology can be seen in his little treatise On the Concept of Christian Dogmatics.6 In that work he defines religion as a consciousness of God.7 This religious consciousness resides in the depth of the self. Since there is given a religious cognition and a religious action as well as a religious feeling, the religious is spread equally over the fundamental activities of the self: “the primitive in religion is neither a thought nor a willing nor a feeling, but something higher which has an impact on all these functions and conditions them in a peculiar way.”8 For Mynster, the God-consciousness, or what we are calling Religiousness 1, is in the innermost quarters of the self, and from here it exercises an equal influence on all the self’s activities. “Penetrating, exhaustive thought,” “genuinely moral action,” and “deep, full feeling” do not happen apart from religion, according to Mynster.9 This religion, which consists of a consciousness of God lying in the nature of the human and which is not really communicated but is developed from within the self when the self is awakened to it by external nature, Mynster labels “natural religion.” In speaking of the development of natural religion, Mynster is referring to what I would call the transition from Religiousness 1 to Religiousness 2. Far from wanting to disparage natural religion, Myn5

6

7 8 9

Niels Munk Plum Jakob Peter Mynster. Som Kristen og Teolog, Copenhagen: G.E.C. Gad 1938, p. 132. I am working with the Danish version of the treatise which was first published in German: Jakob Peter Mynster Om Begrebet af den christelige Dogmatik, Copenhagen 1831. Ibid., p. 4. Ibid., p. 4. Ibid., p. 14.

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ster claims that it, like all religion, is revealed. Since he believes that nothing can be known unless it becomes revealed knowledge, Mynster sees natural religion’s natural knowledge of God as being dependent on revelation. Natural religion is not merely a negative phenomenon as opposed to positive religion: it is a religion with a definite content. Neither is it an abstract religion; it is a religion with a living God, with a concrete understanding of God’s providence, power, goodness, and justice as well as of the sinfulness and misery of the human condition.10 Even talk of redemption, he says, “must be granted as soon as the sigh which moves in the whole creation penetrates a human heart.”11 And finally, while natural religion does not form a visible church, Mynster contends that one cannot deny it an invisible church which is widely dispersed and whose members mutually recognize one another. Mynster definitely wants to give natural religion its due. And yet he holds tenaciously to a qualitative difference between natural religion and the Christian religion. The distinction between Religiousness 2 and Religiousness 3 is for him finally the difference between naturalism and supernaturalism, two positions which he regards as being necessarily opposed to each other. The result is an either/or situation: “Either God reveals himself only in nature, in the given powers of things and according to the laws of this nature; or there is received a revelation of God by action in accord with a law which does not belong to this nature.”12 Either nature has to redeem itself, or redemption happens supernaturally. There is no third alternative for Mynster. Martensen disagreed with Mynster, of course, on the question of the possibility of theological mediation.13 Martensen’s whole theological enterprise can be seen as an effort to sublate the contradictory positions of supernaturalism and rationalism. But the impact of Mynster on Martensen should not be underestimated. It was not only Hegel that Martensen saw the need “to go beyond.” He “went beyond” many thinkers but usually only after preserving much of what he surpassed. This is especially the case with regards to Mynster.

10 11 12 13

Ibid., pp. 17-18. Ibid., p. 17. Ibid., p. 21. Martensen winsomely differentiates his position from that of Mynster in his article “Rationalisme, Supranaturalisme og principium exclusi medii” in Tidsskrift for Litteratur og Kritik no. 1, 1839, pp. 456-473.


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III. In his Lectures on Speculative Dogmatics delivered in 1838-39 at the University of Copenhagen, Martensen defines religion as a consciousness of God.14 The regulative notion for Martensen’s logical inquiry into religion is the Idea, where the Idea is understood not in the Kantian sense of an unconditioned ideal of reason that is non-constitutive or unreal and therefore merely regulative, but rather in the Hegelian sense of that final purpose of the teleological process in terms of which a given subject of inquiry is seen in its relation to the totality or whole for reality. In focusing on the Idea, the philosophy of religion is concerned with the historical development of religion, but it also considers its essence: The essence of religion as a definite form of the human’s consciousness of eternity can only be conceptually grasped when it is understood in its qualitative difference from the other forms of consciousness in which the human enters into a relation to the absolute Idea. The absolute Idea is also the object of art, and in its highest determination as the Idea of God constitutes the essential content of philosophy. Art can be and philosophy is a consciousness of God, which is exactly also the general definition of religion.15

At this point it sounds as if Martensen is identifying religion with art and philosophy. He is indeed saying that the philosophical quest is religious and that art may sometimes be so, insofar as philosophy does involve and art may involve a consciousness of God. But consciousness of God can be a totally objective affair; it can be merely an expression of relatedness to God rather than an expression of relationship with God. Therefore, Martensen is speaking here of Religiousness 1 when he equates religion with philosophy and art. Religion proper, however, i.e. Religiousness 2 and 3, is a really existing spiritual relationship: But its [religion’s] qualitative difference from art and philosophy consists precisely in the fact that these forms of consciousness contain the Absolute in its infinite objectivity, while religion is the infinitely subjective and real existence of the Idea of God in the human. Religion is not merely a consciousness of and knowledge of that fundamental relation which exists between God and the human, but it is this fundamental spiritual relation itself as really existing. Thus, as the human in religion stands not merely in an ideal but existential relation to the deity, religion is considered as the essence of human nature or as that which makes the human human.16 14

15 16

Forelæsninger over “Speculativ Dogmatik,” undated lectures from 1838-39 at the University of Copenhagen, in Pap. II C 26-28, in Pap. XIII, p. 8. Pap. XIII, p. 7. Pap. XIII, p. 8.

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With this statement another question arises. The last sentence in the above quotation gives reason to pause, for it is as though Martensen is saying that the existential relationship is to be equated with essential humanity. This would contradict our designation of Religiousness 1 as the locus of essential human nature. This difficulty can be clarified by noting that Religiousness 1 does refer to the essential nature of the human. But were that metaphysical God-relatedness never realized, were Religiousness 2 and 3 never made manifest, then the ideal would be a meaningless abstract affirmation about the human. This is not the case, however; the religious relationship does transpire as the human worships the divine. Therefore, because of the explicit manifestation of religiosity, language about the essential religious nature of the human can be regarded as meaningful. The human becomes what it essentially is when it enters into the religious relationship. Martensen’s statement in the above quotation merely affirms how the manifestation of Religiousness 2 and 3 substantiates his claim about Religiousness 1. Because Religiousness 1 or the natural relatedness of God to the human is relatedness within the self, it inevitably receives expression in a culture’s art and philosophy. These forms of consciousness reflect the metaphysical or ontological significance which Martensen claims for religion. Religion is therefore more than a psychological phenomenon in the self. That is why Martensen believes the qualitative difference between religious and aesthetic feelings must be demonstrated. This is done not merely by describing religion but by showing “its ground and possibility in the relation between the Idea of God and the human self.”17 Description focuses only on the explicit manifestations of religion which make their appearance in Religiousness 2 or 3. Such description remains silent about that innate religious sense which is the human’s natural possession. At the same time, the inclusion of Religiousness 1 within the religious spectrum is no reason to blur the distinction between the human’s innate sense for the eternal and that experiential relating in which one enters into an I-Thou encounter and is thereby on the way towards becoming an authentic personality: “Art and philosophy present the Idea of God in its objectivity, but religion is its real subjective existence in the human. In the former I relate objectively to the Idea of God (that is, I contemplate the Idea as it is in-and-for-itself without any relations); in the latter I relate subjectively (that is, I ask about its relation to me).”18 It is this 17 18

Pap. XIII, p. 8. Pap. XIII, p. 9.


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personal subjectivity of religiosity which distinguishes Religiousness 2 and Religiousness 3 from Religiousness 1. But objectively, the divine is metaphysically present and available to all.

IV. The contours of Martensen’s view of religion can be further filled out by turning to his book on medieval mysticism from 1840.19 Threefourths of that work is devoted to a phenomenology of the mystical consciousness. We cannot deal in depth with the fruits of that study, but even a cursory summary will prove beneficial in our effort to comprehend Martensen’s theological anthropology. The essence of mysticism, according to Martensen, can be characterized in terms of the three moments of mystery, revelation, and the highest Good or virtue. The first two of these moments apply most directly to our concerns. The dialectic of mystery and revelation is central to the mystical consciousness. Revelation is given expression by means of finite representations and forms, but the mystic claims that such images and symbols finally veil the innermost mystery. Mysticism cannot rest content with God as “God,” but strives to get behind the symbol of God to that divine reality who is the very ground and possibility of personality. The mystic desires to move from the God of Religiousness 3 to the God of Religiousness 1. The mystical consciousness is finally uncomfortable with that participation in the divine which comes through religious symbolism; it instead must seek after that to which the symbol points. The highest name which the mystic gives God is “essence,” and the mystic’s highest purpose is the intuition of that essence.20 Since this essence is equivalent to pure nothing and the divine nothing is one with infinite freedom it can be said that essence, non-picturability, freedom, and pure nothing are roughly equivalent names for God which are repeatedly encountered in the mystical writings. The mystical lies in the immediate nature of the mystery which has not disclosed its revelation. This indeterminate mystery is posited as

19

20

Hans Lassen Martensen Mester Eckart. Et Bidrag til at oplyse Middelalderens Mystik, Copenhagen 1840. (English translation: Meister Eckhart: A Study in Speculative Theology in Between Hegel and Kierkegaard: Hans L. Martensen’s Philosophy of Religion, tr. by Curtis L. Thompson and David J. Kangas. Atlanta: Scholars Press 1997, pp. 149-243, abbreviated BHK.) BHK, p. 178 / Mester Eckart, p. 41.

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the true mystery, a union with the hidden God is posited as the highest blessedness: “In this esoteric stillness mystical consciousness, with its holy silence, merges with the ineffable and the inexpressible which transcend all sense and understanding.”21 The soul comes into a true unity with this mystery “only through ecstasy,” “not only sight and hearing but also all articulated thought passes out of consciousness.”22 But the dialectic between mystery and revelation is unending, and so the mystic is unable to find rest in the mystery: At the heart of the infinite pleroma mystical consciousness longs again after determinate content, and in order to find this it must give itself over to the kingdom of the Trinity which includes God’s revelation in the world and God’s coming to the salvation of humanity. Nevertheless, just as mystical consciousness arrives in the sphere of revelation, it once again longs for mystery; it runs once again through the entire via negationis in order to penetrate the pure nothing, and so forth.23

So the mystery discloses itself as revelation in order to be true mystery, and the soul continually oscillates between the hidden and revealed God. The mystery/revelation dialectic is nothing other than an oscillation between Religiousness 1 and Religiousness 3. In this view Martensen believes mysticism does not err. For mystery, he says, “is the ground for all actual existence…life’s invisible root and secret, and all religious and speculative interests aim at living in this and raising this up into consciousness.”24 Mysticism’s error comes, however, in considering the immediate, hidden mystery as the highest. Martensen’s position is clearly stated when he writes: “Only the expanded and developed mystery, i.e. revelation is the truth. Revelation contains the difference, negation, and contrast which are the conditions for all consciousness and knowledge…. The concepts mystery and revelation are not true outside each other, but only within one another.”25 The mystic considers the contrast merely as a denial, as a limitation of the excessive fullness of the divine essence, and therefore believes this denial or limitation ought to be denied. Mysticism forgets the very thing it enjoins in its moments of illumination, namely, that the divine essence gains its living certification only through contrast. Martensen believes this contrast ought to be affirmed, since apart from contrast and difference life would not take 21 22 23 24 25

BHK, p. 183 / Mester Eckart, p. 50. BHK, p. 184 / Mester Eckart, p. 51. BHK, p. 184 / Mester Eckart, p. 51. BHK, p. 184 / Mester Eckart, p. 52. BHK, pp. 184-185 / Mester Eckart, p. 52.


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place, but all would lie in a desolate stillness in which neither human nor divine spirits moved. The life of God, world, and creatures is the result of difference within the inner reality of the divine essence itself; that essence has creatively brought forth an other to which it can communicate itself.26 Martensen contends, Only the personal God, i.e. the God who reveals the divine essence both to God’s own self and also to God’s creation, is the true God. A mystery without spirit and revelation is a contradiction, an invisible beauty, an ineffective good, an unknown truth, a light without eyes….Even as mystery and revelation are eternally united in the divine Spirit, they must become thus in human spirit, because human spirit has been set as a locus of divine revelation.27

In true religiosity (Religiousness 2 and 3) there is a union with God in God’s revelation. And in that true union is found genuine difference, the difference between God and the created spirit, a difference witnessed to in the sacred relation of conscience and experienced in the personal union of love. Martensen claims true religiosity accepts its finitude and allows its immediate God-relatedness (Religiousness 1) to be transformed into a relationship with God based on mediation or revelation (Religiousness 2 and 3). Unlike mysticism, true religiosity neither seeks a false immediacy nor strives to throw away all concepts in an effort to escape finitude.

V. Having examined Martensen’s conception of religion, we can ask about its anthropological implications. In particular, how does Martensen’s view of religion affect his understanding of human cognition and volition? Our young Danish intellectual addresses himself to the epistemological part of this question in his dissertation, The Autonomy of Human Self-Consciousness in Modern Dogmatic Theology.28 This work begins with a discussion of the internal relatedness of philosophy and theology. And the major portion of it is devoted to criti26 27 28

BHK, p. 185 / Mester Eckart, p. 53. BHK, p. 185 / Mester Eckart, p. 53. Hans Lassen Martensen Den menneskelige Selvbevidstheds Autonomie i vor Tids dogmatiske Theologie, tr. from the 1837 Latin original into Danish by L.V. Petersen, Copenhagen 1841. (English translation: The Autonomy of Human Self-Consciousness in Modern Dogmatic Theology in Between Hegel and Kierkegaard: Hans L. Martensen’s Philosophy of Religion, tr. by Curtis L. Thompson and David J. Kangas, op. cit., pp. 73-147.)

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cizing the autonomic systems of Kant’s moral theology and Schleiermacher’s feeling theology as one-sidedly subjective, together with a brief criticism of Hegel’s objective system of autonomy. However, in his early methodological comments Martensen sets forth a sketchy but provocative proposal for a religious understanding of cognition. He develops his God-grounded epistemology out of the theoretical dimension of conscience as a co-knowing of God and the human. The proper epistemology Martensen believes is one that acknowledges the human’s fundamental relation. The metaphysical Godrelatedness of Religiousness 1 is claimed to be really present within the human in the double sense of being present as a real part of the self’s givenness and as making present for the self an ideal to be realized. In short, Martensen’s proposal is that Religiousness 1 is the grounds for human cognition. Martensen states, “the most intense and original moment in the God-consciousness, that from which this, so to speak, draws its power and sustenance, is the conscience.”29 A transmoral meaning is bestowed on this concept of the conscience. It is a person’s awareness that existence is naturally, internally related to God. Conscience is that “light in which the human is revealed as God’s creature.”30 Much more than a vague feeling, it yields a clear knowledge that is equally human and divine.31 Conscience is related to but not identical with consciousness. Thus, room is left for an autonomous subject which, if it rightly understands itself, will acknowledge its dependence on the divine: in the light of the conscience, [consciousness] knows the very concept of God’s absolute knowledge. However, it does so in such a way that in the most intimate union it separates itself from the latter. By recognizing the validity of this divine knowledge it comes to realize the thought that it does not have its knowledge of God from itself, but from the knowing God; it separates this consciousness of God from all others and grants it apriority and superiority.32

Human rationality is dependent upon that light which shines from the natural relatedness of God to the human. This is how Martensen can say, “the conscience constitutes the rational creature as rational, makes the human human, and in this way must be said to make up his or her essence.”33 Not reason but the conscience (religion) is the char29 30 31 32 33

BHK, p. 81 / Autonomie, p. 9. BHK, p. 81 / Autonomie, p. 10. BHK, pp. 80-81 / Autonomie, pp. 9-10. BHK, p. 81 / Autonomie, p. 10. BHK, p. 81 / Autonomie, p. 10.


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acteristic mark of the human creature. The human is properly understood when viewed as homo religiosus. This means that the religious dimension of all rational activity should be acknowledged. The reality of Religiousness 1 calls for the recognition of the basic God-relatedness of the human as a limit conditioning all human knowledge. Just as every subject-matter has limits which should be acknowledged, “so there is also placed in us – in that very knowing of our knowledge – this eternal limit, which is to be viewed as that which conditions the cultivation of the true concept of our knowledge.”34 Epistemology is properly conceived when the human acknowledges the difference between the primitive knowledge of God and the secondary nature of human knowledge. Such a religious epistemology will be transcendental in the genuine sense of recognizing the real conditions of possibility for knowledge as including the illuminating divine light and the limit-character of that condition. Martensen’s utilization of a right-wing interpretation of Hegel’s philosophy has yielded a transcendental epistemology which, unlike Kant’s critique of speculative thinking, clears the way for Religiousness 2 and 3 and thus attempts to secure a basis for speculation.

VI. Martensen’s conception of religion also informs his understanding of human volition. This understanding is first worked out in his Outline to a System of Moral Philosophy.35 The Outline is an extremely compact and yet rich abstract of the structure of Martensen’s moral philosophy as it had developed up to 1841. In a long preface, Martensen makes a case for the value of Hegel’s system as a contribution to ethics. This is not inappropriate, for the Outline is a very Hegelian document both in its form (triadic divisions abound) and in its content (Hegel’s view of morality as expressed in his Philosophy of Right has been very influential). And yet, Martensen here creates his own “system” of freedom. The main body of the work lays out the systematic

34 35

BHK, p. 82 / Autonomie, p. 11. Hans Lassen Martensen Grundrids til Moralphilosophiens System. Udgivet til Brug ved academiske Forelæsninger, Copenhagen 1841. (English translation: Outline to a System of Moral Philosophy, in Between Hegel and Kierkegaard: Hans L. Martensen’s Philosophy of Religion, tr. by Curtis L. Thompson and David J. Kangas, op. cit., pp. 245-313.)

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implications of his concise proposal for a religious understanding of volition which is articulated at the outset of the work. It is that proposal which most concerns us. The primary presupposition of Martensen’s moral philosophy is the human free will. His understanding of volition is built around the distinction between the essential will and the subjective will of the human. Three passages from the Outline provide the substance of Martensen’s view of human volition. The first passage establishes the distinction: The essential will has an eternal, universal content, is destined only toward its immanent end or toward its Idea and is consequently its own necessity. As essential, freedom is at the same time still not determined as actual. It becomes actual only when it passes over into the human’s subjective will, when the human’s universal will becomes one with its individual will. But freedom is a real possibility for the human, a possibility which with inner necessity brings along with it its actuality. The human must realize its essential freedom, but that necessity whereby the human is situated is no physical necessity but a metaphysical and moral one.36

Here we find then that Religiousness 1 includes the essential will of the human as that purely metaphysical quality it possesses as a free spirit.37 Due to no merit on its own part but by virtue of its essential will, every member of the human race has the will to do the good, the rational.38 Yet, this good will only receives a moral and personal value when the human’s subjective will is penetrated by rationality.39 Religion’s testimony about the will is twofold: it testifies to the propensity for the subjective will to become evil while at the same time bearing witness to the goodness of the human’s essence (the essential will) in that he or she is created in the image of God. In the second passage Martensen claims the nature of the human will entails the ability to deny itself: The will could not experience an actual development of freedom if it were not possible for it to negate its essence. The subjective will must be able to separate itself from the essential, must be able to fall away from the Idea of freedom. The will must therefore determine itself as freedom of choice or as the ability to choose between opposite ends. The antinomy between the proposition that the will can only determine itself toward its Idea, and the opposite, that it can also negate it, is annulled by the recognition that the latter contains the negative condition for the actuality of the former. Only by overcoming the possibility of its opposite can freedom actually substantiate itself.40

36 37 38 39 40

BHK, p. 258 / Grundrids, p. 9. BHK, p. 258 / Grundrids, p. 9. BHK, p. 258f. / Grundrids, p. 89f. BHK, p. 259 / Grundrids, p. 10. BHK, p. 259 / Grundrids, p. 10.


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Of course, in realizing its freedom, the will has to enter into a system of conditions and boundaries. The limits presented by the givenness of the external world and one’s own individuality are necessary for the will to be definite.41 The will is not unfree or bound simply because it is finite; however, that which is essentially free is bound as a phenomenon in time “insofar as it still has its limit outside itself and has not taken this up into itself as an inner immanent limit, as its own rational necessity.”42 Therefore, a victory must be gained over the will’s outer and inner natural necessity in order for it to become in existence what it is in essence. Here the influence of Kant’s practical philosophy is apparent. Martensen’s theological anthropology incorporates a Kantian understanding of the rational nature of the human but subordinates this intrinsic rationality to the religious nature of the human creature. The third passage from Martensen’s Outline depicts human volition as grounded in God: As the human’s free will cannot be thought of as absolutely presuppositionless but presupposes the creative will of the Godhead as its innermost ground of determination, a new antinomy appears, namely, the antinomy between the dependence of human freedom on God and its own unconditional self-determination. But this dependence must be seen as freedom itself. That is to say, as the human will is essentially determined by the creative will, it must realize this; but since it herein is determined as its own selfdetermining, it is determined as the absolutely free. As the human does God’s will, the human in addition carries out its own essential will.43

Here Martensen virtually identifies the essential will of the human with the will of God. This prompts two comments. First, this theological move is typical of the way the distinction between the essential and the existential serves Martensen time and again. It is the basis for his discussion of such themes as grace in relation to freedom, the comical, the person of Christ, law and duty, the Fall, guilt, etc. In Martensen’s theology, Religiousness 1 is a veritable fountain out of which flows mystery, essential knowledge, essential freedom, in short, all things divine in origin. Second, the identification of the essential will of the human with that of God points to the social nature of the human. Essential humanity implies the concept of the race for Martensen. The Good, as the union of the human will with the divine, is the human’s purpose; it is in relation to this Good that the human is 41 42 43

BHK, p. 259 / Grundrids, p. 11. BHK, p. 259 / Grundrids, p. 11. BHK, p. 260 / Grundrids, p. 12.

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determined as personality or as the freely willing I.44 Martensen develops his system of moral philosophy around the notions of “The Good as Law,” “The Good as Ideal,” and “The Good as Kingdom of Personality.” The last of these three sections especially points out how central to Martensen’s system the social character of the essential will is. The human is essentially a communal creature. Thus, just as Martensen’s understanding of human cognition (V above) resolves the epistemological antinomy between thought and being, so his understanding of human volition resolves the ontological antinomy between individuality and sociality.

VII. Kierkegaard’s polemic against Martensen has led many scholars to dismiss the latter as second-rate thinker whose infatuation with Hegel’s system and capitulation to Danish culture more than qualified him for the strictures which Kierkegaard sent his way. It is true that not all of Martensen’s reflections are worth being rehearsed, and some should be outrightly rejected. Martensen was a bourgeois Christian with a speculative bent, and no hermeneutics of retrieval can erase that fact. But he was also a fascinating blend of the romantic, the metaphysician, the mystic, the ethicist, and the churchperson all rolled into one. And many of his thoughts, especially those which support the structure of his theological edifice, should be retrieved. Some of the major representatives of neo-orthodoxy evidently learned much from him, and so can those who are convinced that a post-Hegelian return to German idealism may prove a rich resource for contemporary theological formulation. Paul Tillich is one from our era who seems to have benefited from a study of Martensen. During a visit to Denmark in 1954, Tillich communicated to Regin Prenter that of all theologians, he felt the rightwing Hegelians Martensen and Marheineke stood closest to his theology.45 This statement may be construed as a less than serious remark made to flatter a host, but a comparison of the two men’s theologies suggests otherwise. The structure of Tillich’s theology is very similar to that of Martensen, even if Tillich’s thought is much more nuanced. 44 45

BHK, p. 266 / Grundrids, pp. 23-24. Hermann Brandt Gotteserkenntnis und Weltentfremdung: Der Weg der spekulativen Theologie Hans Lassen Martensens, op. cit., p. 257, n. 16.


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While the creative achievement of Tillich’s systematic theology rests secure, one is able to discern possible points of dependence on Martensen. What we have called Religiousness 1 looks very similar to what Tillich designates as Reason.46 The distinction between essence and existence is central to the structure of each man’s thought. Furthermore, there seems to be a parallelism in the way each uses such concepts as conscience, ecstasy, mystery, revelation, freedom, destiny, imaginative intuition, faith, symbol, and, not least, theonomy. This is not to mention the Christological similarities and their parallel developments of the doctrine of the Trinity. It may be that some of these parallelisms are coincidental and attributable to the fact that both thinkers drew upon the same idealistic world of thought. However, it is difficult to discount all the similarities. Tillich, it seems, should be credited with a good sense of judgment in his selection of theological conversation partners. Martensen’s anthropology, surprisingly enough, also bears a strong resemblance to that of Ludwig Feuerbach. Both affirm the concept of essential humanity as well as the reality of the human’s alienation from that essence. The issue dividing them is one which still divides many theists and atheists: the nature of the relation between essential humanity and God. Martensen’s theological anthropology is committed to such themes as the immanence and self-limitation of God, the reality of human self-determination as a divine determination, the call to God-grounded autonomy, and the goal of a God-centered community. Martensen’s difference with Feuerbach finally lies in a disagreement over the status of a central human faculty which we have not discussed above, namely, that of the imagination. Feuerbach holds that theological language is merely mythological representations which flow from the human’s naturally religious imagination and are projected onto the essence of humanity. Philosophical reason, however, he says exposes these imaginative representations as the projections they actually are. Martensen, by contrast, holds that talk of God employs imaginative representations and that such poetic expressions spring from the intuitive imagination of the human. However, he assesses the religious imagination positively in regarding it as a means by which the divine reality discloses itself. Imaginative intuition, for Martensen, possesses an integrity of its own in that it gives expression to a living deity which cannot be captured by or reduced to concepts. 46

It also seems that if one equates Religiousness 1 with Religiousness 3, then one has the theological position of Karl Barth.

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Martensen had a vision of reality in which God was viewed as being in the most intimate union with the human. He consistently maintained an infinite qualitative difference between God and the human, but such difference was understood as transpiring within a basic relatedness. Analogy provided the framework for Martensen’s negative dialectics. Martensen’s vision, if not all the reflections born from it, warrants recapturing. Not that Feuerbach’s warnings should not be heeded, and so too those of his fellow masters of suspicion – Marx, Nietzsche, Freud, and yes, most of all Kierkegaard. But the critical spirit cannot sustain life, only refine it. The human needs a vision, a view of the whole. Martensen offers one in which both God and the human are given a substantial place. He claims such a view makes better sense of reality than those which leave out either God or the human or finally view these two as disjunctive realities. Martensen has bequeathed a worthy theological vision of reality for those who would learn from it. For criticism of life lived within that vision, however, one had best turn to other thinkers for assistance.

Martensen’s Dogmatics and its Reception By Niels Thulstrup If one were to point to a single work as representative of the main trend of Danish theology in the 19th century, one’s choice would necessarily fall on Hans Lassen Martensen’s Christian Dogmatics.1 This work represents an attempt which was better intended than realized to found and systematically describe an interpretation of Christianity which was culturally open and harmless, well suited to confirm the general complacency, invariably soothing, and in no way disquieting. Where Kierkegaard’s works have proved to retain the topicality of true classics, those of Martensen seem hopelessly antiquated; their own society, however, would have arrived at the opposite judgment. Martensen’s Dogmatics was translated into English by William Urwick with the title Christian Dogmatics.2 Urwick’s translation of Martensen’s work, which had appeared in 1849 in Denmark, was undertaken on the basis of the German translation. Unlike the Danish editions of the work, of which the last to be published appeared in 1905, the English edition was provided with an index. Since Martensen’s work is already available in English it would be superfluous to examine it in detail here, so we shall confine ourselves to a short description, which follows in essentials the most thorough account of Martensen’s theology as a whole yet to appear, namely Skat Arildsen’s monograph.3

1

2

3

Hans Lassen Martensen Den christelige Dogmatik, Copenhagen 1849, abbreviated CD. Hans Lassen Martensen Christian Dogmatics, tr. by William Urwick, Edinburgh: T.&T. Clark 1866. Skat Arildsen Hans Lassen Martensen. Hans Liv, Udvikling og Arbejde, Copenhagen: G.E.C. Gads Forlag 1932.

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I. Description of Martensen’s Dogmatics The main conception in Martensen’s Christian Dogmatics is that Christianity is “the religious relation to God,” which is more closely defined as “a relation of existence – a relation of personal life and being to God.”4 This relation is expressed in the conscience, which Martensen, following Franz von Baader, understands as man’s original and palpable common knowledge, that is, knowledge shared with God (conscientia) concerning one’s personal and existential relationship to him. This relationship encompasses the whole of man’s spiritual life: feeling, thought, and will. The fundamental religious emotion is the feeling of unlimited respect, a feeling which is the precondition for understanding religious life. The religious life is maintained by both thought (reason) and fantasy (view, conception). Martensen develops these ideas as follows: Religious cognizance of God is not knowledge in the form of abstract thought; but the idea of God assumes shape in a comprehensive view of the world, and of human life in its relation to God, a view of heaven and earth, nature and history, heaven and hell. Piety cognizes not merely by thoughts growing out of the relations of conscience and confined to those relations, but also by means of the mental picture which springs from the same relations…we denominate not only the reason, but also the imagination as the organ of religious perception.5

In feelings and knowledge it is God who seeks man, whereas in man it is the will which responds to God’s search; all three are reciprocally related and, taken together, comprise “faith, the central point of union.”6 The religio-existential relationship entails, according to Martensen, coherent theological thought, a variety of Christian “speculation” whose foundation is the unconditional unity of the objective Scripture and Church principles, understood as the formal principle, and the Christian principle of subjectivity, understood as the material principle. The objective yardstick, that is, the canon, of all Christianity is Christ, who is present in the Church. The original, valid, and sufficient portrait of Christ is to be found in the New Testament. The mediator between Scripture and faith is the Church and its tradition. Martensen further asserts that dogmatics is both ecumenical and confessional; moreover, it is also necessary to take philosophy into account, since Christian knowledge, understood as being in the world, ought to par4 5 6

CD, § 4. CD, § 8. CD, § 10.

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ticipate reciprocally in the highest forms of expression of natural human life. The idea of truth is the necessary presupposition of Christian knowledge. Since the human spirit has been “darkened” by sin, rebirth is the ineluctable presupposition for achieving a clear understanding of divine and human things. The conception of truth is communicated in the rebirth, which both implies justification by faith and the witness of the spirit (testimonium spiritus sancti). The unconditionally scientific character of dogmatics is contingent upon the conception of truth, which is the fundamental precondition for any Christian discipline, just as the Christian concepts of morality and beauty are the preconditions for “ethical productivity” and Christian art. Dogmatics is not merely an account of and argumentation for the relationship of faith (the “pious emotions,” as Schleiermacher claimed), but rather, the contents of faith derive from the Word of God and the authority of Revelation. Martensen concludes the Introduction to his Dogmatics by posing the question of the limits of Christian knowledge. When the subjective concept of truth which is communicated to the believing and reborn Christian is held to correspond to the objective idea of truth in God himself, the problem is then whether this knowledge can be held to be adequate. Martensen rejects both the doctrine of the unknowability of God and the opposite claim that He is fully knowable, since he maintains that a type of knowledge of God exists which is true both in virtue of its point of departure and its goal. However, such knowledge is not exhaustive in its clarity, but only in its certainty. Clarity is only achieved with blessedness. Martensen proceeds to unfold his system of dogmatics on the foundation provided by the principles sketched out above. In this system the scholar proceeds on the basis of the dogma of the Trinity more or less in the following fashion. The inward self-revelation reveals an eternal distinction between God as Father and God as Son, and this distinction is furthermore the ground of God’s external self-revelation in the Creation. Christ is the principle of both the creation of the world and of its perfection. For this reason he had to become man and would have had to in any case, even if the Fall had not necessitated the Atonement. The doctrine of the Spirit deals with the procession of the Spirit from the Father and the Son, the foundation of the Church and its maintenance, and finally the perfection in the future of the Church. By way of conclusion it may be said that Martensen’s dogmatic system, of which some individual issues are supported by theosophical positions, is a development of the so-called soterio-ecumenical teach-

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ing on the Trinity, that is, the doctrine of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit as these have manifested themselves in the works of creation, re-creation, and sanctification. Martensen’s Dogmatics has the structure of an ellipse whose two foci are “creatio” and “incarnatio.” According to God’s original plan, the work of creation was to take place in two movements in which creatio was to be the beginning and incarnatio the perfecting act of creation. However, the evolution of the Kingdom of God has been “retarded” by sin, for which reason the Kingdom must be revealed as a Kingdom of Redemption. It is impossible for the creature to redeem himself. Sin changes nothing in God’s goal; rather, it changes the pathway to the goal. Christ is only able to be the world-Savior because he is from all eternity the world-perfecting mediator, true God and true man who thus is also the perfect link between God and man. Therefore, Christ is not merely to be understood in terms of history, religion, and ethics, but also with a view to his metaphysical and cosmic significance. Martensen finds this to be expressed in Paul’s description of Christ as the head beneath which everything else is to be assembled.7 Properly considered, Martensen’s Dogmatics is a theological system. Its basis is the metaphysics of the doctrine of the Trinity. Considered from the point of view of systematic theology, it has formal advantages with respect to earlier works, and thus in this respect it may be mentioned in the same breath with such works as the dogmatics of Schleiermacher. Its structure is elegant; throughout the work, every effort is made to discover unity in multiplicity, just as it attempts to point out the transitions to and connections with the various concepts contained within it, though sometimes on the basis of unclear concepts or empty rhetoric. The development is illuminated from universal vantage points: metaphysical and empirical, theoretical and teleological, cosmic and eschatological, and so forth. Martensen proceeds like a theological juggler, following the worst of the Germanic patterns. In his hands the various doctrines are transformed into religious fantasies which are moderated and tempered by means of a dialectical-mediatory frame of thought whose task it is to demonstrate both the (hypothetical) point of contradiction which permeates all of existence and the element of unity. Mediation is an expression of synthesis, and harmony is most clearly evident in Martensen’s concept of totality, which is characteristic of his Dogmatics. Martensen praises a Christianly colored, idealis7

Ephesians 1.10f.


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tic religion of humanity, a decidedly monistic system from which all dualism is ultimately rejected. Again, to Martensen the true concept of humanity is a Christian concept which must be determinative for the powers animating culture and education. Already the Dogmatics hints at ideas which come to be more fully developed many years later in his work The Christian Ethics,8 namely his concepts of Christian science (dealing with the true), Christian ethics (with the good), and Christian aesthetics (with the beautiful), in short, some form of Christian Platonism. According to Martensen, the dialectically mediated doctrines are synonymous with sound learning. Using this formal rule, which Martensen arrives at on the basis of the principles arranged in his work, all divergent theories are dismissed as both untrue and unsound. In consequence of this and on the basis of the same handy yardstick, Martensen rejects (without mentioning their author) Kierkegaard’s “maxims, aphorisms, ideas, and glimpses” in his Preface,9 which is not included in the English translation. Grundtvigianism is combated more exhaustively, although Martensen’s greatest effort is directed against D.F. Strauss. It has been thoroughly documented10 that Martensen’s Dogmatics is indebted to a number of Danish and German theologians and philosophers, all of whom belonged to a greater or lesser extent to the late romantic and idealist tradition in cultural life. To speak in generalities, Martensen’s attachment to and dependence upon this tradition is evident in his choice of terms, which to a modern reader appears oldfashioned and peculiar for a work on Christian dogmatics. Such words as “enthusiasm,” “admiration,” “genius,” “hero,” and “talent” occur frequently. Moreover, the whole of Martensen’s attitude towards existence is strongly influenced by this cultural tradition, which was felt soon after the middle of the 19th century to belong to a distant and foreign past. Among those thinkers who may be said to have influenced Martensen the foremost was Frederik Christian Sibbern, who emphasized that the creative imagination was a facet of the process of acquiring 8

9 10

Hans Lassen Martensen Den christelige Ethik, Copenhagen 1871-78. English translation: Christian Ethics vols. 1-3, tr. by C. Spense, William Affleck, and Sophia Taylor, Edinburgh: T.&T. Clark 1873-82. CD, p. iii. Especially by Skat Arildsen in his aforementioned work and by, among others, Hermann Brandt Gotteserkenntnis und Weltentfremdung: Der Weg der spekulativen Theologie Hans Lassen Martensens, Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht 1971.

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knowledge. Further, in spite of Martensen’s criticism of Grundtvig there can be no doubt that the concept of worship which appears in Martensen’s Dogmatics has been strongly influenced by Grundtvig: the sacraments, and not the sermon, are understood to be the focus of worship, just as the understanding of Christ as effectively present in his Church, in which he exercises functions which both form and preserve society, also derives from Grundtvig. Martensen’s theoretical section (“Introduction”) shows him to be strongly dependent upon I.A. Dorner (1809-84), who has been virtually forgotten in our time. Martensen corresponded with Dorner for a considerable period of time. On a single, important issue, Martensen seems to have been influenced by Schleiermacher, since, like the latter he insisted on the intimate connection between the basic principles of Protestantism (the formal principle, sola scriptura, the material principle, sola fide) and the concept of the Church. But the most influential personality in conjunction with Martensen’s Dogmatics was unquestionably Franz von Baader. Martensen had made the acquaintance of this Catholic philosopher of religion in Munich during the lengthy sojourn he undertook in his youth, and he remained faithful to Baader throughout his life, as even the work of Martensen’s old age, Jacob Böhme,11 amply proves. Martensen’s Trinitarian disposition in his Dogmatics, referred to above, was appropriated from the account published by the right Hegelian, Philipp Marheineke. The somewhat obscure Judas Ischarioth of the somewhat more original right Hegelian, Carl Daub also influenced him.12 To my mind Hermann Brandt (mentioned above) assigns to Schelling too much importance in connection with Martensen’s works; only Schelling’s famous work which appeared in 1809 on the subject of human freedom can be shown to have influenced Martensen’s account in his Dogmatics of the doctrines concerning angels, demons, and Satan. It ought finally to be mentioned that in his Dogmatics Martensen’s speculative interpretation is frequently to be characterized as in part in agreement with, and in part a rejection of, the Lutheran scholars of 11

12

Hans Lassen Martensen Jacob Bøhme. Theosophiske Studier, Copenhagen 1881. English translation: Jacob Boehme: His Life and Teaching, tr. by T. Rhys Evans, London: Hodder & Stoughton 1885. Carl Daub Judas Ischarioth oder das Böse in Verhältniss zum Guten betrachtet vols. 12, Heidelberg 1816-18.


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dogmatics whose teachings were at the time easily accessible in the Hutterus redivivus of Karl Hase.13

II. The Reception of Martensen’s Dogmatics Martensen’s Dogmatics had been awaited with great anticipation, and by many it was received with gratitude and uncritical acceptance. However, already the reviews of it appearing in the daily press (e.g. in the Berlingske Tidende) predicted that it would encounter resistance from many sides. This judgment was soon vindicated. If Martensen’s Dogmatics did not lead to much bloodshed, then at least much ink was consumed and much newsprint and paper were offered on the subject. What triggered it all was the result of the fact that Martensen’s sometime comrade-in-arms and friend, Professor of Philosophy Rasmus Nielsen (1809-84), happened to be fascinated by Kierkegaard’s writings for a short period of time. On the 15th of October, 1849, Rasmus Nielsen thus published a short work entitled, Magister S. Kierkegaard’s ‘Johannes Climacus’ and Dr. Martensen’s ‘Christian Dogmatics’. An Investigative Review.14 In this work Nielsen openly agrees with Kierkegaard’s pseudonymous persona, Johannes Climacus, whom he also quotes repeatedly, and in the process criticizes Martensen’s work with devastating effect. Nielsen’s title is a little misleading since his review in fact only discusses Martensen’s work. As we should expect, Martensen was very ungracious towards Nielsen’s review. Kierkegaard was also bitterly opposed to Nielsen’s pamphlet, which is explained by the fact that the latter had quite misunderstood the significance and necessity of Kierkegaard’s indirect method and had instead remained in the traditional lecturing mode. In spite of the personal and theoretical disagreements which separated these three figures, there is nevertheless good reason to devote some attention to Nielsen’s criticism of Martensen’s Dogmatics. Nielsen’s main intention was to investigate the theoretical relationship between systematic theology and Christianity. To him the question was whether Christianity could without violence to its nature be made the 13

14

Karl Hase Hutterus redivivus oder Dogmatik der evangelisch-lutherischen Kirche, 4th improved edition, Leipzig 1839. Rasmus Nielsen Mag. S. Kierkegaards ‘Johannes Climacus’ og Dr. Martensens ‘Christelige Dogmatik’. En undersøgende Anmeldelse, Copenhagen 1849.

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object of objective study or for dogmatic speculation. Is speculation to be assigned some religious or Christian validity, or is Christianity transformed into something new and different when it becomes the object of speculation? Nielsen affirmed the latter proposition. Where Martensen had claimed that the contents of Christianity “must be interpreted, supplied with reasons, and explained via the forms of objective knowledge,”15 Nielsen agrees with Kierkegaard, who had protested against “the contemporary Christian epistemology.”16 According to Nielsen, the pseudonymous persona Johannes Climacus deserves to be praised for having posed the problem of Christianity in dialectical form: Christianity aims at the salvation of the individual, and therefore presupposes an infinite concern with salvation. Thus, the fundamental question must be that of the relation of the individual to Christianity, rather than questions relating to problems within Christianity. Nor can the relation of the individual to Christianity be realized via the objective pathway advocated by Martensen. Whether one pursues the paths of history or speculation, one arrives at an inappropriate relationship between the individual and Christianity. History only arrives at approximations, while speculation reduces the individual to something arbitrary: faith is not the result of scholarly contemplation…on the contrary, this sort of objectivity loses sight of the infinitely personal quality of passionate interest, which is the presupposition of faith…. Where faith has up to this point had a useful chastiser in the form of uncertainty, in certainty it would encounter its worst enemy. For if the passion is taken away, then faith is no more, and certainty and passion are themselves equally unexciting.17

No eternal decision resides in what is objective, but in what is subjective. The greatest truth for an existent is objective uncertainty, which is retained in the appropriation of passionate inwardness. What has been said about truth is only a circumlocution for faith, which does not come without some risk. To an existing subjectivity the highest truth is the paradox. Christianity is a “communication of existence”18 in contradistinction to speculation, which pretends to be objective knowledge. In a Christian context the main thing is to exist, while in a speculative context one attempts to understand. Faith, however, “is a sphere in its own right”19 and is different from speculation. Thus, the modern form of 15 16 17 18 19

Ibid., p. 6. Ibid., p. 6. Ibid., p. 16. Ibid., e.g. p. 34. Ibid., p. 36.


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speculation which attempts to mediate between Christianity and speculation is in reality “the greatest misunderstanding of Christianity.”20 After accounting in this fashion for the view he had adopted from Kierkegaard’s pseudonymous persona, Nielsen proceeds to his critical examination of Martensen’s Dogmatics. Nielsen asserts that the relation between Christianity and speculation may be described as follows: both parts claim to express the Absolute, the former in the form of faith, the latter in the form of knowledge. If faith is the only correct form and presupposition for the appropriation of the absolute truth of Christianity, then the principle of faith is itself absolute and can only be violated or destroyed when, as in Martensen’s case, it is to be supported by something foreign to it, such as speculative knowledge. In a corresponding manner the principle of speculation with respect to all forms of thought and knowledge is to be found in the Absolute, and it functions without the aid of such things as faith. Martensen commits the error, according to Nielsen, of confusing faith and speculation. Admittedly, Martensen distinguishes between dogmatics and philosophy, but his distinction is inconsistent. On the one hand, Martensen emphasizes that faith is the presupposition for scholarly (that is, speculative) insight into Christian truth, but, on the other hand, Martensen also claims that the Christian concepts may be academically depicted by philosophy without the Christian faith. If this point should prove correct, as Nielsen notes, then faith is superfluous, which Martensen does not admit. Thus Martensen has not really understood the actual problem of faith; what is even more surprising is that he has not understood the problem of speculation either. Both quantities of these are relativized by means of the reciprocal interaction he attempts to establish between them (on a misconceived basis). Martensen maintains that it is the task of dogmatics to attempt to arrive at a deeper appropriation of the truth of Christianity by thinking, but it is quite unclear what sort of thought he in reality refers to. Nielsen notes that individual passages in the Dogmatics insist that this must be an existential thought, while he elsewhere claims that it must be a form of speculative thought.21 However, this is never purely speculative thought, but only speculation “to a certain degree” and mediation “to a certain degree.”22 Martensen has only liquid, rather than solid, boundaries. 20 21 22

Ibid., p. 41. Ibid., p. 56. Ibid., pp. 98, 109.

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He does not speak absolutely of the Absolute, which is relatively mediated between relative absolutes. Martensen does not seem to be aware that if he intends to make use of speculation, then it must be done on speculation’s own terms, in which case the consequences will be different from those Martensen imagines, since dogmatics itself will be destroyed as superfluous. Martensen fails to comprehend that speculation objects to the use he wants to make of it, since to employ speculation for dogmatic-ecclesiastical purposes is to use it for something else, that is, to assign it a purpose beyond itself. To speculate relatively and to a certain extent is, to speculate beyond speculation. For speculation conceives of the Absolute absolutely, and as such has its purpose in itself only….One may renounce the use of speculation, one may overlook it or despise it, but one may not use it relatively without violating the Absolute which is to be seen in its medium and which will take form in its dialectic.23

Martensen seeks to appropriate faith, but without taking its essential problem into the bargain. He confuses existential and speculative thought. He attempts to arrive at speculative knowledge and objective knowledge on the basis of the motto “credo ut intelligam.”24 He further claims that dogmatics does not receive its impulse from doubt, but from faith, which he also asserts contains a critical and dialectical tendency. Unfortunately, Martensen does not attempt to explain in what this tendency consists. The question of individual, personal salvation is not even posed by the speculative thinker, whose task is to forget himself (subjectivity) in order to concentrate on the objective (objectivity). But the interests in salvation and speculation point in two different directions. The problem of inwardness does not occur at all in dogmatics, although in Christian terms it is the only decisive matter. Martensen apparently fails to understand that if it were possible to account for the objective truth of the various Christian dogmas on the basis of either historical or speculative evidence, then the truth would be just as obvious to the unbeliever as to the believer. But if, as Nielsen continues, the certainty of objective truth cannot be won by the elucidation of objective evidence, then it must be based solely on a subjective foundation, that is, on the “existential appropriation in faith…to the same extent that I, as thinker, understand, and as existent express what it is to believe, my own major conviction and inward assurance of 23 24

Ibid., pp. 23-24. Ibid., pp. 61, 72, 92, 96.


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the truth of the revealed Word increases.”25 The appropriation in faith, understood as absolutely subjective, does not exclude the objective, but instead relates “in infinite passion”26 to the object of faith. If one seeks, as Martensen does, to obtain certainty by the objective route, and if one attempts to appropriate the object of faith by means of objective knowledge, then the object of faith becomes an object of knowledge, and as such it cannot be appropriated by either faith or knowledge. It will remain a sort of indeterminate tertium quid, a fantastic thing about which one would be at a loss to comment. Nielsen finds Martensen’s account of the principles of Protestantism equally unsatisfactory, and he is unsparing in his comments on the subject: “if anyone…expects to find a single decisive definition he will no doubt be strangely disappointed, for the basic question is lacking, approximation dominates the field, and the whole business exudes a certain diffuse just-about-ness.”27 This is evident throughout the section: in the account of the canonical validity of the Scriptures for life and teaching, in the account of the relationship between the Biblical documents understood as the inspired Canon and critical exegesis, in Martensen’s presentation of the development of the relationship between the formal and material principles, between the student of dogmatics and the Church he attempts to serve. According to Nielsen, if dogmatic knowledge is to take on a hard and determinate character, then it is essential to establish complete clarity as to the relationship between faith and speculative knowledge. Is it possible to understand the contents of faith or not? Writing out of his own personal background in speculative philosophy, Nielsen maintains that the nature of God is an object of knowledge and thus intelligible to the speculative philosophy of religion, whereas for the student of dogmatics it is an object of faith and accordingly unintelligible. Almost the whole way through his Dogmatics Martensen attempts by means of dogmatics to mediate between two mutually exclusive points of view. It is only in his treatment of eschatology that Martensen is halted by the incomprehensible antinomy between universal apokatastasis and eternal condemnation. If Martensen had understood the unintelligibility of this single issue, Nielsen maintains, then he would also have comprehended the unintelligibility of Christianity – in which case he would hardly have written his Dogmatics. 25 26 27

Ibid., pp. 98-99. Ibid., e.g. pp. 16, 18-20, 25-26, 35. Ibid., p. 103.

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Like Nielsen, Peter Michael Stilling (1812-69) began as a conservative Hegelian and even published some works which illustrate his initial position. However, under the influence of Kierkegaard’s pseudonymous writings and presumably, as in the case of Nielsen, after personal conversations with Kierkegaard, Stilling’s views on the relationship between philosophy and theology changed decisively. Towards the end of 1849 Stilling published a work entitled On the Pretended Reconciliation of Faith and Knowledge, with Special Consideration of Prof. Martensen’s ‘Christian Dogmatics’. Critical-Polemical Treatise.28 Stilling’s work attacks Martensen’s Dogmatics along the same lines as Nielsen, and it would accordingly be superfluous to describe this attack more extensively in these pages. Like Nielsen, Stilling is especially critical of Martensen’s ambivalent attitude towards the theoretical question: if the subject of faith, on the one hand, and Christianity as object, on the other, are to be correctly related to one another, then the subject must definitively choose either to allow his thought to turn away from Christianity completely or to subordinate itself to Christianity in worship and thus in the obedience of faith to yield to the paradox. Martensen’s mediation is only a superficial solution. Naturally the Grundtvigian theoretician Peter Christian Kierkegaard (1805-88) could not permit himself to remain silent during the debate. He gave a condescending lecture at the Clerical Conference of Roskilde on the 30th of October, 1849, which was later published in the Danish Church Times.29 Making very free use of Paul’s words in 2 Corinthians 5.13, Kierkegaard concluded that Martensen represented sober-mindedness, while his own younger brother represented ecstasy. In this connection it is understandable that Martensen was unenthusiastic about receiving recognition from the Grundtivigians; it was no less unpleasant for Kierkegaard to read his elder brother’s description of him. People might be led to suppose that he was mad.

28

29

Peter Michael Stilling Om den indbildte Forsoning af Tro og – Viden med saerligt Hensyn til Prof. Martensens ‘christelige Dogmatik’. Kritisk-polemisk Afhandling, Copenhagen 1849. Peter Christian Kierkegaard “Betragtninger over Forholdet mellem Martensen og S. Kierkegaard” in Dansk Kirketidende vol. 5, no. 219, 1849, columns 171-193, (a part of C. Pram Gad “Roeskilde Præsteconvent holdt sit Efteraarsmøde i Ringssted Torsdagen den 30te October 1849” in Dansk Kirketidende vol. 5, no. 217, 1849, columns 131-153; no. 219, columns 169-193). Reprinted in Peter Christian Kierkegaards Samlede Skrifter vols. 1-6, ed. by Poul Egede Glahn and Lavrids Nyegård, Copenhagen: Karl Schønbergs Forlag 1902-1905; vol. 4, pp. 99-120.


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The most important critique of Martensen’s Dogmatics to be offered by the theologians was presented by Jens Paludan-Müller (1813-99), whose work, entitled On the Christian Dogmatics of Dr. Martensen, was published in 1850.30 Paludan-Müller was concerned with two theoretical issues, namely the scholarly and ecclesiastical foundations of dogmatics. Thus he undertook a critical investigation of Martensen’s method. He discovered that Martensen attempts to reconcile, or mediate between, as the then contemporary jargon had it, the ecclesiastical consciousness and free thought. Paludan-Müller finds that Martensen in reality is guilty of taking a shortcut here: the result of such an investigation is a forgone conclusion, so that Martensen merely tailors his method and arrays his evidence accordingly. Moreover, he finds that Martensen’s fantasy dominates his thought processes. There is no logical necessity connecting his premises and his conclusions. The basis of the Dogmatics is obscurely formulated, a fact Paludan-Müller finds applicable to both Martensen’s doctrine of Holy Scripture and to his teaching on the Church. In both cases Martensen’s account is unclear and ambiguous. Moreover, as far as the confession of the Church is concerned, Paludan-Müller finds Martensen again to be imprecise: he teaches that dogmatics must have confessional character, but he fails to mention to what extent or on which conditions this confessional character is to be affirmed. Martensen further leaves his reader in doubt when the latter attempts to clarify the relationship between the contents of dogmatics and Christian and nonChristian philosophy as well as the relationship between faith and doubt. Paludan-Müller’s main objection to the Dogmatics itself is that Martensen incorrectly draws a parallel between the Incarnation and the Redemption. In his own opinion “The idea of the Incarnation has its reality and truth in the Redemption and the Atonement.”31 Martensen’s colleague, the peaceable Carl Emil Scharling (180377), attempted to assist the dogmatician by defending him against the attacks of Nielsen and Stilling in particular.32 Scharling’s defense was 30 31 32

Jens Paludan-Müller Om Dr. Martensens ‘Christelige Dogmatik,’ Copenhagen 1850. Ibid., p. 53. Carl Emil Scharling “Den christelige Dogmatik. Fremstillet af Dr. H. Martensen. Anmeldt af Dr. C.E. Scharling under Hensyn til Mag. S. Kierkegaards ‘Johannes Climacus’ og Dr. H. Martensens ‘Christelige Dogmatik’. En undersøgende Anmeldelse af R. Nielsen, Professor i Philosophien. Om den indbildte Forsoning af Tro og Viden, med særligt Hensyn til Prof. Martensens “christelige Dogmatik”. Kritisk-polemisk Afhandling af Mag. P.M. Stilling. Om Dr. Martensens christelige Dogmatik, af J. Paludan-Müller, residerende Capellan ved Budolphi Kirke i Aalborg” in Nyt Theologisk Tidsskrift vol. 1, 1850, pp. 348-375.

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unfortunate, and the two philosophers had an easy time of it with their subsequent polemics. Another theologian who was almost universally regarded as an outsider was the pugnacious Magnus Eiriksson (1806-81). As early as in September of 1849, Eiriksson had a diffuse and caustic attack on Martensen’s Dogmatics published under the title Speculative Orthodoxy.33 Its author was a peculiarity in the ecclesiastical and theological life of the 19th century in Denmark, in that he was an extreme rationalist. One might be tempted to think that Eiriksson had studied Luther’s polemics against the Roman Catholic Church and its Pope when one sees the number of calumnies he is able to put into print; but then, in this respect it is possible that he had learned a bit from following the careers of Grundtvig and Lindberg. Eiriksson holds that Martensen’s Dogmatics is “equipped with such monstrous versatility”34 that it has become a potpourri of everything imaginable, “a confused mass”35 of mutually contradictory and contraindicative elements: “ecclesiastical, Biblical, rationalistic, mystical, Hegelian, (and) Gnostic.”36 The reviewer feels that Martensen most adheres to Hegel’s procedure, although the result of this is a caricature because of arbitrary wrestling with various concepts and all manner of contradictions. Martensen is further criticized for making arbitrary use of the Scriptures, and as a whole his Dogmatics is “equally despicable, whether regarded from the theoretical or the practical point of view.”37 Thus, it will be unable to satisfy “any party or faction at all within Christendom.”38 It might also be mentioned that Ludvig Helweg (1818-83) who was sympathetic to Grundtvig, also followed Martensen’s critics and criticized his Dogmatics in the Danish Church Times in 1850.39 Around the middle of June of 1850, Martensen replied to his critics in a short work entitled Dogmatic Information.40 His intentions in 33

34 35 36 37 38 39

40

Magnus Eiriksson Speculativ Rettroenhed, fremstillet efter Dr. Martensens “christelige Dogmatik” og geistlig Retfærdighed, belyst ved en Biskops Deeltagelse i en Generalfiskal-Sag, Copenhagen 1849. Ibid., p. 67. Ibid., p. 66. Ibid., p. 68. Ibid., p. 76. Ibid., pp. 76-77. Ludvig Helweg “Prof. Martensens Dogmatik og dens Angribere” in Danske Kirketidende vol. 5, no. 229, 1850, columns 345-357; no. 230, columns 369-373. Hans Lassen Martensen Dogmatiske Oplysninger, Copenhagen 1850.


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writing are, he says, to shed light on some few of the points which have been the subject of discussion and to clear away some of the misunderstandings of his critics.41 In so doing he by no means intends to enter into an academic discussion which he in advance finds endless and sterile. Martensen proceeds to repudiate all of his critics: Eiriksson has seriously misunderstood matters, Stilling is beyond the academic pale, and therefore irrelevant, while Nielsen has both misunderstood and misinterpreted the Dogmatics and has himself no theoretical basis. Martensen regards Kierkegaard’s authorship as something “entirely irrelevant.”42 Martensen does not discuss; he simply dictates, and accordingly without exception he rejects every attack on his Christian Dogmatics as ill-founded. The most likely explanation for this attitude is probably that Martensen was simply unable to repel his assailants, who naturally enough speedily returned to their inkwells. Rasmus Nielsen started with a short critical work entitled Dr. H. Martensen’s Dogmatic Information Explained.43 Nielsen there maintains, among other things, that Martensen apparently utilizes a special sort of logic for reborn humans, a logic intended to serve for scientific, objective, contemplative, and speculative-dogmatic purposes. However, Nielsen continues, it rather looks as if “there is something terribly jumbled with this logic for the reborn” which has revealed its inability to mediate the contradictions present in Martensen’s work, contradictions which cry to heaven.44 Eiriksson also replied to Martensen in a short work under the title The Cardinal Virtues of the New Danish Theology,45 which also appeared in 1850. This time Eiriksson notes with satisfaction that he and Martensen were apparently agreed on the subject of the relationship between faith and paradox. Since Martensen had recently claimed that Eiriksson was guilty of serious misunderstandings of his work, Eiriksson accordingly presents Martensen with a list of “75 theological questions” which he may answer at his convenience. Martensen failed to respond, and in fact he merely continued to publish his Dogmatics unrevised in 1850, 1865, and 1883. It appeared in both German and English translation while he still lived.

41 42 43

44 45

Ibid., pp. 1-2. Ibid., p. 12. Rasmus Nielsen Dr. H. Martensens Dogmatiske Oplysninger belyste, Copenhagen 1850. Ibid., p. 65. Magnus Eiriksson Den nydanske Theologies Cardinaldyder, Copenhagen 1850.

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One ought also to note that under the pseudonym Erasmus Næpius the Lutheran High Church priest Wilhelm Rothe (1800-78) published in 1853 “Letters on Martensen’s Dogmatics” in the New Theological Journal.46 Rothe’s goal was to work out what he termed a “dogmatics of reflection,” which might be able to renew the old evangelical Lutheran teaching on faith (analogous with the efforts of Hase and Luthardt in Germany). When Rothe died, he left behind him a large yet still unfinished manuscript of this work. As we should expect, he distanced himself from both the mildly rationalizing views of Henrik Nikolaj Clausen (1793-1877) and from Martensen’s speculative dogmatics. Rothe’s clear and weighty letters on Martensen’s Dogmatics are the most significant publicly tendered theological contribution to the discussion, although they had no great influence on its course. Immediately after its publication Kierkegaard read Martensen’s Dogmatics; he did so with increasing irritation the more his reading progressed. He also read most of the writings of the critics of the Dogmatics, which he probably received as gifts from their authors. These remained in his library until his death.47 Nevertheless, Kierkegaard refrained from publishing any form of systematic and public criticism of Martensen’s work and his later publications. Nor did he publicly retaliate against the critics, although several drafts of such efforts are preserved.48 The first two notes in Kierkegaard’s journal are programmatic with respect to his subsequent entries. The first note offers a brief characterization of the situation, while the second describes Martensen’s Dogmatics. In Kierkegaard’s eyes the situation is as follows: While all existence is disintegrating, while anyone with eyes must see that all this about millions of Christians is a sham, that if anything Christianity has vanished from the world, Martensen sits and organizes a dogmatic system. What does it mean that he undertakes something like this? As far as faith is concerned, it says that everything in this country is just as it should be, we are all Christians; there is no danger afoot here, we have the opportunity to indulge in scholarship. Since everything else is as it should be, the most important matter confronting us now is to determine where the angels are to be placed in the system, and things like that.49

The second reads: 46

47

48 49

Wilhelm Rothe “Breve om den Martensenske Dogmatik” in Nyt Theologisk Tidsskrift vol. 4, 1853, pp. 292-338. See Ktl. 701, 703, 709, and 802. (Ktl. = Auktionsprotokol over Søren Kierkegaards Bogsamling, ed. by H.P. Rohde, Copenhagen: The Royal Library 1967.) In Pap. X 6. JP 6, 6448 / Pap. X 1 A 553.


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it is really ridiculous! There has been talk of the system and scientificity and about scientificity, etc., and then finally comes the system. Merciful God, my most popular book is more stringent in definition of concepts, and my pseudonym Johannes Climacus is seven times as stringent in definition of concepts. Martensen’s Dogmatics is, after all, a popular piece lacking the powerful imagination or something similar which could give it that kind of worth; and the only scholarliness I have discovered in it is that it is divided into paragraphs.50

The quotations speak well enough for themselves. Kierkegaard wrote down yet another remark which, considered as a theoretical observation, is not only directed against Martensen’s work, but against dogmatic systems altogether. As usual, Kierkegaard himself best describes his errand. In the first place, A dogmatic system, from a Christian point of view, is a luxury item; in calm weather, when one can count on at least the majority of men as being Christians, there can be time for such things – but when was that ever the case? And when it storms – then systematizing is evil, then all theology must be upbuilding or edifying. Systematizing contains an indirect falsification – as if everyone’s genuinely being a Christian were entirely settled – since there is time to systematize.51

In the second place, A dogmatic system ought not to be erected on the basis: to comprehend faith, but on the basis: to comprehend that faith cannot be comprehended. In a nutshell, from a Christian point of view, “the pastor” and “the professor” ought to say one and the same thing, only the professor should say it raised to the second power. If there are rebel spirits who are not willing to be satisfied with “the pastor,” then they ought to come to something more rigorous by going to the professor. Christianly, everything is discipline; the ascending scale is to come to the more rigorous discipline. By running from “the pastor” we ought not slip into a speculative effeminacy but ought to come into an even more rigorous discipline.52

The historical background for these theoretical observations, which Kierkegaard also recorded in some drafts53 and in letters to, among others, Nielsen,54 is as follows. On the 5th of June, 1849, Denmark’s new constitution, which signalled the transition to democratic government, came into effect. To Kierkegaard this was a decisive sign that disintegration had set in, and that the tyranny of stupidity was about to begin. On the 26th of June in that year Regine Olsen’s father, whom Kierkegaard had esteemed highly, died. On the 1st of July he saw his 50 51 52 53 54

JP 6, 6449 / Pap. X 1 A 556. JP 3, 3564 / Pap. X 1 A 561. Ibid. Pap. X 6 B 108; where they are presented as a guide for Nielsen. See especially LD, pp. 320-321 / B&A 1, pp. 251-252, which almost verbatim reproduces the last-cited quotation above.

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former fiancée in church. He got the impression that she expected him to greet her, and in the subsequent period he once again reconsidered his relationship to her and wrote a good deal on the subject both in his journal and in a letter to Regine’s husband, Frederik Schlegel,55 in which he hoped to obtain both understanding and reconciliation. Instead, everything was returned, accompanied by an indignant letter. On the 28th of June Kierkegaard delivered the manuscript of The Sickness unto Death, which was published already on the 30th of July by C.A. Reitzel’s Press, which was also the publisher of Martensen’s Dogmatics. In short, in these few weeks of summer Kierkegaard was much preoccupied by just about anything but Martensen’s Dogmatics. In addition to the distractions mentioned above one ought to mention Kierkegaard’s somewhat irritable relationship to Rasmus Nielsen. The two maintained a correspondence concerning Kierkegaard’s books, which Nielsen diligently read, and concerning Martensen’s Dogmatics. The situation in the late summer of 1849 was peculiar, as the correspondence between Kierkegaard and Nielsen, and Kierkegaard’s notes in his journal, fully and credibly document. Mynster, who was definitely an opponent of the Hegelian speculation, had previously been reserved with respect to Martensen. However, the publication of the Christian Dogmatics, in which Mynster is mentioned several times with approval, changed the Bishop’s opinion for the better. Nielsen, on the other hand, was still regarded by Mynster as a “speculator,” and was therefore in disgrace. Neither Mynster nor Martensen was at the time aware that Nielsen had by this time established a positive relationship to Kierkegaard, nor did either of them suspect that Nielsen would shortly send Kierkegaard’s pseudonymous persona into the fray against Martensen. A dinner party in Lyngby was attended by Mynster, Martensen, and Nielsen. After dinner Martensen pressed himself on Nielsen as an old acquaintance and ideological ally. Nielsen related the whole incident to Kierkegaard in a letter.56 In a note in his journal Kierkegaard entertained himself with the thought of a “collision” with “the Mediation,” (sc. Martensen), on the grounds that one cannot collide with a mediation as one can with a paradox.57 Kierkegaard observes that it is only possible to “klinke” with a “mediation,” according to both of the 55 56 57

See LD, pp. 322-337 / B&A 1, pp. 253-264. LD, pp. 377-378 / B&A 1, p. 297. Pap. X 1 A 674.


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meanings of this word in the Danish language: it is possible to drink a toast, that is, to greet someone with a glass (meaning 1) in this case Martensen, the personified mediation; similarly, it is also possible to “klinke” with the mediation in the sense of reassembling chipped glass or porcelain (meaning 2). Kierkegaard never attempted to “klinke” personally in either of the two senses. In spite of his absorption in other matters, Kierkegaard nevertheless found the time to read Martensen’s Dogmatics. As mentioned above, he was unenthusiastic. At one point he wrote: “In Martensen’s whole dogmatics…there is not a single sentence which is a plain yes or no. It is the old sophistry…meanwhile the reader…is so distracted that he no longer notices that essentially he has learned nothing.”58 Shortly after this remark we again discover that Martensen is criticized for claiming the authority of Scripture in one instance, while he elsewhere maintains that speculation is higher than the Biblical authority: “What nonsense the whole thing is.”59 Martensen attempts to pull the wool over his readers’ eyes; his work is full of references to Kant, Hegel, Schelling, and so on as if they were guarantors for a loan, while at the same time he never explicitly mentions the younger Fichte, Baader, or A. Günther, from whom he has obviously learned a good deal, and whose arguments against Schleiermacher Martensen even makes use of.60 Martensen’s opposition to “modern scholarship,” which is to say, to the left Hegelians as represented especially by D.F. Strauss, is “neither fish nor fowl.”61 Martensen makes nonsense of the oral and written transmission of Scripture,62 jabs at Kierkegaard in his discussion of the doctrine of rebirth,63 is perhaps on the right track in his discussion of the sacrament of Baptism, but immediately afterwards he is wrong-headed again,64 is shaky in his understanding of ordination,65 and so on, and so forth. Martensen treats heresy in a scholarly manner and rejects it; however, Kierkegaard maintains, a consistently worked out theory cannot be dismissed on academic terms. It can only be rejected by faith.66 As 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66

JP 1, 673 / Pap. X 1 A 566. Pap. X 1 A 578. JP 6, 6456 / Pap. X 1 A 576. JP 6, 6460 / Pap. X 1 A 588. Pap. X 1 A 604. Pap. X 1 A 618. Pap. X 1 A 619. Pap. X 1 A 620. Pap. X 1 A 622. Pap. X 1 A 606.

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a thinker and as a man, Martensen is mediocre, and his Dogmatics ought to be exhibited under glass in a museum for misunderstandings; this is the result of Kierkegaard’s reading of this funeral monument erected upon the grave of cultural Protestantism on a romantic-speculative basis. Kierkegaard wrote quite a number of drafts for polemical articles against Martensen’s Dogmatics, against the Dogmatic Information, against Nielsen, Stilling, Paludan-Müller, and Eiriksson. None of these, however, was published. At least part of the reason for this reticence may lie in the relationship between Kierkegaard and Nielsen, which began with great confidence from Kierkegaard and ended with his rejection of Nielsen. Other factors will naturally also have played their part, but in this context we will be unable to deal with these. As is well known, for a period of time in 1848 Kierkegaard was sure that his death was imminent. This is supported by many of his notes.67 He accordingly saw it as his duty to initiate someone into his affairs. Kierkegaard chose Nielsen, as emerges from his journals.68 Kierkegaard’s plan was that after his death Nielsen would undertake to publish the unpublished manuscripts. As excited as he had by that time become with Kierkegaard, Nielsen was not inclined to hesitate overly long, and in any case, had a somewhat overhasty nature. Already on the 19th of May, 1849, he published in book form a series of lectures he had held at the University; they were entitled, Evangelical Faith and the Modern Consciousness. Lectures on the Life of Jesus.69 The work contained a powerful attack on speculative theology which was clearly inspired by Kierkegaard, who was, however, nowhere mentioned by name. Kierkegaard became angry; he felt his own works were “plundered in many ways, the pseudonyms most of all, which he never cites, perhaps with deliberate shrewdness, as the least read. And then, my conversations!”70 It was a matter of course that the walks which Nielsen and Kierkegaard usually enjoyed together were now broken off.71 Kierkegaard made a long series of notes for a polemic against Nielsen, but published none of them.72 In the last of them, dated in 1853, he says directly: “It was 67 68 69

70 71 72

E.g. JP 6, 6211 / Pap. IX A 178. Pap. X 6 B 102. Rasmus Nielsen Evangelietroen og den moderne Bevidsthed. Forelæsninger over Jesu Liv, Copenhagen 1849. JP 6, 6402 / Pap. X 1 A 343. See LD, pp. 290-292 / B&A 1, pp. 228-230. Pap. X 6 B 83-102 (included in part in JP 6, 6403, 6404, 6405, 6406, 6663).


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fortunate I did not die [in 1848]. Nor did it take long before I discovered that this Professor Nielsen was probably a worrisome misunderstanding. That point has now been reached that if I, for example, were to die, then this Prof. Nielsen would be the last one I should like to have considered to be the true appreciator of my efforts.”73 Kierkegaard was unable either to approve of or to assent to Nielsen’s previously mentioned major book or to his attack on Martensen’s Dogmatics. Nielsen’s fundamental mistake was that he made banal the thoughts he had borrowed from Kierkegaard and both contaminated and confused them by presenting them in direct communication by presuming to “lecture.” With this background it is at least partially intelligible that Kierkegaard himself decided not to publish any direct criticism of Martensen. Of course, he had already published the indirect critique of Martensen’s work particularly in the Climacus writings, prior to the publication of The Christian Dogmatics. Kierkegaard was, incidentally, familiar with the Dogmatics in its original form, back when it was still designated a “speculative dogmatics.” He possessed a complete copy of Martensen’s lectures in their original form.74 In the preserved polemical drafts it appears that what primarily enraged Kierkegaard was the fact that Martensen attempted in his Dogmatics to ignore Kierkegaard’s writings completely.75 He was content instead to dismiss them in his Preface with a few poorly chosen and arrogant remarks. Kierkegaard was furthermore exercised by Martensen’s personality, rather than by any particulars in the development of his dogmatic system; it was his stubborn posture which Kierkegaard attacked both before and after the publication of the Dogmatics. Yet another factor was Kierkegaard’s personal resentment of Martensen’s successful academic career. Kierkegaard was also sharply opposed to the lack of agreement between teaching and life which he felt Martensen represented: “In Christian terms the communication of truth is to suffer – to Martensen it seems to mean to make a career.”76 Already the pseudonymous persona Johannes Climacus had demonstrated that the entire “basic confusion of modern speculation resides in its having forced the Christian aspect to recede by the 73 74 75

76

Pap. X 6 B 102. Published in SKS 18, 374-386, KK:11. Pap. II C 27. Pap. X 6 B 103-143 (included in part in JP 6, 6475, 6574, 6566, 6596, 6558, 6559, 6636). Pap. X 6 B 103, p. 129.

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whole sphere, down into the aesthetic.”77 – In the original manuscript of the Concluding Unscientific Postscript, Martensen was mentioned by name in a number of passages, but before publication these were altered to read “a lecturer” or “a Hegelian.” Martensen’s error consists in his having ignored Kierkegaard’s books and “then ultimately wanting to reduce it all to nothing,”78 while Nielsen’s error consists in transforming the fact that there is no science (of faith) to a science. He lectures where one ought not to lecture, but to preach, and then to live in accordance with one’s preaching. Nielsen had cobbled Kierkegaard’s corrective into a doctrine.79 Nor does Kierkegaard spare Martensen’s other critics: Paludan-Müller,80 Stilling,81 Scharling,82 P.C. Kierkegaard,83 and the wrathful Eiriksson.84 Finally, Kierkegaard ironizes at the expense of Martensen’s Dogmatic Information,85 since it fails to offer anything new. Martensen has still failed to understand anything at all of the decisive significance of indirect communication. If Martensen had been an honest man, he might fittingly have declared as follows: “I well understand that Christianity’s true nature is indirect communication, but I do not have the powers to achieve this.” And, Kierkegaard adds, “had he done so, I would certainly not have been able to say a word, because that is just about what I would have said. But this cheekiness: to do away with Christianity without further ado, presumably in order to replace it with a fat salary and a knighthood and a velvet belly in honor and dignity as the seriousness of life: this is not to be borne!”86 This was Kierkegaard’s final evaluation of Martensen’s Dogmatics and of his Dogmatic Information, as well as his reaction to Martensen’s defenders and critics. In public he kept silent and continued to prefer to express himself indirectly.

77 78 79 80 81 82 83 84 85 86

JP 6, 6475 / Pap. X 6 B 105. Translation modified. Pap. X 6 B 114, p. 147. Pap. X 6 B 114, p. 159. Pap. X 6 B 107. Pap. X 6 B 109. JP 6, 6574 / Pap. X 6 B 121. Pap. X 6 B 125. JP 6, 6558 / Pap. X 6 B 130. JP 6, 6559 / Pap. X 6 B 131. JP 6, 6596 / Pap. X 6 B 128. Pap. X 6 B 135-143. Pap. X 6 B 136.

Grundtvig and Romanticism By Flemming Lundgreen-Nielsen Translated by Edward Broadbridge Nicolai Frederik Severin Grundtvig (1783-1872) lived practically the whole of his active life as a writer in the age of romanticism. Danish literary histories regard him as one of the major figures in the Golden Age of Denmark, the period in which romanticism and neo-classicism united in a harmonious idealism. But was Grundtvig a romantic in the European sense of the word? The question cannot be answered as easily as it is put. At least two possibilities come to mind. The first is concerned with Grundtvig’s direct relationship to romanticism, above all German Romanticism, as it was moulded by poets and philosophers around 1800. This is dealt with in Sections I-IV. The second answer, in Sections V-VIII, considers which romantic ideas and structures Grundtvig admits into his imaginative world and his literary productions, especially in the later areas of his work.

I. In his early youth Grundtvig was, surprisingly enough, a supporter and pupil of 18th century intellectualism. Politically he was a radical – tolerant, and a champion of liberty after Voltaire’s heart. His Danish models are the intellectual satirist, Ludvig Holberg, from the first half of the 18th century, and Holberg’s bold and provocative disciples in the second half, the playwright and critic, P.A. Heiberg, and the versifier, T.C. Bruun. Grundtvig’s unpublished poetic efforts around 1800, the work of a schoolboy, student and fully-fledged theological graduate, imitate a number of late 18th century genres in Danish poetry, though not the

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hymn. In a historical novel in 1803, Ulfhild, Grundtvig writes a footnote in which he excuses his hero, Harald, for bursting out in poetry by explaining that in those days the poetic art was so respected that princes gained as much honor through poetry as through their warlike display.1 In his comedy The Private Schoolmasters2 from the previous year he ridicules a modern pedagogue called Fichte for his emotional and free-andeasy attitude to life by having him compose self-centered, lyrical, unrhymed verses. Grundtvig has no confidence in the romantic belief in the power of poetry and its prestige in the higher ranks of society. This is not due to his ignorance of the main ideas of German Romanticism. He had listened doggedly to, and taken random detailed notes from, the philosophical lectures and subsequent talks on Goethe that his cousin, the philosopher Henrich Steffens, had given in Copenhagen in 1802-1803. But he had completely failed to understand the basic premises and had been content to note down the most paradoxical phrases so that he could use them, like some peasant student in Holberg, in order to excel in witty conversation – a social convention which by nature and upbringing he otherwise found difficult during his student days in Copenhagen. Steffens had given an account of the German Jena Romanticism’s view of learning in general, and of natural history, world history and in particular the place of the individual in the overall unity. According to the lectures that are preserved, however, he did not deal with romanticism’s view of language, inherited from the monographs that J.G. Herder produced in his youth around 1770. Then, in the summer of 1804, in a period of intense self-tuition, Grundtvig learned Old Icelandic, and in a series of unpublished stories from the saga-material he transferred a number of Icelandic words to Danish and formed Danish phrases after the Icelandic. Without his knowing it, this practice was in accordance with the romantic philosophy of language: return to the source of language, to its original purity. This resulted in a breakthrough for his poetry in its concentration and power, while his prose remained dominated by the pedantic, intellectual style of argument characteristic of the late 18th century. At the beginning of April 1805 Grundtvig arrived at Egeløkke Manor on the island of Langeland, where he was to work as tutor to a 1

2

N.F.S. Grundtvig Ulfhild, Grundtvig Archive, The Royal Library, Copenhagen, Fascicle 492, hefte 6, 8 recto. N.F.S. Grundtvig Skoleholderne, Grundtvig Archive, The Royal Library, Copenhagen, Fascicle 490.1.

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seven-year-old boy. He immediately fell violently and unhappily in love with the boy’s mother, Constance Steensen-Leth. The pages of Grundtvig’s diary that tell of his first six months on Langeland are lost: they have been torn out. Doubtless Constance handled her gauche, young tutor with the natural elegance and charm of the upper class, while Grundtvig, unaccustomed to society life and with precious little talent for it, let himself be blinded, enthralled, carried away. He read aloud to her while the boy played in the corner, and she played music to him or conversed with him spiritually. In the evening when he went up to his room, he sat down to work through all the dangerous impressions of the day. At this point romantic philosophy came to his aid. In his loneliness he tries to establish a picture of the world in which Constance did not rule; in his diary notes he recalls Steffens’ lectures and now for the first time he understands them. As a further safeguard he decides to read in private romantics such as Fichte and Schelling. In July 1805 he comments in his journal on a memorandum from his (now lost) diary from 1802 concerning Addison’s depreciation of music as an art form in The Spectator.3 Grundtvig now believes that art – painting, sculpture, literature, music – can be defined as “poetic” in the romantic sense: it reflects a “higher existence only to be glimpsed.” He introduces a terminological distinction between art and poetry. Art is the craft’s form (in paint, stone, words, notes) and falls into randomly divided subjects. Poetry is constituted across the subject boundaries by a conception of life orientated towards a higher existence in eternity. Immediately after his 22nd birthday in September 1805 Grundtvig joined the romantic school. That is the conclusion of a discussion that stretches over three days in his diary.4 Its subject is the nature of poetry. Grundtvig rejects various 18th century definitions of poetry and discovers that he is actually in agreement with Steffens in his eighth lecture: poetry is everything that bears the stamp of the eternal, and man has a means of sensing this in the pure, natural perception of the inner eye and ear. By “natural perception” Grundtvig understands an internal and innate ability to distinguish the higher meaning that lies beneath the surface that ordinary senses stop at. However, Grundtvig also has objections to romanticism. For the time being he has no solution to the problem of how to express such a 3

4

N.F.S. Grundtvigs Dag- og Udtogsbøger vols. 1-2, ed. by Gustav Albeck, Copenhagen: C.A. Reitzels Boghandel 1979; vol. 1, pp. 241-244. Ibid., vol. 1, pp. 218-26.

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poetic totality in earthly form, for example, in language. The perfect assimilation between the inner experience and the material medium can never be realized. A further problem for him is that a life striving towards the higher sphere of eternity will carry with it a painful discrepancy between the dull, everyday life and the higher but intangible existence. And thus the romantic poet suffers from a certain sickliness. He names Klopstock and Wieland as representatives of this type of romantic, but even more obviously he could have included Novalis and Hölderlin in Germany and the lyric poet, A.W. Schack Staffeldt, in Denmark. Grundtvig ends by proposing a practical compromise to himself: he should also recognize as examples of the spirit’s striving towards essential poetry lower and less perfect degrees of poetry than the absolute, which man in any case cannot achieve in this life. It is characteristic of Grundtvig that he considers the poet’s practical position in everyday life rather than turning his back on the world to plumb his own depths. It is even more characteristic that his conversion to romantic philosophy takes place rationally, tested for logic, not through the bursting of an emotional dam. A book-list dated just before Christmas 1805 shows that Grundtvig now owns Fichte’s The Vocation of Man (1800), and Schelling’s Bruno (1802). Both works would have confirmed him in his application of an overall view of existence in which spirit is the motivating force in everything. This new widening of his perception, this new rethinking of his life from a horizontal plane onto a vertical one has a directly negative effect on his writing efforts. Whereas in previous years he had written freely in many different literary genres, he now wrote nothing at all for the next six months. His study of Schelling continued in the spring of 1806. In a diary which he writes in order to keep track of his pupil’s progress, we can see how he has tried to teach the child “to place a deeper sense in reality without being repelled by its external effects,”5 – in other words a practical application of the new-found poetic view of life. At the same time Grundtvig tries to persuade himself to see Constance as an incidental expression – for him alone unhappy and painful – of a longing for eternity. She must be an instrument to turn his way of life towards the poetic, not the object of his desire. This is how peace of mind on earth is to be found: “the Ultimate must be purified of everything limiting, or it must coincide with its pure primordial vision. The inner 5

Ibid., vol. 1, p. 330.


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vision must no longer be the enemy of perception.”6 For the present Grundtvig cannot compose on this formula. A few love poems to Constance sent with a selection of flowers are allegories, and, being stylized on the pattern of Holberg’s mock-heroic poem Peder Paars, “Of charming thoughts alone does poesie consist,”7 they hardly amount to romantically transported self-expression. Friedrich Schiller’s aesthetic, historical and poetical works also found a place on Grundtvig’s writing-desk. Schiller’s experiment in regenerating and renewing the Greek drama of fate in The Bride from Messina is discussed in some notes which in 1807 turn into a printed essay in the Copenhagen periodical New Minerva.8 Grundtvig credits Schiller for the idealistic direction his poetry takes, but regrets that Schiller engaged himself in an artificial, man-made harmonization of the eternal and the temporal. He maintains instead that the modern reader can only identify with heroes like Schiller’s Karl Moor in The Robbers, Don Carlos, Joan of Arc and above all, Shakespeare’s Hamlet. For they fought on the basis of their glimpse of the eternal in their miserable existence, just as their reader must do today. The unharmonious and incomplete element in them is the fact that their lives are not perfectly rounded off – there is a defect in art. But it is precisely this that at the same time is the signal for “a profusion of poetry,”9 the longing for eternity. Here is where the modern reader can invest his feelings, be carried along in joy and tears. By contrast, Schiller’s Sicilians, in classical style, submit calmly to the vicissitudes of life in their belief in a superhuman fate. For Grundtvig, only the absolute engagement in the poetic can free man from his detested earthly existence, and then only in flashes. In this amplification of his thought in the printed essay he shares romanticism’s high estimation of literature as a path to the eternal. In a passage deleted from his private notes he has clarified his viewpoint: the reconciliation to existence of the classical Schiller – and also of Goethe – is an obvious illusion, in fact it is identical with Paul’s category, man’s service of vanity, in Romans 8.1923, whilst the poetic form of life corresponds to the description in the same passage of the sighing of the creature longing for the glorious 6 7

8

9

Ibid., vol. 1, p. 370. Hans Michelsen [i.e. Ludvig Holberg] Peder Paars. Poema heroico-comicum, 3rd augumented and revised edition, Copenhagen 1720, p. 290. N.F.S. Grundtvigs Dag- og Udtogsbøger, op. cit., vol. 1, pp. 385-90, and in Ny Minerva, June 1807, pp. 225-248. N.F.S. Grundtvig “Om Schiller og Bruden fra Messina” in Ny Minerva, June 1807, p. 231.

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liberty of the children of God. In this rejected draft Grundtvig moves from self-centered romanticism to a subject that is greater than the self: Christianity. For various personal reasons he did not immediately draw the conclusions of this conviction. The years 1807-1810 are the most romantic in his life as a writer. For the rest of his long life Grundtvig prefers poetry – the right direction, to art – the polished form. Thus, in painting he places Leonardo da Vinci’s mere sketch of Christ’s face in The Last Supper above Raphael’s finished pictures (in a note from 1810).10 Here perhaps is the reason why Grundtvig wrote so many fragmentary and halffinished poems, for which he has had to face much criticism from men of letters and literary historians.

II. In the years 1805-09 Denmark’s principal romantic, Adam Oehlenschläger, was given royal support to live abroad in Germany, France and Italy in order to develop his poetic talent. In his absence Grundtvig appears before the Copenhagen public as a romantic. On Langeland in 1806 he had acquired Oehlenschläger’s Poetical Writings.11 He was immediately seized with boundless admiration for Vaulundur’s Saga, an Old Norse legend about the patiently striving artist which Oehlenschläger had rewritten as an old-fashioned yet familiar sounding prose tale. Characteristically for Grundtvig, he attached little or no importance to Oehlenschläger’s programmed genie drama, Aladdin and the Wonderful Lamp, doubtless because at the end of it Aladdin trusts in his own strength in the battle against evil and fails to make use of the lamp, the God-given power. Grundtvig’s preference for Oehlenschläger’s Norse saga rather than his oriental drama also had something to do with his own attempts after 1800 to utilize material from Norse antiquity. At Egeløkke one of this most effective safeguards against Constance’s smile and glance had been his absorption in the Norse past. Grundtvig had a vague feeling – a romantic concept – that there was more meaning in our forefathers’ paganism than scholars of the 18th century could see. At the same time as he was in raptures over Vaulundur his attention was drawn to a poem by the Copenhagen academic, Jens Møller, writ10 11

Grundtvig Archive, The Royal Library, Copenhagen, File 213. 11 verso. Adam Oehlenschläger Poetiske Skrifter vols. 1-2, Copenhagen 1805.


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ten in the contemptuous and deliberately anachronistic style of the previous decade on a poem, “Skirnir’s Journey,” in the Elder Edda.12 In great haste (and indignation) Grundtvig produced a retort to Møller’s unhistorical treatment of the material – “Brief Comment on the Songs of the Edda.”13 The article was published in New Minerva in September 1806. It is most noteworthy for containing the first sketch of an overall view of the Aesir mythology. Its model is found in Steffens’ seventh and eighth lectures where in fewer than thirty pages he surveyed the whole course of the history of the world. Even more important, Jens Møller’s verse narrative apparently prompted Grundtvig to attempt a rewriting of “Skirnir’s Journey” in a little Edda-like song, “Freyr’s Love.”14 This poem, which was first printed in 1808, is in several respects pure romanticism. The choice of subject, the nation’s ancient religion, fulfils romanticism’s search for the identity of the individual nation. The tendency to see the action around Freyr, his helper Skirnir, and the maiden Gerd as one episode amongst many leading to Ragnarok is a transference of romanticism’s view of history as epic drama into mythology. In the actual poetic execution Grundtvig places great emphasis on burning love as a motive, in many metaphors of fire and flower, both of which were favorite areas of imagery for romantics such as Steffens and Staffeldt. In the long scene in which Freyr overpowers the poor girl through a series of curses, a scene extended even further by Grundtvig, the tremendous power of the word, i.e. poetry, is demonstrated romantically. Grundtvig very carefully adapted his style and content to a unique form. The motions of love are expressed in modern end-rhymed verse, whereas the rough action in the Old Norse story is worked out in short, chopping, partly alliterative lines. Most arch-romantics are recognizable by their absorption in their own inner being and by their development of an imaginative world with only an airy connection to earthly existence. It is paradoxical that Grundtvig’s way into literary romanticism is a flight from the self and sexuality into mythology, history and theology. The picture begins to flicker. 12 13

14

Jens Møller “Skirners Reise” in Ny Minerva, May 1806, pp. 212-230. N.F.S. Grundtvig “Lidet om Sangene i Edda” in Ny Minerva, September 1806, pp. 270-299. (Reprinted in Grundtvigs Udvalgte Skrifter vols. 1-10, ed. by Holger Begtrup, Copenhagen: Gyldendalske Boghandel, Nordisk Forlag 1904-1909; vol. 1, pp. 117-134.) N.F.S. Grundtvig “Freis Kærlighed” in Grundtvigs Udvalgte Skrifter, op. cit., vol. 1, pp. 295-317.

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In the following years Grundtvig’s writing is now within the bounds of romanticism, now overstepping them from a direct or unspoken impulse in his view of Christianity. In an essay printed in 1807, “On Religion and Liturgy,”15 he rejects Schelling’s philosophy of identity and any deification of literature in favor of the divine revelation. Another essay from the same year, “On Scholarship and its Encouragement,”16 romantically maintains not only that spirit controls and forms material reality, but also that spiritual life presupposes the religious impulse. A more scholarly documented article from 1807, “On Norse Mythology,”17 presents an all-embracing interpretation of Norse mythology and by way of comparison describes Greek mythology as a work of art, while the Norse mythology through Ragnarok and the subsequent golden age is called truly poetic. Both judgments point back to Steffens’ distinction between art and poetry. In the summer of 1808 Grundtvig began bit by bit to interpret his own life up until that point. The draft of a poem “Journey in the Summer of 1807”18 is an early forerunner of his confessionary, symbolic poem, “The Hill by the Sea at Egeløkke” (1811).19 Here he describes his path away from Constance, from love and from his own narrow self towards an objective material, the pagan North, represented in the text by the friend of his youth, P.N. Skougaard. However, he still lacked the necessary distance to his Egeløkke feelings, and he had not developed his understanding of the coherence in Norse paganism in sufficient detail. The poem was not ready for publication until Grundtvig was on the other side of his human breakdown and Christian breakthrough around Christmas of 1810. In practice and in literature Grundtvig continued with romanticism. On his departure as chaplain to the Langeland militia he gave a sermon in November 1807 in which he urged the Langelanders to stand or fall in the battle, just like the Norse of old, if they should have to 15

16

17

18

19

N.F.S. Grundtvig “Om Religion og Liturgie” in Theologisk Maanedsskrivt vol. 9, 1807, pp. 129-201. N.F.S. Grundtvig “Om Videnskabelighed og dens Fremme” in Ny Minerva, February 1807, pp. 249-298. N.F.S. Grundtvig “Om Asalæren” in Ny Minerva, May 1807, pp. 156-188. (Reprinted in Grundtvigs Udvalgte Skrifter, op. cit., vol. 1, pp. 204-223.) N.F.S. Grundtvig “Rejsen i Sommeren 1807” in Grundtvig Archive, The Royal Library, Copenhagen, Fascicle 386.1. N.F.S. Grundtvig “Strandbakken ved Egeløkke” in Saga. Nytaarsgave for 1812, Copenhagen: Andreas Seidelins Forlag 1811, pp. 53-58. (Reprinted in Grundtvigs Udvalgte Skrifter, op. cit., vol. 2, pp. 98-101.)


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fight against Denmark’s English enemies. In the booklet The Masked Ball in Denmark from March 1808, Grundtvig nurtures the romantic intention to exhort the present to serious action by referring to the heroic achievements of the past, heathen or Catholic, against the English.20 In its execution, however, this strange little story interspersed with songs – Grundtvig’s first book – is more a dry, intellectual allegory than what the subtitle promised, “a vision.” In the confusion surrounding the death of Christian VII it quite escaped public attention. Well ensconced in Copenhagen in May 1808, Grundtvig set out to win over the general public and the educated reader to his form of romanticism. In a newspaper article in 1809 he recommended the preservation of the barrows that were scattered around the country, because only as monuments in their original positions did they have any meaning, whilst the unearthing of pots and bones would not increase the qualitative knowledge of the pagan past. He composed to order an inscription with an Old Norse ring to it for the monument to the naval hero, Peter Willemoes, and the others fallen in the battle against the English off Zealand Spit in March 1808 – probably some of Grundtvig’s best-known lines.21 And in the summer of 1810, when the sudden death of the heir to the Swedish throne opened Grundtvig’s eyes to the possibility of a united Scandinavia, he wrote a majestically authoritative elegy for the prince and followed it up with a pamphlet to the Swedish people. By pointing to Denmark-Norway’s and Sweden’s common language and religion, he attempted to move the Swedish parliament into choosing Frederik VI of Denmark as the new heir to the Swedish throne. In this he failed, but he had placed himself before the Scandinavian peoples as a poet who delivered judgments and as a historian. Romanticism’s very high estimation of the poet as, if not God’s mouthpiece, then at least that of the eternal or history, a worldly seer, breaks through here – just as it does in the meticulous composition and solemnly imposing style of the elegy and the prose work. Grundtvig’s more traditionally literary initiatives were also strongly tinged with romanticism. The program and confessionary poem from 1808 “Gunderslev Forest”22 describes the self’s intuitively motivated 20

21

22

N.F.S. Grundtvig Maskeradeballet i Dannemark 1808, Copenhagen: J.H. Schubothe 1808. (Reprinted in Grundtvigs Udvalgte Skrifter, op. cit., vol. 1, pp. 225-234.) N.F.S. Grundtvig “Sjællands Odde.” Monument at Odden Cemetary 1810. (Cf. the text in Dagen no. 40, March 6, 1810, p. 2, col. 1.) (Reprinted in Grundtvigs Udvalgte Skrifter, op. cit., vol. 1, pp. 756-757.) N.F.S. Grundtvig “Gunderslev Skov” in Nyeste Skilderie af Kjøbenhavn vol. 5, no. 101, September 27, 1808, columns 1597-1600.

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journey through a dark and enclosed forest to a large and ancient dolmen, which in a moment of inspiration he hails as an altar once used in honor of the Aesir. This apparent archaeological error of judgment has no serious consequences for the vitality of the poem. Its subject is the path, the direction of the spiritual endeavor, and passionate engagement as the driving-force. But the poem contains no mythological details, and there is no proposal for the reawakening of belief in the Norse gods. In its form the content is adapted to the meter in verse lines of different length with a variety of rhyme schemes. The poem is a companion piece to the work that marks the breakthrough of Danish Romanticism, Oehlenschläger’s symbolic lyric poem, “The Golden Horns” from 1802.23 Under the impact of the English bombardment of Copenhagen and the carrying off of the navy in the autumn of 1807, both Oehlenschläger and his older rival, Jens Baggesen, had published inspiring national ballads in the style of the old Danish popular ballad. Grundtvig joined in with poems in a Copenhagen newspaper, including in 1809 “The Evening,”24 on the murder of Knud Lavard, which was followed historically by a regeneration of the race and the kingdom under Valdemar the Great; and the more personal “In Praise of Freyja,”25 where Grundtvig finds reconciliation with the nature of spring, which stimulated the senses far too much, by interpreting it in terms of Norse mythology. An elegiac romance on Peter Willemoes from 1810 “Come Hither, Little Girls!”26 achieves a powerful effect by lauding the hero’s posthumous reputation in the framework of a girl’s song of mourning for his great deeds. The poem is reminiscent of the late 18th century historical everyday idyll by the dramatist, Thomas Thaarup. A purer, and deliberately provocative, romanticism is to be found, also with imitations of Shakespeare and Oehlenschläger, in Grundtvig’s most ambitious product of the decade: the plan to rewrite in numerous booklets of plays and prose a thousand years of Norse paganism from Odin’s appearance to the end of the mythology in the fall of Palnatoke 23

24

25

26

Adam Oehlenschläger “Guldhornene” in his Digte, Copenhagen: Universitetsboghandler Fr. Brummers Forlag 1803, pp. 75-82. N.F.S. Grundtvig “Aftenen (Ved min Færd til Middelsyssel)” in Nyeste Skilderie af Kjøbenhavn vol. 37, February 14, 1809, columns. 585-588. N.F.S. Grundtvig “Freias Pris” in Nyeste Skilderie af Kjøbenhavn vol. 66, May 27, 1809, columns. 1063-1064. N.F.S. Grundtvig “Kommer hid, I Piger smaa!” in Danske og Norske historiske Mindesange, ed. by K.L. Rahbek, Copenhagen 1810, pp. 166-172. (Reprinted in Grundtvigs Udvalgte Skrifter, op. cit., vol. 1, pp. 764-768.)


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and Jomsburg. Apart from a few attempts at saga-like narratives Grundtvig only completed and published the first and last part of the whole project. Scenes from the Decline of Heroic Life in the North,27 in deliberate competition with Oehlenschläger’s tragedy Hakon Earl the Mighty,28 describes the ending of pagan belief in Denmark. Scenes from the Battle of Norns and Aesir written in 1809-10, published in 1811,29 deals with the history of the Volsunga race with Sigurd and Brynhild as central figures; after his crisis around Christmas 1810, Grundtvig added characters and scenes with a Christian-didactic purpose in mind, even though they obviously conflicted with the purely pagan plot. Both of the Scenes are characterized by Grundtvig’s vacillation between the aesthetically attractive pagan heroism and the steady advance of his biblical orthodoxy. Artistically the Scenes testify to Grundtvig’s romanticism as regards both composition and language, with contrasts between the love idyll and scenes of brutal violence, with a certain aesthetic of ugliness in the dialogue’s expression of strong passions, with unexpected changes from comedy to tragedy and vice versa, and above all with an old Norse and old Danish inventory of single words and set phrases that far exceeds what Oehlenschläger had offered his public. Grundtvig’s pieces were also romantic in being closet drama (with stage instructions in the epic past tense) – not calculated for the Royal Theater. He was to persevere with his romantic philosophy of history and philology in 1810. At the start of the year he invited subscriptions both for as literal a translation as was possible of the Elder Edda, and for a journal (together with the philosopher Frederik Christian Sibbern) to be called Odin and Saga, whose guiding principles were to be found in romanticism’s overall view of history and poetry. But neither of the projects met with sufficient interest. Privately he reached a high point of romantic symbolism as a poet with the poem he wrote on the occasion of his elderly father’s 50th anniversary as a clergyman in December 1810. In one stanza at least he demonstrates his ability to develop and transform a number of metaphors, ambiguous on their own, and to rivet them together in 27

28

29

N.F.S. Grundtvig, Optrin af Kæmpelivets Undergang i Norden vols. 1-2, Copenhagen: J.H. Schubothe 1809-11. (Reprinted in Grundtvigs Udvalgte Skrifter, op. cit., vol. 1, pp. 383-545.) Adam Oehlenschläger Hakon Jarl hin Rige in his Nordiske Digte, Copenhagen: Andreas Seidelin 1807. N.F.S. Grundtvig Optrin af Norners og Asers Kamp, Copenhagen: J.H. Schubothe 1811. (Reprinted in Grundtvigs Udvalgte Skrifter, op. cit., vol. 1, pp. 548-744.)

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brief lines without padding and with a rhyme that seems both natural and meritorious. This style, which is the best possible illustration of why romanticism appreciates symbols, is to be found later in Grundtvig’s writing in his most successful lyrical pieces – “The Easter Lily” (1817)30 and New Year’s Morn (1824).31 However, already before the two Scenes (1809-11), with which his first period as a poet comes to an end, Grundtvig had broken decisively with the romantic view of life in favor of his former emphasis on the power of Christianity. This happened in December 1808, when he published Norse Mythology, a major work in the literature of the decade. The book is the first attempt to create a comprehensive unity out of the heterogeneous sources of Norse mythology. Its principle of scholarship is precisely the same as romanticism’s inner philosophy, “the deeper sense,” and on this principle Grundtvig arranges the sources in accordance with their significance for the unity which he senses. In his treatment of individual myths Grundtvig upholds a Platonic dualism in his representation of love. Finally, he presents a theory that the whole of Norse mythology was created by an old and gifted poet, who wanted to order all the contradictory phenomena of life and therefore interpreted them into a colossal tragedy in five acts. So far the book’s attitude is pure romanticism. But towards the end of the work, Grundtvig oversteps his selfimposed borders in a surprising manner. He resolutely declares that Ragnarok, which he depicts in detail on the basis of his guiding-star, the Edda poem, The Sooth-saying of the Volva, never came. There is reasonable evidence in the myths themselves for this, inasmuch as in the various medieval sources Ragnarok appears only in prophecies of the future. But that is not the reason Grundtvig gives for nullifying the Norse drama. He maintains that its progress was stopped when another son of the Norse Father of the universe (Alfader) who was purer than Odin, namely Christ, descended to earth, dethroned the selfish Aesir, destroyed the wicked giants and blew fresh life into the dying divine spark. These heroic feats, which are not reported in the New Testament, triumph over the hypothetical pagan poet’s explanation of the baffling conflicts of earthly life. They point forward to a 30

31

N.F.S. Grundtvig “Paaske-Lilien” in his journal Danne-Virke vol. 3, hefte 3, April 22, 1817. (Reprinted in Grundtvigs Udvalgte Skrifter, op. cit., vol. 3, pp. 438-440, pp. 458459.) N.F.S. Grundtvig Nyaars-Morgen. Et Riim, Copenhagen 1824. (Reprinted in Grundtvigs Udvalgte Skrifter, op. cit., vol. 4, pp. 249-343.)


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time when with increasing power Grundtvig searches out the answer to all questions in the historical course of Christianity and ultimately in the Bible. And thus a direct clash with the self-validating overall visions of romanticism is unavoidable.

III. After a deep spiritual crisis and several actual attacks of acute mental illness, Grundtvig experienced a breakthrough in his Christian faith around Christmas 1810. Early in 1811 he began to search for new poetic assurance in the Bible and the history of the Church. He found it reassuring that poets such as David in the Old Testament, Johannes Ewald in the 18th century, and the Norwegian clergyman Jonas Rein in the present age had been able to use their poetic talents in God’s service. In Paul’s speech on the Areopagus (Acts 17.28) he found a New Testament argument for the justification of the poetic art, even pagan art, as a true relic of the image of God that was lost with the Fall. In 1811 it actually led him to a kind of identification with the Old Testament prophets. The romantics’ idea of poetic genius was derived from, amongst others, the Old Testament. Now Grundtvig returned to the biblical seers in a sense. His retrospective poetry collection Saga, published in December 1811, carries a motto from the prophet Ezekiel (33.32): “for they hear thy words, but they do them not.” In the Foreword to Saga, where the motto is given a detailed commentary, he even continues the quotation: “then shall they know that a prophet hath been among them.”32 In a draft of the Foreword Grundtvig worked on a Christian definition of the poet.33 He sees two types of poet in his own age: the passive, presumably romantic type who makes himself an unresisting tool for his own imagination and its impulses, and the active, presumably a moralizing classicist, who strictly controls his imagination in the service of a particular goal. Alongside these he wishes to place a third type, which with a pun he calls the “deponent,”34 a union of passive form and active meaning.

32

33

34

N.F.S. Grundtvig Saga. Nytaarsgave for 1812, Copenhagen: Andreas Seidelins Forlag 1811. (Reprinted in Grundtvigs Udvalgte Skrifter, op. cit., vol. 2, p. 88, p. 96.) Gustav Albeck Omkring Grundtvigs Digtsamlinger, Copenhagen: Universitetsforlaget i Aarhus and Ejnar Munksgaard 1955, pp. 102-104. Draft in the Grundtvig Archive, The Royal Library, Copenhagen. Fascicle 386. Published in Gustav Albeck, Omkring Grundtvigs Digtsamlinger, op. cit., p. 103.

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The deponent poet regards the flight of his imagination intellectually in order to ascertain its direction before he gives himself up to it. Since in 1811 Grundtvig had for years been defining true poetry as that aimed toward the eternal, he could quickly conclude that deponent poets must be “religious or Christian.”35 Although Grundtvig omits this passage in the draft from the printed Foreword in favor of a mosaic of biblical quotations, in subsequent years he appears to have made every effort to become such a deponent poet. It still leaves room for romantic elements on a level lower than the one concerned with an overall view of life. For a brief period around the new year 1810-11 Grundtvig wrote some private lyric fragments in which his poetic style is ruthlessly ascetic, short on images and non-sensuous. But it is not long before he is again drawing on romanticism’s emotional and ambiguous store of images in order to acknowledge and speak the unspeakable. The abundant use of metaphors for the “rose,” the “source” and the “rune” in the long poem Roskilde Rhyme (1814),36 and the commentary on it in archaizing prose Roskilde Saga (1814),37 are clear evidence of his great need for and inspiration from a freely proliferating imagery that at times eludes rational understanding. Grundtvig actually had to give up a precise commentary on specific points in the Roskilde works as well as the later New Year’s Morn,38 because he watched his notes growing into an ever thickening wilderness of associations that even he himself could not carve a path through for the reader. In 1811 Grundtvig had made a decision to speak directly without unnecessary circumlocutory images in his biblical Christian authorship. At Christmas 1815 he changed his mind. He had found that even well-educated people were outraged by his truculence or completely misunderstood him, both when he spoke out directly about things and when he treated them in the poetic form which he himself had found as natural as drawing breath. He then had to choose a means of communication that he felt he mastered best. This involved a deliberate resumption of

35 36

37

38

Ibid. N.F.S. Grundtvig Roskilde-Riim, Copenhagen: Andreas Seidelins Forlag 1814. (Reprinted in Grundtvigs Udvalgte Skrifter, op. cit., vol. 2, pp. 427-608.) N.F.S. Grundtvig Roskilde-Saga til Oplysning af Roskilde-Riim, Copenhagen: Andreas Seidelins Forlag 1814. (Reprinted in Grundtvigs Udvalgte Skrifter, op. cit., vol. 2, pp. 610-693.) N.F.S. Grundtvig Nyaars-Morgen. Et Riim, Copenhagen 1824. (Reprinted in Grundtvigs Udvalgte Skrifter, op. cit., vol. 4, pp. 249-343.)


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the poetic technique from the romantic years of his youth, which in fact he had never really managed to discard in practice.

IV. In the period before 1811 Grundtvig had gone beyond romanticism. He made use of it as a lower-ranking philosophy of life which could lead on to the higher one of Christianity. After 1811 he regarded romanticism for some years as one of the major enemies of the Christian faith, and he directed furious attacks upon it. Grundtvig’s interest in world history was awakened in earnest while he was teaching from 1808-10 at the Schouboe Institute, a modern private school in Copenhagen. In a lecture there in 1809 or 1810 he named Goethe and Schiller as contemporary classics on a par with the ancient Greeks and Shakespeare. Manuscript corrections reveal that instead of Schiller he had originally written the names of two archromantics, Novalis and Tieck. These two, along with many others, came under fire in Grundtvig’s culturally oriented World Chronicles of 1812 and 1817.39 In the 1812 volume romanticism is attacked for its pantheistic natural philosophy, lacking all distinction between good and evil, for its mythologizing of Christianity and for its delusion of the individual’s ability to redeem himself. Writers like Novalis, Tieck and Werner are described in the same terms: at first their harps played glorious music, but then the poets got lost in their inner selves until only the sound of broken strings was heard. In 1817 he has harsh things to say about Fichte’s arrogant self-worship and criticized Novalis, Tieck and the Schlegel brothers for wanting to turn time into eternity, to immerse themselves in themselves and lose themselves in the world. In Denmark Grundtvig accuses Holberg, Baggesen and especially Oehlenschläger of similarly wishing to be controlled by a far too mundane and self-centered attitude. Grundtvig’s assault on Novalis is particularly enlightening. It is inserted into the middle of a pamphlet duel against H.C. Ørsted, a natural scientist from Copenhagen. Ørsted was a searcher for harmony who preferred calm inquiries within the framework of a speculative romantic system to Grundtvig’s violent swings of faith and 39

N.F.S. Grundtvig Kort Begreb af Verdens Krønike i Sammenhæng, Copenhagen 1812. Udsigt over Verdens-Krøniken fornemmelig i det Lutherske Tidsrum, Copenhagen 1817.

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apparently haphazard subjectivism. In the controversial pamphlet, Against the Little Accuser (1815), Grundtvig portrayed Novalis as the typical representative of German Romanticism and its errors.40 Grundtvig translates a poetic fragment by Novalis, which according to Tieck was originally intended for the novel Heinrich von Ofterdingen. It describes how poetry’s “secret words”41 will one day be able to unite all life’s contradictions in song and play, whilst mathematics and other book-knowledge will be made superfluous. Grundtvig comments: “In brief, the blue flower, the forget-me-not of Paradise, that is what Novalis insists on finding and embracing, not as a weeping maiden but as the queen of life: then in a heavenly carriage he will float away with her over all worlds in poignant pleasure; light and dark, truth and lies will lovingly embrace each other in the night that is forever light.”42 The words “weeping maiden” were coined in Danish by Grundtvig to specify the subservient position of poetry to religion. Grundtvig’s portrait of Novalis continues: “A deep longing for rest and harmony, a deep look into the heart of nature, a burning love for the great and the beautiful, these things were to be found in Novalis as in few others, but love developed into impure passion that infected his desires and confused his visions.”43 Alongside this stern judgment on Novalis’ wrong turn and subsequent impurity, infection and confusion to the point of madness, Grundtvig acknowledges that his poetry also includes moving moments in “certain deep and Christian notes.”44 In the condemnatory Chronicles of the 1810’s Grundtvig also admits that in the great battle between Christianity and materialism (the latter being particularly apparent in the French philosophy of Enlightenment) German Romanticism has a role to play as a viable spiritual ferment. Grundtvig’s last direct clash with literary romanticism took place in October, November and December 1818, when he threw himself into the so-called “Controversy of Twelve,” a literary feud between, on the one side, Oehlenschläger (represented by twelve admirers and many others among the young Copenhagen academics) and, on the other side, Oehlenschläger’s old rival, Jens Baggesen, who as a critic had 40

41 42 43 44

N.F.S. Grundtvig Imod den lille Anklager, det er Prof. H.C. Ørsted, med Bevis for at Schellings Philosophie er uchristelig, ugudelig og løgnagtig, Copenhagen: Andreas Seidelin 1815, pp. 195-197. Ibid., p. 195. Ibid., p. 195f. Ibid., p. 196. Ibid., p. 197.


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been attacking Oehlenschläger since 1813 – not without some justification – for the falling curve in his career as poet and cultural personality. Grundtvig supported Baggesen because he regarded him as more spiritual than the young supporters of Oehlenschläger. He was now standing face to face with Danish Romanticism’s second and third generation, people like Carsten Hauch and Poul Martin Møller, who had not yet published works bearing their own individual hallmark. The argument against them is therefore directed more towards their immaturity as critics and their rebellious contempt for historical tradition and order. Only in his demonstration of the unspiritual sensuality for which the young blindly worship Oehlenschläger does Grundtvig return to the bitter line of thought with which he attacked Novalis in 1815. By the end of the decade Grundtvig was no longer a literary figure. He became a vicar, and for a number of years transferred his interest to theology and church politics. At any rate he no longer took part in literary campaigns and did not seem to keep up very well with modern literature. In the 1830’s, when he returned after a number of quiet years to writing for a wider public, it was not in the capacity of an old member of romanticism’s first generation, but simply as Grundtvig. At about the same time the literary critics stopped reviewing his works as “ordinary” literature and accepted that, since he was Grundtvig, a legend in his own lifetime, he must be read on his own terms. To summarize: in a great many ways Grundtvig came close to romanticism in the first two decades of his writing career, but he never became a romantic proper. This is primarily due to his changing yet steadily growing sympathy for evangelical Christianity – and secondly (though not dealt with here) his respect for scholarly hard work and learning, an inheritance from the polyhistory of the 18th century.

V. Romantic ideas, patterns and concepts are to be found in many places in the last fifty years of Grundtvig’s writing, right up until his death in 1872, the year after Georg Brandes introduced modernism. Several of Grundtvig’s principal ideas are derived from the romantics, though their origin is sometimes difficult to trace, since the romantics and their predecessors, the pre-romantic philosophers, occasionally borrowed them from Christian or ecclesiastical thought and reshaped them secularly. And because Grundtvig was already extremely well-

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read at an early stage in his life, a study of sources is required in every single instance before a line of thought in its first manifestation can be revealed as Christian or romantic. What is most important is that Grundtvig takes seriously the romantics’ high estimation of the creative process of literary composition. He uses words as tools to a degree that no other Danish Golden Age writer does, in poetry and prose, in speech and in writing, in his private as well as his public life. The majority of his titles are written for the occasion, sometimes in a great hurry, with the aim of intervening in and changing some situation or other whose possible consequences he compares with his interpretation of the meaning of the course of history and the world. That is why he takes an aggressive line towards other poets such as Baggesen and Oehlenschläger who engage in frivolous games with their muse. His own major poem New Year’s Morn (1824) is a perfect example of romanticism’s obscurely prophetic poetry, centered around the typical and the universal in his personal life to date and leading into a grand prophecy and hopes for the future. Grundtvig’s view of nature is romantic. Nature is depicted not for its own sake but is lit up, given a spiritual light, “transfigured,” just as it is in Oehlenschläger’s boldest poem of his youth, The Life of Jesus Christ Repeated in the Annual Cycle of Nature.45 This is also and in particular true in poems where a modern reader feels the apparently realistic details to have been convincingly depicted. Nature becomes transcendent, and Grundtvig can read it like a book – his own expression in 1808 to his friend, Christian Molbech. In such poems Grundtvig is a good romantic writer in his preservation of the ambiguity between what is real and what is invisibly spiritual in his metaphors from nature. In more limited areas as well, for example, in his enthusiasm for Norway as the birthplace of heroes and in his love of the old popular ballads Grundtvig continues the lines that marked the breakthrough of romanticism into Denmark in 1802. In his history writing in the 1810’s, 1830’s and 1840’s Grundtvig demonstrates a supremely comprehensive view of history. He has a tendency to structure events into vast patterns of artistic composition which in the end form universal unities. He calls this ability to find meaning in the course of events a “hawk’s eye” (in 1818 in connection 45

Adam Oehlenschläger Jesu Christi gientagne Liv i den aarlige Natur in Poetiske Skrifter vols. 1-2, Copenhagen 1805; vol. 1, pp. 421-480.


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with Baggesen’s concept of spirit).46 In his only work on contemporary history, Within Living Memory, lectures given in 1838 and published posthumously in 1877,47 Grundtvig suggests that the reader should regard the French Revolution in 1789 from the meeting of the Assembly to the execution of the King as a Shakespearean tragedy. In general, throughout his life he prefers to use accounts of older history – antiquity, the Middle Ages, the Reformation – for the purposes of a national and Christian revival. In Grundtvig’s use of myths and mythology, both the existing (from antiquity or Old Norse) and the self-made (often lifted out of the Bible, Saxo or the Old Danish Rhymed Chronicle) we can observe the same ambiguity as in his descriptions of nature. In the course of a few words the language becomes heavy with associations, rich in details and yet unbelievably far-reaching. The development of subtle details is guided by an overall vision, in perfect accordance with the methodology of the romantics’ research into myths. And the myths are not merely illuminated, but used themselves in order to illuminate. The age of a myth is most reliably evaluated by the sympathetic reader’s living feeling, and at this point scholars should submit to poets. For as Grundtvig sees it, the myth-makers employed a romantic-poetic principle: they denoted the invisible through the visible. Nor were they in any way learned empiricists, consciously transforming the phenomena of visible nature into invisible allegorical events – a dig from Grundtvig’s side at the rational myth-interpreters in both the 18th and the 19th century who had attempted to read myths as disguised lessons in meteorology and geology. Grundtvig’s plan for a folk high school and for adult education is colored extensively by romantic ideas. “The living word,” in the sense of the spoken native language employed in spontaneous interaction between teacher and pupils had been demonstrated to Grundtvig in his youth by Steffens. He never lost faith in its ability to ignite. In the folk high school that he hoped to set up at Sorø in mid-Zealand as a national counterweight to the Latin-dominated university in Copenhagen, his priorities were lessons in the native language, in folk-song, in the history of the country and in the nation’s literature – a continu46

47

N.F.S. Grundtvig “Om Digterne Baggesen og Oehlenschläger” in his journal DanneVirke vol. 4, hefte 3, November 1818. (Reprinted in Grundtvigs Udvalgte Skrifter, op. cit., vol. 3, p. 612.) Svend Grundtvig (ed.), N.F.S. Grundtvig: Mands Minde 1788-1838, Copenhagen: Karl Schønbergs Forlag 1877.

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ation of ideas on national upbringing and education from both the German pre-romantics and German Romanticism. His so-called historical and poetic method of teaching makes use of the “hawk’s eye” from romanticism’s philosophy of history, in contrast to the mechanical passing on of the compilatory chaos of the common, dry textbooks. He wishes to ensure a knowledge of the native language by, among other things, including dialects and proverbs in the teaching – areas that romanticism had rediscovered and given status to. In his commemorative poem for Steffens in 1845 he dreams of having the philosopher’s ashes buried in the middle of Sorø High School in recognition of the fact that it was Steffens who gave him the first impulse for a Danish high school.48 In the latter half of the 18th century J.G. Herder had published his essays on the philosophy of history, in which he maintained that a nation’s soul and identity are to be found in its language, its literature and its culture. He proclaimed that genius is always national, and he laid down a pattern of organic development over the history of the world. His work began a new epoch. Until 1750 it had still been possible, despite differences in language and temperament, to maintain the feeling of a common European culture that was established from the Latin Middle Ages. Now the European history of ideas was split into a number of national histories, internally quite different from one another. In Denmark Grundtvig mediated Herder’s ideas and changed them into genuine politics of culture. Under the influence of Napoleon’s demise, he saw in the years 1814-15 with increasing clarity that God’s chosen people in recent times are the Danes, with their unequalled feeling for truth and love. On this basis Grundtvig developed a concept of Danishness, not in the sense of a particular nation with a particular language, but as a call, a God-given gift, an ability to see true Christianity in the earthly phenomena and give it room, in other words, a Christian version of Steffens’ definition of poetry. This concept of Danishness was ready for use in Grundtvig’s active role as encourager and comforter in the two Schleswig wars of 1848-50 and 1864. In literature it found expression in his self-produced journal, Danne-Virke (1816-19) and in his wartime magazine, The Dane (184851) – both titles intended as trumpet fanfares. Danishness was also the driving-force behind Grundtvig’s national philology in the great translation projects of the 1810’s. He produced 48

N.F.S. Grundtvig “Henrich Steffens” in Berlingske Tidende, March 14, 1845. (Reprinted in Grundtvigs Udvalgte Skrifter, op. cit., vol. 9, pp. 45-48.)


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a Danish version of Saxo’s Latin Chronicle of the Kingdom of Denmark, Gesta Danorum,49 and Snorri Sturluson’s Old Icelandic companion work on Norway, Heimskringla,50 both from around 1220. Grundtvig chose to translate them into the simple, oral style of a Zealand peasant – a style that corresponds neither to the Latin original’s embellished rhetoric nor to the Old Icelandic’s terse saga diction. Grundtvig’s own compass under the laborious translation work was once again romanticism: a feeling for what the text conceals. In his defence in 1816 against a pedantic philologist’s criticism, he exclaims in enthusiasm for Signe’s song in death that he better than the scholars can capture “what inflames the song, what penetrates all barriers and plays under the open sky like a sounding flame” – also or especially where the text does not contain direct utterances.51 To Saxo and Snorri, Grundtvig added in 1820 a verse rendition of the Anglo-Saxon poem Beowulf, a project financed by a patron.52 The text was not published until 1815 in a Copenhagen edition, with a rather misleading parallel text in Latin. In the Foreword to his version Grundtvig maintains the same intuitive method of translating into Danish: his rewriting is in every respect precise, “historically faithful, so I have never deliberately altered or inserted anything, and poetically faithful, so I have endeavored with all my might to render into living speech what I saw in the poem.”53 The Saxo and Snorri translations whetted Grundtvig’s appetite for a major, practical project: nothing less than a national subscription to finance the publication of these national historians, in which people should give what they could and take what they needed. The impoverished should be able to buy copies at cost-price or less, and Grundtvig declined a translation fee and never covered his costs incurred in the considerable administration connected with distribution. To circumvent the commercial bookseller was his main goal. In this idealistic project he abandoned his scholarly study and set out, so to speak, to compose romantically with the nation itself as his material. But the 49

50

51

52

53

N.F.S. Grundtvig (translator), Danmarks Krønike af Saxo Grammaticus, fordansket vols. 1-3, Copenhagen 1818-22. N.F.S. Grundtvig (translator), Norges Konge-Krønike af Snorro Sturlesøn, fordansket vols. 1-3, Copenhagen 1818-22. N.F.S. Grundtvig Literatur-Tidende Skudsmaal i Henseende til Prøverne af Saxo og Snorro, Copenhagen: A Seidelin 1816, p. 20. N.F.S. Grundtvig (translator) Bjowulfs Drape. Et Gothisk Helte-Digt fra forrige AarTusinde, Copenhagen: Andreas Seidelin 1820. Ibid., p. XXXIV.

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poverty especially of the self-governing farms in the wake of the financial ordinance of 1813 had the effect of more or less quietly killing off the project when all six volumes were finally finished in 1823. Grundtvig had been on the market too early with his idea for a public co-operative publishing company. Grundtvig’s lifelong attempt to delineate “Danish” as a concept that was Christian, national, geographical, linguistic and cultural was perhaps the boldest of its kind in European Romanticism. As a result of Denmark’s decline as a military and political power in Europe in the course of Grundtvig’s lifetime, his ideal of Danishness as an attitude to life did not have the same catastrophic consequences in the following century as the Germans’ simultaneous development of German ideology had in the empire and the Third Reich. On the contrary, his linking of the life of the people to Christianity and to the native language, as expressed in his long didactic poem, The Pleiades of Christendom (1860),54 has had a tangible effect on Danish culture right up until today. Along with the idea of Danishness we find in Grundtvig – from the 1830’s onwards – a belief in the Danes’ unequalled popular spirit (folkelighed). In the public debate on the advisory assemblies in the 1830’s, which prepared the ground for the Constitution in 1849, and in his capacity as a member of parliament, Grundtvig attempted, though largely without success, to turn the popular spirit into a political program. It proved a better bet to turn it into a cultural program at the high schools. Finally, the theology that Grundtvig arrived at in his maturity and old age also clearly includes romantic elements. The idea of organic growth inherited from the romantic philosophy of history is transferred to an optimistic Christian faith, where it can be illustrated in the biblical words of an “illumination” of all mysteries in the fullness of time (Ephesians 1.8-10) and of growth only on God’s conditions (I Corinthians 3.7). In The Pleiades of Christendom Grundtvig actually reproaches Luther for having placed too much emphasis on Jesus’ suffering and too little on the spiritual rebirth in man and the consequent growth in God.55 Earlier Lutheran poets in Denmark, from Hans Christensen Sthen at the end of the 16th century through Thomas Kingo a hundred years later to H.A. Brorson and Johannes Ewald in the 18th century’s pie54

55

N.F.S. Grundtvig Christenhedens Syvstjerne, Copenhagen 1860. See “Den nordiske Menighed,” stanzas 62-86. Ibid., stanzas 85-89.


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tism and pre-romanticism, glorified God by confessing their own sin and wretchedness. Grundtvig regarded his own existence as a sign of a (coming) Christian renewal; he sees himself in images of an Easter lily (in the poem of the same name from 1817), one of the heralds of spring in the Danish countryside. He becomes a summoning and prophetic watchman on a par with the Old Testament prophet, for example, in the poem “Commemorative Song at the Ancestors’ Grave” (1815).56 He mirrors himself in Henrich Steffens’ work as a light-bringing and awakening blaze of fire, an Easter angel for the living, crucified, dead, buried and resurrected word (in the obituary poem on the writer in 1845). In the third volume of his world history handbook from 1843, Grundtvig defines Martin Luther as a prophet of a particularly modern kind: he carries a whole age within him and develops it out of himself, manifesting in himself, so to speak, what he prophesies.57 This is a Christian adaptation into a practical and world-historical use of the teaching of romanticism concerning the omnipotence of artistic genius.

VI. There are aspects of romanticism that Grundtvig definitely rejects; for example, the romantics’ favorite idea of the artist as creator, “a Prometheus sub Jove” (Shaftesbury), in nature like God, albeit in miniature – and the consequent idea of the work of art as a microcosm, akin to the universe. Admittedly, he never wrote the theory of literature that he busied himself with in the 1810’s, a theory in opposition to the 17th century’s interpretation of Aristotle, the 18th century’s aesthetic of imagination and harmony in Shaftesbury, Christian Wolff and Edward Young, and the 19th century’s classicism of Goethe and Schiller and romanticism of Novalis and Jean Paul. But in fragmentary writings he keeps a safe distance from romanticism’s self-creating genius. In some manuscripts for a series of lectures from October 1813 on the conditions of man58 Grundtvig thus emphasizes that even in its highest expression the power of imagination is unable to create out of nothing. 56

57 58

N.F.S. Grundtvig “Mindesang paa Fædres Gravhøi” in his Prøver af Snorros og Saxos Krøniker i en ny Oversættelse samt et Ord til Danske og Norske, Copenhagen: Andreas Seidelin 1815. (Reprinted in Grundtvigs Udvalgte Skrifter, op. cit., vol. 4, pp. 8-13.) See Grundtvigs Udvalgte Skrifter, op. cit., vol. 7, p. 541. Nicolai Frederik Severin Grundtvigs Værker i Udvalg vols. 1-10, ed. by Georg Christensen and Hal Koch, Copenhagen: Gyldendal 1941; vol. 2, pp. 241-270.

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It is always dependent on something it can imagine and relate to, and since it is impossible to imagine a nothing, the phrase “freely creating”59 activity becomes meaningless. This is, he notes, the cosmological evidence of God derived from the nature of imaginative power instead of building as is usual on the existence of external, tangible realities. For Grundtvig, both the material, phenomenal world and the inner world of man affirm the idea of “the invisible Creator, in whom we live and move and have our being”60 – a quotation from Paul (Acts 17.28). In a draft for an article in Danne-Virke four years later, “On Revelation, Art and Knowledge,”61 Grundtvig traces true poetry back to the ancient Hebrew prophets with their incomplete or rough visions. At the same time he distrusts sensuous perfection or beauty in a work of art, because these qualities are often merely “empty ting-a-lings” or “savory sausages.” In the published article the main weight is transferred from these attacks to a positive view of true poetry as conditioned solely by God’s intervention. It is Christian art, he says, coming to the world for our benefit through an incomprehensible wonder that alone can complete the work, which is to say “transform and transfigure the sensuous which through the Fall became subject to death and corruption.”62 Grundtvig’s Christian poetics presuppose the dogmas of the Fall and the Atonement through the power of a supernatural revelation. There is no question of a romantic self-redemption. Nor can Grundtvig accept another of the romantics’ favorite ideas, the originality of the artist. He exemplifies the type of writer who reacts spiritedly to his surroundings, through reading the works of earlier periods or in an interaction with contemporary writers. With his very wide reading he had a less naive relationship to the age’s ideal of originality than, say, Oehlenschläger. In an article in his youth “On Oehlenschläger’s Balder the Good” (1808)63 he wrote off his own ability to reproduce his inner visions in poetry. In the verse “Foreword” to the epic poem “Ragnarok” (1817),64 he prefers a simple, purposeful poetic activity in 59 60 61

62

63

64

Ibid., vol. 2, p. 265. Ibid., vol. 2, p. 269. N.F.S. Grundtvig “Om Aabenbaring, Kunst og Vidskab” in the Grundtvig Archive, The Royal Library, Copenhagen. Fascicle 162.1 6v-9v, 12r. N.F.S. Grundtvig “Om Aabenbaring, Konst og Vidskab” in his journal Danne-Virke vol. 3, hefte 3, 1817, p. 293. N.F.S. Grundtvig “Om Oehlenschlägers Baldur hiin Gode” in Ny Minerva, December 1807, pp. 301-320. N.F.S. Grundtvig “Ragna-Roke, (et dansk Æmter)” in his journal Danne-Virke vol. 3, hefte 4, 1817, pp. 301-312.


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continuation of the historical chronicle tradition, pouring scorn on slogans about the self-validation of art and the artist’s originality. In his nonfiction writings Grundtvig opposes in theory and practice the demand for originality. He feels it to be an unreasonable narrowing down to the subjective and the specific – that is, a devaluation of what the romantics found most valuable: the mirroring of the endless inner wealth of a distinctive personality. This is especially true when he regards the genre of hymns. In his essay An Impartial View of the Danish State Church (1834),65 he regrets that he himself and other modern hymn-writers have “far less feeling for the essential and ordinary, and a far greater preference for our ‘individual’ way of seeing and for ‘our own eggs’ than the old writers.”66 The endeavor to join the historical tradition and to lose the reprehensible predilection for individuality is the motivation behind Grundtvig’s many translations and adaptations of older and newer hymn material. The expectation by modern art theorists of a sharpening artistic individualism is detrimental to the general understanding, validity and use of the texts. To counter this he employs a more or less gentle modernization of dead and living predecessors. Doubtless his age esteemed his work more highly than posterity. Seen at the end of the 20th century, in which literary forms are so decisively different from those of romanticism, Grundtvig appears rather to have Grundtvigianized Luther, Kingo, Brorson, Ingemann and others. Such is the irony of history.

VII. Christianity and romanticism have a common basis in the belief that the individual’s existence as well as the world in general is driven by an invisible but incontrovertibly real, spiritual power. In faith man puts himself into a relationship with God. The romantic puts himself first and foremost into a relationship with his mysterious, enticing inner self. The difference for the believer is insuperable so long as Christianity remains the only meaning of life. The romantic, by contrast, absorbs the religious element without great difficulty and finds an undogmatically conceived God in his fertile inner chaos.

65 66

N.F.S. Grundtvig Den Danske Stats-Kirke upartisk betragtet, Copenhagen 1834. See Grundtvigs Udvalgte Skrifter, op. cit., vol. 8, p. 84.

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In the midst of his furious battle against Schelling’s philosophy of identity, Grundtvig believed, as mentioned, that German romanticism, in spite of everything, had been a useful ferment in turbulent times. When Grundtvig separated the human from the Christian in Norse Mythology (1832)67 and declared the former to be a necessary condition for the latter, he was also reconciling himself with the romantics. He made peace and an alliance with those he characterized as “naturalists,” people who, like the Greeks of antiquity and the ancient Norse, were conscious of man’s spiritual source and nature. In his much-quoted Introduction to Norse Mythology – the “Rhymed Letter to the Norse Kinsfolk”68 – Grundtvig uses the god of war Thor with his hammer to denote the power of all spiritual freedom, and the god of poetry Bragi to stand for the force of the winged word, while the giants and their ally, Fenrir, represent the massive bestial materialism. But Loki, the father of the wolf, halfAesir, half-giant is deliberately allowed the freedom to act, for with his wit and his intelligence he awakens the truly divine to spiritual battle. In Grundtvig’s eyes, of course, only the truly divine can win a confrontation with a spiritual opposition of inescapably lower rank. Loki is a dialectical figure, kindred to the Greeks’ chained Prometheus – partly an expression of reason’s ingenious rebellion against the divine, partly the father of materialism (his son Fenrir swallows Odin, the leader of the Aesir, at Ragnarok), of spiritual impotence (his daughter Hel rules in the kingdom of death) and of falseness. Grundtvig regards Loki’s negative capabilities as the necessary consequences of self-conceit and the worship of reason. On the positive side Loki provokes the spiritual battle and thus benefits the highest form of spirituality, the religious, which he had hoped to tear down. A similar though more sympathetically formulated view of the intellectual worker with no clear faith is outlined in a commemorative poem which Grundtvig wrote in 1844 (published in 1848) on the famous sculptor, Bertel Thorvaldsen.69 67

68

69

N.F.S. Grundtvig Nordens Mythologi eller Sindbilled-Sprog historisk-poetisk udviklet og oplyst, Copenhagen: J.H. Schubothe 1832. (Reprinted in Grundtvigs Udvalgte Skrifter, op. cit., vol. 5, pp. 378-767.) N.F.S. Grundtvig “Rim-Brev til Nordiske Paarørende” in Nordens Mythologi eller Sindbilled-Sprog historisk-poetisk udviklet og oplyst, Copenhagen: J.H. Schubothe 1832, pp. III-XII. N.F.S. Grundtvig “Albert Thorvaldsen, (i Marts 1844)” in his journal Danskeren vol. 1, no. 27, September 20, 1848, pp. 417-423. (Reprinted in Grundtvigs Udvalgte Skrifter, op. cit., vol. 9, pp. 9-13.)


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VIII. After a spiritual adolescence approaching romanticism Grundtvig broke with romanticism’s radical individualism. In place of the individual formation and development of personality he set as his ultimate goal the incorporation of the individual into a greater community – linguistically into the community of the native language, nationally into the community of history, socially into the community of society, ecclesiastically into the community of the congregation and religiously into the community of evangelical Christianity. In the perspective of the history of ideas Grundtvig begins in Jena Romanticism with universal-historical interpretations of Norse mythology and ancient history in the years 1806-1808, moving on from there to a parallel with the Heidelberg school in the national and Christian works from 1809-1824, and finally more or less sliding backwards to romanticism’s pre-conditions, Herder’s philosophy of the organism. However, in the 1830’s, following his three trips to England, Grundtvig linked these thoughts of Herder in an original manner to the political and economic liberalism of England. He summoned all spiritual forces to battle and competition, thus setting the late, autocratic Denmark in motion towards popular education and popular government, at a faster tempo in fact than he himself actually believed was reasonable for the beginning of a movement. Faced with visions of the great communities, romanticism’s cultivation of the individual began to pale in his world of ideas. The scrupulous observer, however, will soon note the romantic individualism in spite of everything in Grundtvig’s authorship. In his seventh lecture in 1802 Steffens had worked on the problem of uniting a concept of programmed necessity in history with the freedom of the individual. In his preparations Steffens offered a formula for the placing in his age of the great and unusual human being, a formula that could be applied to Grundtvig: the consciousness that the man of significance is “a larger or smaller, more or less all-embracing encapsulation of the past, individualized by his special character.”70 The past is here the historic tradition of the above-mentioned communities. The specific character is to a large degree in Grundtvig’s case an inheritance from romanticism. This manifests itself most clearly in his poetic work.

70

Johnny Kondrup (ed.) Henrich Steffens: Indledning til philosophiske Forelæsninger, Copenhagen: C.A. Reitzels Forlag 1996, p. 117.

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Where Grundtvig’s poetry is artistically at its best, it rests on the aesthetic principles of romanticism: the ambiguity and multiplicity of symbols and images, the fertile growth of associations, the leaps across different levels of meaning, the rapid change of overall atmosphere, the informed use of mythology and history – all these are characteristic elements. Even in Grundtvig’s last poem from 1872 the romantic features of his imagery and combinations of images form largely unevangelical myth. The recognition “Old enough I have become”71 is an echo of Norna-Gest’s last words in Olaf Tryggvason’s Saga. The voyage across the stormy sea to destruction or the safe haven, here to the kingdom of the dead or Paradise, is well-known as an aria metaphor in the 18th century. “The Owl’s Song” (in the second stanza) in the kingdom of the dead may be Minerva’s, that is human reason’s, helplessness, but in Ewald’s heroic ballad opera The Fishermen (1779)72 the owl’s song with its howling u-vowel expresses exactly in music the danger of shipwreck and destruction. “Soul-Ferry-Prow” (in the third stanza) is Grundtvig’s positive adaptation of Charon’s boat. Not until the two final stanzas, where the haven of heaven opens before him, does the poet turn to Christian expressions. In the most dramatic years of his youth, 1805-1810, Grundtvig was inspired and influenced by romanticism in a decisive manner, yet valued its ideas less highly than those of Christianity. From 1810 he fought romanticism for twenty years or so, first in literature then in theology. After 1832 he became reconciled to it again in the recognition of its unquestionably spiritual nature, though more as a general current in the culture than as a grouping together of particular authors or particular books. In Grundtvig’s own works the imagery of mystery, which will in the fullness of time be “transfigured,” is a major artistic category. The mysteries are presented out of his own sub-consciousness or consciousness, out of his age, out of history. Their elucidation is the prerogative of God. Perhaps Grundtvig’s literary philosophy should be called a “baptized romanticism.”

71

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Th. Balslev, Ernst J. Borup, Uffe Hansen, Ejnar Skovrup, Magnus Stevns (eds.) Nik. Fred. Sev. Grundtvig: Sang-Værk, Copenhagen: Det danske Forlag, vol. 5, 1951, p. 628. Johannes Ewald Fiskerne, Copenhagen 1779.

III. Literature

Adam Oehlenschläger’s Erik and Roller and Danish Romanticism By Kathryn Shailer-Hanson There is a fabulous myth concerning the advent of literary romanticism in Denmark, which is reiterated in most of the standard Scandinavian literary histories produced this century and which is commonly referred to as Adam Oehlenschläger’s “breakthrough.”1 According to 1

Vilhelm Andersen’s early study of Danish romanticism (Guldhornene. Et bidrag til den danske Romantiks Historie, Copenhagen: Det Nordiske Forlag 1896) and threevolume biography of Oehlenschläger established the myth (Adam Oehlenschläger. Et Livs Poesie vols. 1-3, Copenhagen: Nordisk Forlag 1899-1900), and his literary history with Petersen served to entrench it (Illustreret dansk Litteraturhistorie vols. 1-4, ed. by Vilhelm Andersen and Carl S. Petersen Copenhagen: Gyldendal 1924-34; vol. 3, Det nittende Aarhundredesforste Halvdel by Vilhelm Andersen, 1924). See also Frederik J. Billeskov Jansen Romantik og Romantisme, 2nd edition, Copenhagen: Munksgaard 1964, pp. 15-40. Dansk litteraturhistorie vols. 1-4, ed. by P.H. Traustedt et al., Copenhagen: Politikens Forlag 1967; vol. 2, Fra Oehlenschläger til Kierkegaard by Gustav Albeck, Oluf Friis, and Peter P. Rohde, pp. 5-20. Hanne Marie Svendsen and Werner Svendsen Geschichte der dänischen Literatur, Neumünster: K. Wachholtz 1964, pp. 184-191. P.M. Mitchell A History of Danish Literature, 2nd edition, New York: Kraus-Thomson 1971, pp. 105-126. Dansk litteraturhistorie vols. 1-6, ed. by P.H. Traustedt et al., Copenhagen: Politiken 1976-77; vol. 2, Fra Ludvig Holberg til Carsten Hauch by Frederik J. Billeskov Jansen and Gustav Albeck, 1976. M. Møller and T. Nielsen Dansk Litteraturhistorie vols. 1-4, Copenhagen: Politiken 1983. One of the few English language studies on the period, John L. Greenway’s The Golden Horns. Mythic Imagination and the Nordic Past (Athens: University of Georgia Press 1977), also repeats the story. Notable, but isolated, voices which argued against the “breakthrough” include W.K. Stewart (“Oehlenschlager’s Relation to German Romanticism” in Publications for the Advancement of Scandinavian Study vol. 2, 1914-16, pp. 1-24); Kr. Langdal Møller (“Var Oehlenschlägers romantiske Gennembrud forberedt for Modet med Steffens?” in Danske Studier, 1921, pp. 125-134), Ejnar Thomsen (“Omkring Oehlenschlägers tyske quijotiade” in Festskrift udgivet af Kobenhavns Universitet i anledning af Universitetets Årsfest November 1950, Copenhagen: B. Luno 1950, pp. 1180), and Leif Ludwig Albertsen (Auf der Schwelle zum Goldenen Zeitalter: Dänemark um 1800, Copenhagen: Das königliche dänische Ministerium des Äussern 1979). Fritz Paul suggests sympathy with the latter group, though specifically not with Albert-

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this story, which owes its inception to Oehlenschläger’s own account in his memoirs,2 the natural scientist and philosopher, Henrich Steffens, converted the young poet to the philosophy and poetics of the German “nyere Skole”3 during the course of a sixteen-hour conversation one summer’s night in 1802. By all accounts, Oehlenschläger then went home and composed the famous ballad, “The Golden Horns,” reputed to be the first romantic poem in Scandinavia. The impressionable young Adam then precipitously withdrew his first novel, Erik and Roller, from publication and set to work instead on a new lyric play and a collection of new poems and ballads which would appear together later that year in his Poems,4 the volume which allegedly heralded the beginning of romantic poetry in Scandinavia. Largely as a result of these events and also because Oehlenschläger’s poetry – from the Poems through the Poetic Writings of 18055 – is indeed replete with superficial elements clearly borrowed from German Romanticism, scholars of European literature came to view Danish Romanticism as merely a hybrid of the German.6 A careful read2

2

3

4 5 6

sen, in his defence of romanticism and a distinct epoch (“Die skandinavische Romantik: Tradition oder Literarhistorischer Paradigmenwechsel? Anmerkungen zu Problemen der Epochenzäsur und der Literaturgeschichtsschreibung” in Nordische Romantik. Akten der XVII. Studienkonferenz der International Association for Scandinavian Studies, 7.-12. August 1988 in Zürich und Basel (Beiträge zur nordischen Philologie, vol. 19), ed. by Oskar Bandle, Jürg Glauser, Christine Holliger, Hans-Peter Naumann, Basel and Frankfurt am Main: Helbing & Lichtenhahn 1991, pp. 27-39, see p. 30). Adam Oehlenschläger Oehlenschlägers Erindringer vols 1-4, Copenhagen: A.F. Hosts Forlag 1850-51; vol. 1, p. 188. The “nyere Skole” or Jena Romantics included Friedrich and A.W. Schlegel, Novalis, Ludwig Tieck and Friedrich Schelling. A loose-knit group of poets, philosophers, literary theorists and historians, who shared a common world-view and theoretical framework, they were identifiable as a circle from about 1797 to 1802. Steffens studied with Schelling and A.G. Werner, the noted geologist, between 1796 and 1802, and during that time made his own contribution to the German romantic movement with his Beyträge zur innern Naturgeschichte der Erde (1801) which was well regarded by and made him a welcome houseguest among the Jena Circle. Adam Oehlenschläger Digte, Copenhagen 1803. Adam Oehlenschläger Poetiske Skrifter vols. 1-2, Copenhagen 1805. The few articles that attempt to position Scandinavian romanticism within the European romantic movement all accept Steffens’ “conversion” of Oehlenschläger as a starting point and speak of Danish romanticism as a hybrid of the German: See Frederik J. Billeskov Jansen “Nordische Vergangenheit und europäische Strömungen in der skandinavischen Hochromantik” in Tradition und Ursprünglichkeit. Akten des 3. Internationalen Germanistenkongresses 1965 in Amsterdam, ed. by Werner Kohlschmidt and Hermann Meyer, Bern: Francke Verlag 1966, pp. 39-52. Frederik J. Billeskov Jansen “Romantisme européen et romantisme scandinave” in L’âge d’Or. Deux con-

Adam Oehlenschläger’s Erik and Roller and Danish Romanticism

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ing of Oehlenschläger’s earliest work, however, reveals that well over a year before Steffens introduced him to the writings of the Jena Romantics, the Danish poet had already set out on a separate path from his Enlightenment-oriented contemporaries, a path which can only be described as thoroughly romantic. Oehlenschläger made his debut as a writer at the age of twenty with the publication of a Wertheresque ballad, “Wisdom, Love and Friendship,”7 in December 1799, after which scarcely a month went by that one of the several Copenhagen literary journals did not carry one or two of his poems.8 His first major achievement, however, and a work of particular interest to us here, was his award-winning entry in the University of Copenhagen’s prize essay question for 1800: “Would it be beneficial to Scandinavian belles lettres if old Norse mythology were introduced and generally adopted in place of Greek mythology?”9 A few months earlier, Oehlenschläger had published a brief article, “Flowers from Nordic Antiquity,”10 with the simple objective “of making those readers, who are not especially familiar with the old Norse literature, aware of the treasure we possess in the surviving sagas.”11 Clearly inspired by the example of Ossian, the Herderesque 7

7

8

9

10

11

ferences faites à la Sorbonne sur la littérature classique du Danemark, Copenhagen: Munksgaard 1953. P.M. Mitchell “Scandinavia: Romantisk-Romantik-Romantiker” in Romantic and its Cognates: The European History of a Word, ed. by Hans Eichner, Toronto: University of Toronto Press 1972, pp. 362-417. Heinrich Fauteck “Die skandinavische Romantik” in Die Europäische Romantik, ed. by Ernst Behler, Frankfurt am Main: Atheneium 1972, pp. 406-478. Gunnar Eriksson “Romanticism in Scandinavia” in Romanticism in National Context, ed. by Roy Porter and Mikulds Teich, New York and Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1988, pp. 172-190, see pp. 175-176, 186, and George Bisztray “Lumières et romantisme scandinaves” in Le Tournant du Siècle des Lumières 1760-1820. Les Genres en vers des Lumières au Romantisme (A Comparative History of Literatures in European Languages, vol. 3), ed. by György M. Vajda, Budapest: Akadémiai Kiadó 1982, pp. 421-435, see pp. 424-425. Adam Oehlenschläger “Viisdom, Kierlighed og Venskab” in Den danske Tilskuer nos. 97-98, December 19, 1799, pp. 776-784. For a chronological listing of all Oehlenschläger’s Danish publications, see F.L. Liebenberg Bidrag til den oehlenschlägerske Literaturs Historie vols. 1-2, Copenhagen: Samfundet til den danske Literaturs Fremme 1868; vol. 1, pp. 3-236 “Var det gavnligt for Nordens skiønne Litteratur, om den gamle nordiske Mythologie blev indført og almindelig antaget istedet for den Græske?” Originally published in Minerva (March 1801, pp. 272-297), reprinted in F.L. Liebenberg Bidrag til den oehlenschlägerske Literaturs Historie, op. cit., vol. 1, pp. 293-312. Adam Oehlenschläger “Blomster fra den nordiske Oldtid” in Almeen Læsning nos. 5-6, June 1800, pp. 33-38. F.L. Liebenberg Bidrag til den oehlenschlägerske Literaturs Historie, op. cit., vol. 1, p. 257.

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idea of national soul,” and such Rousseauian sentiments as “Hucksterism and so-called worldliness are the drowsy mists which utterly smother simple, noble Nature’s glittering flame,”12 Oehlenschläger compared the men of the saga era with those of his own predominantly rationalistic age: There is certainly little doubt about it, that people on the whole were much better in ancient times, than they now are, that notwithstanding the loathsome barbarism unenlightenment engenders, their souls were stronger, freer, nobler than ours, more worthy than ours to be called the image of the Living God. Feeling was aroused, it burned with an inspired ardor, and what could practical, but wavering reason do against that, which comprises everything; within which every soul’s purpose swims with clarity, although not with the distinctness and order, which is purchased at the expense of those higher faculties of the soul, fantasy and feeling.13

In his prize essay, Oehlenschläger takes this idealized vision of the ancients and the accompanying premise that the saga era was a more poetic age than the present as a point of departure for defending the adoption of Norse mythology as a suitable literary subject. He develops his argument in two stages. First, he discusses the function of mythology in modern poetry and its advantages in aiding the poet to attain his primary goal, “to express the intangible in a beautiful tangible form.”14 Then he elucidates his reasons for believing that Norse mythology can better serve the modern poet to this end than the Greek. Mythology, Oehlenschläger contends, is the product of an era when “the brave soul, unaware of his impotence, rose high up on fantasy’s wings to god, because he believed that he knew the cause of every natural effect and painted them with bold strokes.”15 But mythology is also the relic of an age, which the intervening centuries have shrouded in darkness such that “we cannot distinguish the border between fable and true fact, they run together, and we just catch a glimpse of that age…through a ceremonial magic veil. We are interested in obtaining more knowledge about these times than is within our power, and the imagination, always at the ready, takes pleasure in creating a new world for us.”16 How much easier we find it to idealize the past than the present! Nevertheless, “this fantasy world is based on another poetic world.”17 12 13 14 15 16 17

Ibid., vol. 1, p. 257. Ibid., vol. 1, p. 258. Ibid., vol. 1, p. 293. Ibid., vol. 1, p. 294. (My emphasis.) Ibid., vol. 1, p. 305. Ibid., vol. 1, p. 305.


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So when the modern poet employs mythology as a medium, he at once immerses himself in the nebulous past, which allows his imagination and poetic genius free rein, and insinuates himself into the poetic imagination of that age. The age of mythology stimulates poetic fancy, and mythology itself supports it. The bizarre inventions and rich images of mythology “strengthen his expression and expand the realm of the senses,”18 but even more important, they possess “a dignity, that comes with age, which casts a particular solemn darkness and piety over the poem.”19 Oehlenschläger continues his argument by usurping the prevailing negative view of Norse mythology and turning it to his advantage: if those antagonistic to the poetic use of Norse mythology find it impoverished and crude in comparison with the Greek, this can only be because they are ignorant of its riches because its vast resources have as yet scarcely been tapped. But herein lies its greatest advantage over the Greek: “This lack of cultivation opens to the poet a whole new poetic world, which otherwise would remain untapped.”20 It is crude only in the sense of being uncultivated (udannet), and this inchoate quality itself affords the creative genius of the poet considerably more scope Another major advantage, particularly for the Scandinavian poet, derives simply from the fact that “it is Nordic.” If one believes that myths harbor, “a secret, hidden trace of the oldest lost history,”21 then Norse mythology must necessarily be intrinsically more interesting to the Northerner, “for it contains the oldest bewildering traces of our fatherland’s history, because the gods in this mythology were humans, who lived in our land, and whose institutions have influenced our states through the centuries.”22 He concludes his argument by noting that the Norse myths and sagas could also serve as an inspiration for patriotism and national spirit and better enable the poet to portray the beautiful Nordic scenery. One would hardly call Oehlenschläger’s discussion of mythology a paradigm of clarity or his arguments for favoring Norse mythology entirely convincing. Nor are any of the ideas expressed here particu18 19 20 21

22

Ibid., vol. 1, p. 294. Ibid., vol. 1, p. 305. Ibid., vol. 1, p. 301. Ibid., vol. 1, p. 310. Oehlenschläger is paraphrasing here from Karl Philipp Moritz’s Götterlehre oder Mythologische Dichtungen der Alten, Vienna: Franz Haas 1792. F.L. Liebenberg Bidrag til den oehlenschlägerske Literaturs Historie, op. cit., vol. 1, p. 310.

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larly original.23 But the essay does give us a sense of his poetic outlook as of 1800, as well as his feeling “for the long-lost times, for the age of the gods,” which Langdal Møller viewed as “far beyond the ’90’s mode of feeling and thinking, which had up to this point prevailed in the literature.”24 During the 1780’s and 1790’s, Danish writers – much like their German counterparts – had treated mythological and other medieval Norse themes in one of two ways: “Either one took them seriously, like Pram, who with his Stærkodder (1787) simply gave ‘an allegorical representation with a moral-philosophical content,’ or one used them comically, as if only worthy of a burlesque treatment, like Baggesen did in The Origin of Poetry.”25 What now sets Oehlenschläger apart from these is the pre-eminence he accords fantasy vis-à-vis reason: “the more that fantasy is subordinated to practical reason and its levels of abstraction, the less strong its powers become, the less bold and original its representations….The worship of reason is not yet for the poet.”26 In his belief that “poetry’s element is freedom,”27 and in his recognition that the distant past affords the perfect playground for the poet’s fantasy, because “we cannot delineate the limit between fable and true event,”28 Oehlenschläger already had much in common with the German Romantics. The similarities, however, were not yet apparent in his poetic works. Between mid-1800 and April 1801, Oehlenschläger published over a dozen ballads and lyric poems, only two of which drew their themes from Old Norse material, and both of these predated his prize essay. As a full-time law student, he doubtless felt frustrated with the need to bolster his still shaky knowledge of the Old Norse sagas and myths and the desire to shape his ideas poetically. But in April 1801, Oehlenschläger set his studies aside and drew his inspiration from a current 23

24

25 26

27 28

Cf. Langdal Møller’s comparison of Oehlenschläger’s ideas with those expressed in A.B. Bentzon’s prize essay of 1796 “Hvilken Alder er bedst skikket til at danne den store Digter, den raa og udyrkede eller den dyrkede og slebne” in Kr. Langdal Møller “Var Oehlenschlägers romantiske Gennembrud forberedt for Modet med Steffens?” op. cit., p. 127. As a friend of Bentzon’s, Oehlenschlager was doubtless familiar with the essay, and he likely learned a great deal from him about Herder. Kr. Langdal Møller “Var Oehlenschlägers romantiske Gennembrud forberedt for Modet med Steffens?” op. cit., p. 129. Ibid., p. 128. F.L. Liebenberg Bidrag til den oehlenschlägerske Literaturs Historie, op. cit., vol. 1, pp. 293-294. Ibid., vol. 1, p. 312. Ibid., vol. 1, p. 305.


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event of heroic proportions, which rocked Denmark and momentarily inflamed its citizenry with “patriotism” and “national spirit”: Admiral Nelson’s surprise attack on the small Danish fleet at Kongedybet outside Copenhagen.29 Throughout the 1790’s, Denmark’s neutral political stance and geographical distance from the centers of battle had sheltered her citizens from the ravages of war while making her merchants rich. Internal measures, as well, had worked to render the events in France, the ideals that sparked them, and the ensuing European wars all the more remote. An overwhelming fear of the spread of revolutionary fervor had led to repressive action and censorship such that by 1799 freedom of expression had almost completely been suppressed.30 As a result, the average Dane had been effectively insulated from the upheaval which dominated much of the rest of Europe and had come to assume an attitude of complacency toward it all. So when the attack came, Danes collectively reacted to this seemingly unprovoked act of aggression as to a personal affront and viewed the heroic defense put up by their sailors as a source of personal pride.31 For Oehlenschläger, whose contempt for the narrow-mindedness of contemporary society had been influenced largely by Rousseau’s view concerning civilized versus natural man, the overnight emergence of national heroes and the surge of national pride and brotherly love created an atmosphere akin to his idealized vision of the saga age. To celebrate the event, Oehlenschläger composed several hymns of praise, an elegy, and a short “dramatisk Situation,”32 for with one stroke, he felt sure, Denmark had entered a new heroic age: “No longer does Denmark’s Son have need / to search for those, who punished violence, / and who earned the hero’s wages, / in the dark business of heathen times. / He himself has seen heroes in the North, / who fought in Scandinavia’s greatest battle, / whose honor till the Last Day / will live 29

30

31

32

Oehlenschlager describes the event in his memoirs (Erindringer, op. cit., vol. 1, pp. 157-158). Frederic Durand Histoire de la littèrature danoise, Paris: Aubier-Montaigne 1967, pp. 129ff. George Bisztray “Lumières et romantisme scandinaves,” op. cit., pp. 421423. For a recent Danish assessment of this period, see Dansk Identitetshistorie vols. 1-4, ed. by Ole Feldbæk, Copenhagen: C.A Reitzels Forlag 1991-92; vol. 2, Et Yndigt Land, 1789-1848. “Dansk Somandssang,” “Dansk Heltesang,” “Den 2den April 1801, et Digt,” “Gravsang,” “Anden April 1801, en dramatisk Situation” – all reprinted in Liebenberg, op. cit.

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on this wide earth.”33 The heroic honor of a handful of seamen transcended social hierarchies and revolutionized society: “Nothing is aspired to but honor, / but honor is aspired to by all. / With familiarity, the poor walk with the rich, / the high with the low, hand in hand.”34 The gods had returned and Denmark was transformed: “A deity hovers over Copenhagen. / All small-spiritedness, every grudge is extinguished today; / for the thunder at Denmark’s harbor / has broken circumstance’s cold, wintery chains. / The old spirit is wakened from its trance.”35 The great transformation, however, did not last more than a few weeks, for the English did not return – not for another seven years, that is – and we might well dismiss both the event and Oehlenschläger’s display of nationalistic sentimentality except for two subtle but important consequences: Denmark, once the high tide of feeling had subsided, indeed grew gradually more nationalistic and its reading public became more receptive to a revival of literature from the national past; and Oehlenschläger, though conscious of his own mythmaking, came to view contemporary society in a more hopeful light. Once all the excitement had died down and the student militia, in which Oehlenschläger had served as a group leader, disbanded, he returned to studying law. But he also embarked on a more thorough study of the Norse myths and legends. His discovery of a correlation between the gods, nature, and man not only appealed to his sense of harmony, it carried him well beyond the 18th century concept of belle nature.36 His first effort to explore this correlation poetically was in the novel Erik and Roller, that is, in the work he withdrew from publication following his talk with Steffens. This novel, which remained unpublished until 1897, marked a crucial stage in Oehlenschläger’s poetic development, for the material 33

34

35

36

F.L. Liebenberg Bidrag til den oehlenschlägerske Literaturs Historie, op. cit., vol. 1, p. 319: “Ei meer behøver Danmarks Søn / at søge dem, som tugted Vold, / og som fortiente Heltens Løn, / i mørke Sagn fra Hedenold. / Han selv har Helten seet i Nord, / som slog i Nordens største Slag, / hvis Ære til den sidste Dag / vil leve paa den vide Jord.” Ibid., p. 415: “Der higes efter Intet uden Ære, / men Ære higer ogsaa Alle efter. / Fortrolig gaaer den Arme med den Rige, / den Høie med den Lave Haand i Haand.” Ibid., p. 414: “en Guddom svæver over Kiøbenhavn. / Al Samaahedsaand, alt Nag er dræbt i Dag; / thi Tordenen paa Danmarks Kongedyb / har brudt Forholdets kolde, snevre Lænker. / Den gamle Aand er vaagnet af sin Dvale.” Springer, in particular, has described Oehlenschläger’s pre-Steffens work as characteristic of the 18th century pre-romantic stream, which “simply sang the praises of belle nature.” See Otto Springer Die nordische Renaissance in Skandinavien (Tübinger Germanistische Arbeiten, vol. 22), Stuttgart: Kohlhammer 1936, p. 46.


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itself forced him to consider two dilemmas that would remain central to his poetry for years to come, namely, the nature of good and evil in a universally harmonious system, and the relationship between the heroic warriors of the Old Norse era and modern sentimental (Christian) man. Although Oehlenschläger’s work at this stage was still unpolished and burdened with immature sentimentality, his poetry nevertheless demonstrated a pronounced objectivity in its viewpoint and plasticity in its images (this, of course, in stark contrast with early German romantic poetry). The fundamental contours around which he would build a lifetime of poetry were established in this text. Based on material taken from Saxo’s Gesta Danorum, the story of Erik and Roller revolves around the adventures of two brothers. The unwitting pawns of their power-hungry king, Gøthar, they travel to Denmark in order to restore order to the land, which has degenerated into widespread lawlessness because the weak but good-hearted King Frode has fallen under the influence of destructive elements. On an earlier visit, Erik met and fell in love with Frode’s sister, Gundvar, and now Roller falls for her as well. With her aid and support, they quickly kill off Frode’s perfidious thanes, win his trust, and restore peace and prosperity to the land. But Gøthar also has designs on Denmark, and once Erik discovers that he and his brother have become ensnared in a wicked plot, he is faced with the moral dilemma of either deserting his king and homeland or betraying Gundvar and Frode. The fragment ends at this point, with no hint of a cogent resolution. In writing the tale, Oehlenschläger appears to have had two major ambitions in mind, both of which relate to the conviction voiced in his prize essay a year earlier that “the gods were human beings in this mythology.”37 The first was to portray one of the major themes of Norse mythology, namely the perennial conflict between the Aesir, on the one hand, and the gods and giants of destruction, on the other, in terms of the saga-age hero’s battle to protect a just and moral society from the forces of corruption; and the second, to foreshadow the fate of the gods, or Ragnarok, in terms of man’s alienation from nature, his loss of faith in the gods, and the subsequent rise of a new and better world with the coming of Christ. To fulfill his first objective, Oehlenschläger identifies Erik with Thor, Gundvar with Freya, Erik’s father with Odin, and Frode’s corrupt thanes with Surtur and the fire giants. Erik also embodies all the 37

F.L. Liebenberg Bidrag til den oehlenschlägerske Literaturs Historie, op. cit., vol. 1, p. 310.

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characteristics of the arch-hero: a man of impeccable honor, who speaks wisely, fights bravely, stands by his friends, and succeeds in love. At the hour of his birth, the Norns blessed him with good fortune, and this enables him to exercise his free will, which corresponds to the will of the Aesir, without hindrance. So throughout the story he asserts his right to self-determination (e.g. in defiance of Gøthar’s demand for blind loyalty), and battles oppression and anarchy for the preservation of a law based on the common good and individual freedom. Roller, whom Oehlenschläger never identifies with any mythological character, does not share either Erik’s heroic proportions or his good fortune. Indeed, he is a torn man. Half a hero, he stands by his brother in battle, but never emerges entirely unscathed; half a skald, he does not, like the true skald, “survey the entirety of divine nature,”38 but gains his insights indirectly, in fragments. He listens to the Surtur worshippers through the wall of the cave, and he learns of Christ’s coming through the poems of Eyvind, the true skald, who is considered demented. Roller has not yet lost faith in the gods, but he does find the Surtur chant and Eyvind’s prophecy unsettling. And because Gundvar does not reciprocate his love, he feels thwarted in exercising his free will, restless, and alienated: “Roller seemed to stand in a hostile relationship with all of nature.”39 Though Oehlenschläger weaves numerous images from Norse mythology and Christian legend into the tale and incorporates some rather extraordinary occurrences for dramatic effect, he never allows the truly fantastic free reign. Nothing happens that defies rational explanation. Erik awakens to find Freya standing before him, but quickly discovers that he has mistaken Gundvar for the goddess; Thor breaks into the cave where Roller and Frode are held captive and leads them to safety, but this is really Bjørn, the reformed bandit. If this tendency to rationalize every supernatural appearance seems to run contrary to the Jena Circle’s dream-world brand of romanticism, it is nevertheless entirely typical of Oehlenschläger’s conception of the relationship between the spiritual and material worlds. The gods (i.e. the benevolent gods or Aesir) reveal themselves through nature: “Has anyone been in battle without glimpsing Thor? been in a waving field of grain without seeing Frey? Doesn’t Freya blush among the 38

39

Adam Oehlenschläger Erik og Roller, ed. with an introduction and notes by Viggo Bierring, Copenhagen: Det Nordiske Forlag 1897, p. 157. Ibid., p. 143.


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roses as the most beautiful? Who has never heard Njord’s stormvoice? Who has never listened to Ran’s daughters, the dancing seamaids’ song, when the ocean foamed or hissed? Odin’s wise eye penetrates the whole.”40 By identifying man with the gods through association and by suggesting man’s organic and spiritual connection with nature,41 Oehlenschläger completes his vision of a harmonious, unified world. In this context an act of divine intervention or any other form of spiritual revelation that contravenes the laws of nature would be out of place. Oehlenschläger specifically associates any nature-tampering with evil, e.g. the fire giants and, by extension, Frode’s thanes. Although in Erik and Roller the idea of the divine being subordinate to the laws of nature is only implied, Oehlenschläger would later develop it as the central motif in the poem cycle, The Life of Jesus Christ Repeated in the Annual Cycle of Nature (1805).42 Another related theme only suggested here is the connection between the Norse gods and Christianity, which in both The Life of Jesus Christ and his later abbreviated tale of Erik and Roller (as interpolated into Hroars Saga from 1817),43 associates Christ with Balder. He does, however, foreshadow the demise of the gods, both in his reference to Surtur and in the skald’s fable about Idunn;44 and he adumbrates the coming of Christianity to the North in the figure of Eyvind. It would require but one short step to identify one of the survivors of Ragnarok – namely, Balder, who does not actually “survive,” but comes back from the dead – with Christ.45 40

41 42

43 44

45

Ibid., p. 157. Thor = god of thunder, the defender of the gods; Frey = god of weather and fruitfulness; Freya = goddess of love and beauty; Njord = god of the sea, the father of Frey and Freya; Ran = goddess of the sea, her daughters are the waves; Odin = the All-Father, god of wisdom. Ibid., p. 120: “Does not a voice deep in your soul say: I am immortal?” Adam Oehlenschläger Jesu Christi gientagne Liv i den aarlige Natur in Poetiske Skrifter vols. 1-2, Copenhagen 1805; vol. 1, pp. 421ff. Adam Oehlenschläger Hroars Saga, Copenhagen 1817. According to legend, the goddess Idunn was the keeper of the apples of youth, which kept the Aesir eternally young. She was abducted by the storm giant, Tjasse, and the Aesir began to age; but she was eventually rescued by Loki. The Volospá (Sybil’s Prophecy) in the Elder Edda prophesies Ragnarok, the last great battle between the Aesir and the gods and giants of destruction. Only seven of the Aesir survive: Odin’s sons, Vali and Vidar; Thor’s sons, Magni and Modi; and Balder, Hoder, and Hoenir. Though versions of the Volospá vary, one suggests the coming of a new divinity, which some have considered a reference to Christ. Nevertheless, it is important to bear in mind that the Eddic poems were originally written

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In terms of poetic style, the work falls considerably short of his Poems and Poetic Works. Suffused with Ossianic imagery and Wertheresque sorrows, the tale is cloyingly sentimental. Nevertheless, behind the tears and mist, one finds evidence of poetic experimentation and the unmistakable development of unique stylistic traits. When describing the northern landscape or various religious rites, Oehlenschläger conjures up quite stunning images in a vivid interplay of shadow and light: figures illuminated by fire or moonlight against a pitch-black background, branches or figures silhouetted against a pale sky. His finest achievement, however, lies in the numerous verses interspersed within the prose, many of which are ballads or legends and, as such, contribute to plot development or foreshadow coming events. He also employs a wide variety of verse forms, all Germanic, including the Eddic “Totrykvers,”46 which would become the hallmark of his “The Golden Horns.” All the verses are sung by characters in the tale except for two hymns to Freya, both of which he later rescued for separate publication, and these he interpolates rather awkwardly with a brief introduction. Soothingly rhythmic and richly sensuous, Freyas Rok, in particular, numbers among the loveliest in the tale and best succeeds in attaining Oehlenschläger’s poetic goal “to express the intangible in a beautiful tangible form”47:

46

46

47

down or transcribed in the 13th and 14th centuries by monks. See the following passages from Poems of the Vikings. The Elder Edda, tr. by Patricia Terry, Indianapolis and New York: Bobbs-Merrill 1969, p. 11: Barren fields will bear again, woes will be cured when Baider comes: Hod and Balder will live in Odin’s hall, home of the war-gods. Seek you wisdom still? From bloody twigs Hoenir tells the future; the sons of Ve Vili dwell in the sky, home of the wide winds. Seek you wisdom still? The mighty one comes down on the day of doom, that powerful lord who rules over all. See Jørgen Fafner Oehlenschlägers verskunst (Oehlenschläger Selskabets Skriftserie, vol. 5), Copenhagen: B. Luno 1965, p. 9, p. 19. However, Ida Falbe-Hansen (“Rettelse” in Danske Studier, 1921, p. 134) has argued that Oehlenschläger (as well as Grundtvig and Tegnér) never strictly adhered to the rules of the Eddic verse form as described by Snorri in “Háttatal” but merely emulated its short lines, rhythm, and alliteration. F.L. Liebenberg Bidrag til den oehlenschlägerske Literaturs Historie, op. cit., vol. 1, p. 293.


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When Night rolls out its dark black veil, when the Light dies, when the Sky, divested of its bright flame, broods down, like a sombre prison-arch, then your spinning-wheel, Freya, blazes gently forth in the stillness of love’s midnight hour, sweetly shining, trembling, white. And while it twinkles with a friendly light, You gently spin, With round fingers, the silk Which you will use to tie rose chains, With which you sweetly and lovingly, With your full, snow-white arm, Entwine youth and maid, heart to heart.48

Proceeding from the fall of darkness and first appearance of the constellation called Freya’s Spinning Wheel (Orion), Oehlenschläger takes the shapeless mass of night and stars, and, like a sculptor, gradually creates form: the hint of a body, the “round fingers,” and the “full, snow-white arm.” That is all he needs to lend plasticity to the idea of an all-embracing goddess of love. But she also moves: the fingers spin and bind, the arms entwine. Like this one, most of the poems in Erik and Roller bear little resemblance to German romantic Stimmungspoesie, which works to detach objects from their natural context, and which eventually disintegrates forms into shades and sounds; in fact, Oehlenschläger’s verses tend to produce just the opposite effect. But on two occasions he breaks with this tendency and experiments with rhymes and loosely connected images in a manner highly reminiscent of Ludwig Tieck, as in Eyvind’s song about the immortality of love: Pale and white, Fair and kind, Even in death! The moon triumphed! Slowly vanished The evening glow.

48

Adam Oehlenschläger, Erik og Roller, op. cit., p. 18: “Naar Natten udruller sit sorte Slør, / naar Lyset døer, / naar Himlen berøvet sin blanke Lue / ruger ned, som en skummel Fængselbue, / da fremluer Freya din Rok saa blid / ved Kierligheds stille Midnatstid, / sødtstraalende, bævende, hvid. / Og mens den tindrer med venlig Ild, / du deilig mild, / med runde Fingre den Silke spinder, / som du om Rosenkiederne binder, / hvormed du yndig og elskovsvarm, / med din fulde sneehvide Arm, / slynger Yngling og Pige Barm til Barm.”

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Kathryn Shailer-Hanson Moonlight, On the cheek, Lightly curved, Where so recently, Shaped for a kiss, The rose blazed!49

Even here, Oehlenschläger gradually builds the loosely connected images into a coherent whole and conjures up, not a feeling or emotion, but a vision of the human being incarnate in objective nature. In doing so, he lends a substantially different perspective to the relationship between man and nature than do the German Romantics, such as Tieck and Novalis.50 For Oehlenschläger, nature constitutes a distinct, wholly objective entity, and though man may be spiritually bound to nature, he in no way views it as a projection of the individual self. Rather, collective man and finite nature become one in the endless progression of life, death, and rebirth known as eternal nature. Although, on one level, the work may be viewed as the self-suppressed, less-than-successful effort of a twenty-two year old part-time poet, on another, Erik and Roller clearly represents an important element in the development of romantic poetry in Denmark. Had Oehlenschläger completed and published the work in 1802 as planned, literary historians would doubtless have had to deal with it more seriously than they have. The fact that Oehlenschläger did not, like his German counterparts, renounce reason and vault headlong into a subjective fantasy world, does not, as certain critics have argued, auto49

50

Ibid., p. 137: “Bleg og hvid, / huld og blid, / selv i Døden! / Maanen vandt! / Langsom svandt / Aftenrøden. / Maaneskin, / paa den Kind, / svagt indbuet, / hvor saa nys, / skabt til Kys, / Rosen lued!” Some scholars attribute the difference between Oehlenschläger’s conception of nature and that of the Jena Romantics to the influence of H.C. Ørsted – particularly in connection with Oehlenschläger’s 1805 masterpiece, Aladdin. See William Michelsen Om H.C Ørsted og tankebilledet bag Oehlenschläger’s Aladdin (Oehlenschläger Selskabets Skriftserie, vol. 8), Copenhagen: B. Luno, n.d. [1963] and John Greenway “‘Naturens hemmelige Urkraft’: Orsted’s ‘Theory of Light’ and Oehlenschläger’s Aladdin” “in Nordische Romantik. Akten der XVII. Studienkonferenz der International Association for Scandinavian Studies, Basel and Frankfurt am Main: Helbing & Lichtenhahn 1991, pp. 376-381. Others, notably Fritz Paul (Henrich Steffens: Naturphilosophie und Universalromantik, Munich: Wilhelm Fink 1973), trace this difference to the greater influence of Schelling (via Steffens) in Scandinavia as opposed to Fichte’s dominance within the Jena Circle. Although Ørsted and Oehlenschläger were close friends, it should be noted that Erik and Roller was written during Ørsted’s sojourn in Germany (1801-1804) and before his first meeting with Steffens.


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matically render his work less romantic or pre-romantic.51 Rather, this suggests a different path toward more or less the same nebulous goal, that is, toward poetically overcoming the breach between the mind and the senses that eighteenth century rationalism had fostered, toward overcoming the split between the self and nature, which is the vision of European literary romanticism.

51

Cf. Otto Springer Die nordische Renaissance in Skandinavien, op. cit. and Viggo Bierring (“Udgivernes Forord” in Erik og Roller, by Adam Oehlenschläger, Copenhagen: Det Nordiske Forlag 1897).

The Tragic Moment in Oehlenschläger’s Hakon Earl the Mighty By Niels Ingwersen Translations of verse quotations by Karen Benedicte Busk-Jepsen

Some of the major works by Adam Oehlenschläger (1779-1850) have recently been reconsidered by the critics, but so far no one has dealt in detail with Hakon Earl the Mighty.1 Earlier, this work had, however, received attention and was thoroughly analyzed. The general view on Hakon Earl the Mighty may be summed up very briefly. With Hakon Earl the Mighty, Oehlenschläger intended to create a national drama celebrating the Nordic past, and his admiration for Schiller made him pattern his tragedy on Wallenstein, in which two contrasting philosophies, embodied in two mighty, heroic figures, clash. Hakon Earl the Mighty portrays not only the conflict between two pretenders to the Norwegian throne but also the violent transition, in Norway, from heathendom to Christianity. Both protagonists achieve heroic stature when they leave personal ambition behind and become champions of their beliefs. The outcome of the struggle between the two men brings out the drama’s idea: the once noble, but now corrupt, old Nordic faith must give way to the milder, harmonious spirit of Christianity. One can, thus, rejoice with the people of Norway in Olaf’s victory; but the author’s and the reader’s interest, and a good deal of their sympathy – even though this sympathy may not be extended to Hakon’s causes – are, nevertheless, directed towards the defeated earl, who emerges as the drama’s tragic hero. 1

Partial analyses have been given in Sven Møller Kristensen Den dobbelte Eros: Studier i den danske romantik, Copenhagen: Gyldendal 1966, pp. 67-69, and by Jöran Mjöberg Driömmen om sagatiden vols. 1-2, Stockholm: Natur och Kultur 1967-68; vol. 1, pp. 132-135.

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Hakon has been seen as the self-asserting individualist who, through his willful behavior, has sinned against society, and who, for the sake of justice, must necessarily be destroyed. It has been pointed out that Oehlenschläger, now in favor of a more humanitarian, moralistic outlook, thus turned against the romantic individualism he had earlier championed.2 Hakon, in his final moments, redeems himself through self-judgment and death, and is, therefore, meant to be a truly tragic hero. It has been argued that the drama fails, in part, because Hakon’s defeat is not caused by tragic necessity. He can scarcely be said to suffer from any flaw serious enough to precipitate his fall. His downfall is not brought about, as in Wallenstein, by rebellion against an overlord to whom loyalty had been sworn, but seemingly by something as petty as his sexual exploitations of the young women of his realm. In addition to being made a martyr for the decrepit old Nordic belief, he is thought to be punished more specifically for breaking society’s moral code; and in consequence, the presentation of the earl’s last days seems to lack the inevitable logic of a true tragedy.3 Such notable scholars as Valdemar Vedel and Helge Topsøe-Jensen have maintained, furthermore, that although the play on the whole is very well executed, it falters as Hakon approaches his death. Topsøe-Jensen, who has given the fullest documentation for his view, found that not only does the characterization of the protagonist break down because Oehlenschläger in the last act allows Hakon to indulge in sentimental outpourings which are not psychologically motivated, but also that the presentation of the somnambulistic scene does not succeed because Oehlenschläger allows his sense of style to fail him.4 This paper, which will concentrate especially upon the hero’s situation in his last moments, will hopefully show that these value-judgments can be modified in the favor of Hakon Earl the Mighty. Though the drama may not be entirely successful, its shortcomings hardly 2

3

4

In Vilhelm Andersen’s Adam Oehlenschläger. Et Livs Poesie (vols. 1-3, Copenhagen: Nordisk Forlag 1899-1900), Hakon’s defeat is characterized as “Genimoralens Nederlag under Borgermoralen” (p. 247). Helge Topsøe-Jensen “Schiller og Oehlenschläger” in Edda vol. 15, 192l, pp. 170-238, and vol. 16, 1921, pp. 56-106, especially p. 66 and p. 72. Vilhelm Andersen Guldhornene. Et bidrag til den danske Romantiks Historie. Copenhagen: Det Nordiske Forlag 1896, pp. 224-225, and Paul V. Rubow En Studiebog: Randgloser til gammel og nyere Litteratur, Copenhagen: Gyldendal 1950, p. ii. Helge Topsøe-Jensen “Schiller og Oehlenschläger” in Edda vol. 15, p. 201; vol. 16, pp. 73-74; Valdemar Vedel Studier over Guldalderen i dansk Digtning, Copenhagen 1890, pp. 133-134.

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derive from its creator’s treatment of the protagonist in the final act. The reason for a critic’s harshness toward Act V may stem from his rather traditional attitude towards Hakon Earl the Mighty, i.e. instead of attempting a close examination of what actually happens to the outcast protagonist in his final moments, the critic may view the fate of Hakon exclusively in terms of the play’s ideological content and according to the aesthetic conventions of tragedy. These observations are, of course, valid and necessary, but a full understanding of the ultimate tragedy of Hakon’s fate seems to have evaded the earlier critics. Although Oehlenschläger did not necessarily succeed in creating a work in full accordance with his intentions, one may nevertheless obtain a deeper understanding of what happens to Hakon Earl in his time of defeat by giving some heed to the poet’s own words in his “Fortale til Nordiske Digte.” He claims that the development of character in the modern tragedy should take preeminence over action and that a dramatist cannot be content with presenting the external sides of a character, but must render the characters’ inner life as well.5 In another context Oehlenschläger argues further that each work of art has a specific uniqueness which must be comprehended by the critic if he is to do justice to the work.6 These very general leads in Oehlenschläger’s aesthetics will be followed in this paper in the examination of what takes place in Hakon’s mind as his death draws nearer.

I. The last scenes of Act V annoyed not only later critics but also Oehlenschläger’s contemporaries as well. The management of the Royal Theater wanted the very last scene eliminated because it seemed sentimental.7 But the author argued that if Thora’s monologue were 5

6

7

Adam Oehlenschläger Poetiske Skrifter vols. 1-5, ed. by Helge Topsøe-Jensen, Copenhagen: G.E.C. Gads Forlag 1926-30; vol. 3, p. 22. Adam Oehlenschläger “Svar paa Hr. Capt. Abrahamsons Recension over mine nordiske Digte. En æstetisk Afhandling” in Oehlenschlägers Poetiske Skrifter vols. 1-5, ed. by F.L. Liebenberg, Copenhagen 1858; vol. 3, pp. 264-272. Oehlenschläger states: “For en Digters Opfindelser, Ideer og Forestillinger lader der sig Intet foreskrive i Almindelighed. Ethvert Digt er en Individualitet, har altsaa noget Individuelt, om hvilket det Intet kunne forordnes og bestemmes, førend det digtedes, som maa forstaaes i sin eiendommelige Sammenhæng, altsaa af sig selv” (p. 269). Adam Oehlenschläger Oehlenschlägers Erindringer vols 1-4, Copenhagen: A.F. Hosts Forlag 1850-51; vol. 2, pp. 36-37.


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missing the play’s meaning would be altered drastically.8 In a review from 1808, Captain Abrahamson, singling out the treatment of Hakon’s death for severe criticism, censured Oehlenschläger’s use of comic elements in the somnambulistic scene as being detrimental to the drama’s seriousness.9 In a spirited defence, the young poet responded by citing Lady Macbeth in her moment of guilt-ridden madness.10 If people laugh when watching Hakon, asserted Oehlenschläger, it would be the kind of laughter that would make their hair stand on end, for they would be watching a ghost who, haunted by his crimes, can find no peace, and who, realizing his guilt, finally condemns himself to death. This strong individual, who felt contempt for his fellow man, now harshly judges himself. Oehlenschläger’s own interpretation of his protagonist, which stresses that Hakon’s perception has undergone a sweeping change, clearly demonstrates that the author intended to present a development of character and that he asks the public as well as the critics, to try to grasp the nature of Hakon’s situation. It was, however, another point in Abrahamson’s review which touched a particularly sensitive nerve in Oehlenschläger; for by criticizing Oehlenschläger’s reliance upon Nordic mythology as being overly imaginative, Abrahamson had come close to repudiating the poet’s personal vision of life. It is, thus, not surprising that he defended himself fervently. His reply is, in fact, not an apologia, but rather a proud and highly personal assertion of his own outlook upon life and his right to express that outlook exactly as he had in Hakon Earl the Mighty. Although Oehlenschläger offers few details of the philosophy upon which his outlook is founded, one could, of course, characterize his attitude in terms of romantic ideas. It is, however, more important to notice that Oehlenschläger reveals the possession of an awareness that allows him to view both reality and the art depicting reality in a certain congruous light. Romantic ideas which, to use Friedrich Gundolf’s terminology, became less of a Weltanschauung than of a Weltgefühl, fostered a romantic awareness which was a tre8

9

10

Adam Oehlenschläger Poetiske Skrifter, ed. by Helge Topsøe-Jensen, op. cit., vol. 3, note on p. 422. W.H.F. Abrahamson “Nordiske Digte, af Adam Oehlenschläger. Kbhavn 1807. 460 S. 8vo; trykt og forlagt af Andr. Seidelin” in Kjøbenhavnske lærde Efterretninger for Aar 1808 no. 4, pp. 49-62; no. 5, pp. 75-80. Adam Oehlenschläger “Svar paa Hr. Capt. Abrahamsons Recension over mine nordiske Digte,” op. cit., pp. 270-272.

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mendous inspirational force and which permeated all Oehlenschläger’s early works.11 The essence of this awareness was, according to Oehlenschläger in his reply to Abrahamson, that it allowed the man who possessed it to live in a meaningful, ordered universe, the harmony of which could be observed everywhere, in external nature, as well as in ancient myths, no matter what the origin of those myths might be.12 The writings of Oehlenschläger, and some of his contemporaries, reflect such an awareness; and no matter how differently they express themselves or which specific romantic ideas they tend to emphasize, this awareness makes it inevitable that they be classed together. The romantic poets, who often felt that they were a part of a world in which most men lacked deeper perception and miserably groped in darkness, made the possession of such an awareness a particular theme in their works and often had their heroes strive for, gain, lose, or regain that awareness.13 11

12

13

My choice of the term “romantic awareness,” denoting the early romanticists’ rather unique consciousness of being blessed with a special insight into the working of the universe, may warrant some justification. The choice demonstrates quite evidently that – in contrast to some critics – I find it useful to retain the period designation, “romanticism.” The works of this period have in common, as René Wellek has pointed out in his Concepts of Criticism (New Haven: Yale University Press 1963), so many features, distinctive and peculiar to them as a group, that they must be classed together. One such feature is, in my opinion, the romanticist’s highly conscious knowledge that he possesses an intuitive insight into nature, an insight which grants him the gift of seeing everything in the correct perspective, e.g. he understands that the difference between subject and object is non-existent (man is one with nature), and he understands the significance of history. The romanticist’s possession of such an awareness must, of course, be an exhilarating feeling, for evidently he comprehends and experiences the harmony of the universe more than do most men: to him life’s meaning is, if not understood, then at least intuitively felt. Finally, to use one of the romantic keywords, one can say that the romantic poets, through their anelse, knew that they had been given a higher kind of knowledge, the validity of which was not to be doubted. Adam Oehlenschläger “Svar paa Hr. Capt. Abrahamsons Recension over mine nordiske Digte,” op. cit., pp. 264-266. The romantic awareness can, of course, manifest itself in poetry in many ways which it is beyond the scope of this study to discuss. It may briefly be mentioned that two significant themes to be detected in the body of romantic literature are the gaining and the loss of this awareness. The former is often rendered as an awakening, or abruptly widening perception, a sudden insight, initiating man into a unique knowledge, which gives him the feeling of being re-created. The latter theme, by contrast, is depicted as an experience of death in life; the former insight is doubted or negated; all beauty and purpose in life wanes; and in utter loneliness man faces the meaning-


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It was thought that in an ideal state all men would share this awareness, and the dream of such a state preoccupied many romanticists, as did a sadness over its loss, whenever and wherever it seemed to have occurred. Some of the young Oehlenschläger’s poems testified to this in their praise of the olden days and lament over their passing (“The Death of Hakon Earl or the Introduction of Christianity into Scandinavia” and “The Golden Horns”). Oehlenschläger also bestowed this awareness on the heroes of his major works – Aladdin must serve as an obvious example14 – as well as on Olaf and Hakon, although the perception of the latter two is somewhat limited. In his rebuttal of Abrahamson, Oehlenschläger emphatically declared that to him the mythological fable was more immediate than the historical event, for the former had universal significance while the latter had only temporal meaning. Hakon and Olaf, having been motivated by personal reasons, both suddenly realize that their encounter and its outcome have a meaning that goes beyond the personal and the temporary level. Hakon is, in fact, no longer concerned about the temporary importance of the historical event, whether he or Olaf will rule over Norway, but rather about the universal meaning of the outcome, i.e. which world-order will reign in the future, the old Nordic order or Christianity. For Hakon, as for Olaf, no compromise is feasible; for them the two orders are mutually exclusive. It is up to the romantic poet and his audience to know that, in a sense, both orders express or did express the same thing.15 Since this is the case, the awareness of both protagonists may be called limited, and the victory of one order over the other may be truly mourned, for with the loss of either, something valuable is forever lost. This loss, in part, constitutes the tragedy of Hakon Earl the Mighty, for even though the defeat of paganism is deserved, the victory of Christianity entails another form of limited perception, a limitation which is regrettable but inevitable since the old order in its corrupted 14

14

15

less flux of reality. It may be suggested that, in his portrayal of Hakon’s death, Oehlenschläger envisaged what would happen to a man who experienced the loss of the awareness that had granted his life meaning. Aladdin is twice thrown into despair, but in each case he regains an ever stronger awareness of his higher nature which enables him to overcome his crisis (see Møller Kristensen Den dobbelte Eros, op. cit., pp. 47-50). Adam Oehlenschläger “Svar paa Hr. Capt. Abrahamsons Recension over mine nordiske Digte,” op. cit., p. 266. Oehlenschläger states: “Thi det føler jeg vel, den Længsel og Higen, som rører sig i min og mine Medbrødres Barm i vore helligste Øieblikke, stunder dog kun efter, at det hellige Kors skal smelte sammen og blive Eet med Thors vældige Hammer; at Manden Daad skal finde den skiønne Mø Erkiendelse”

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form can no longer sustain a noble race. Auden’s touching description, in Act IV, of the old belief has much seductive beauty. But Oehlenschläger lets Tangbrand set the record straight for the tempted Olaf: it is made clear that the old order has outlived its role as a meaningful and inspiring power and now lives on as only a depraved ghost of its former self. What Auden pictured was the old Nordic order in its ideal state, rather than in its present condition. The state of the old order is disclosed in a tragic and appalling way when, just before the decisive battle, Hakon sacrifices his son, Erling, to Odin (Act IV). It is revealing that, in spite of his father’s reproaches, the little boy continues to fear the wooden idol, whom he calls a pale, white troll thirsting for his life, and that the boy talks about “the real Odin,”16 who seems to be reminiscent of Olaf’s god. Hakon’s actions seem representative of the disgraceful and the destructive, the manner with which the old order faces its death. Hakon is, however, oblivious of his wrong-doing, and this lack of perception may actually constitute the most serious flaw in his character, a moral flaw that is much more serious than his unquenchable thirst for young women. Oehlenschläger stresses that, in carrying out his barbaric sacrifice, the earl has deluded himself.17 It is such acts as this that eventually cause his defeat, for they are repulsive to the most high-minded among his adherents and leave him only with the despicable as allies. One can argue that Hakon’s lack of perception constitutes the tragic flaw which critics have denied him. Although Hakon has no sense of the true state of his world, this very fact, in a backhanded way, redeems him. As Oehlenschläger points out, the sacrifice of Erling should not be considered a crime but rather Hakon’s ritual assertion of his now fully comprehended duty towards the old order.18 When he stabs his son, the earl suffers immensely as a human being, but his personal feelings no longer matter for he is obeying a command of his gods. After Hakon’s defeat, Olaf compares him, in a derogatory manner, with the Old Testament’s Abraham.19 Although Olaf then brushes the similarity aside, the point is nevertheless well taken, for the earl, too, believed himself to have unflinchingly carried out his god’s wishes. 16

17

18 19

All page references are to Poetiske Skrifter, ed. by Helge Topsøe-Jensen, vol. 3, p. 354: “den rette Odin.” Adam Oehlenschläger “Svar paa Hr. Capt. Abrahamsons Recension over mine nordiske Digte,” op. cit., p. 268. Ibid. Adam Oehlenschläger Poetiske Skrifter, ed. by Helge Topsøe-Jensen, op. cit., vol. 3, pp. 372-373.


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Hakon’s deeds, no matter how inhuman they seem, are, then, consequences of his newly gained awareness of being the defender of the old order, the corruption of which he is unable to comprehend. It should be remembered that, by his sacrifice of Erling, he gives up his proud dream of his own line ruling Norway. Through his strong belief in the old Nordic gods, he conceives of himself in an impersonal manner and completely subjects himself to the role he envisages to be in accordance with the situation. By accepting this role, the old, mighty individualist, who has hitherto striven merely to fulfil his own ambitions, seems to undergo an extraordinary change, which adds to his stature. A higher justice, however, wills his failure, and as a result the earl suffers a double tragedy: his order is defeated, and through its defeat he is made to realize that he was mistaken in his beliefs; as a result, he is hurled into chaos. Hakon fought for the survival of the old gods, but he fought, at the same time, for all that which had come to constitute a meaningful order in his own universe. His defeat, then, must mean not only the end of his god’s reign, as well as of his own, but also a loss of the awareness that made his life purposeful. This personal tragedy, the loss of his awareness, is foreshadowed in Act IV, when Hakon is told that his son Eriand has fallen in battle with Olaf. The earl’s monologue clearly indicates what the fall of the Nordic order would mean to him: The world is in decline! Ha, in decline! How then? Is Valhal shrouded in a mist? Did Odin’s golden chair in Hlidskialf rust? And has lost its splendor? Frigga green, Ha, have you faded quickly, mother! like A birch in autumn? And did Loki steal Your golden vessel? Ydun! red with fruit? Where is your hammer, Thor? Where, Asatyr! Your left hand frightening and powerful? Say, noble crowd, do you in darkness dwell, And have you followed pious Baludur’s heel?20

It is this disturbing vision of a disintegrating world of gods, which finally makes Hakon realize how much is at stake for his region, and 20

Ibid., vol. 3, p. 336: “Det gaaer tilbage! Ha, det gaaer tilbage! / Hvorledes? Hyller Taager sig om Valhal? / Blev Odins gyldne Stol i Hlidskialf rusten? / Har den alt tabt sin Glands? du grønne Frigga, / Ha, est du visnet hurtig, Moder! som / En Birk i Høst? Har atter Loke stiaalet / Dit Guldkar, Ydun! med den rode Frugt? / Hvor er din Hammer, Thor? Hvor, Asatyr! / Din stærke drabelige venstre Haand? / Siig, høie Skare, har du hyllet dig / I Mulm, og fulgt til Hæl den fromme Baldur?”

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which cancels out all personal ambition on his part. He immediately reasserts his belief in his gods and declares himself to be willing to sacrifice anything for Odin’s sake. Shortly after this declaration and his consequent slaying of Erling, Hakon is summoned to the battle which is to be his and his order’s final defeat. The rise of chaos, which Hakon had envisaged with horror, foreshadows, then, not only the just and inevitable fall of the old order ruling the Nordic spirit, but also the final and tragic collapse of the foundation of his own life; accordingly, the last act ought also to be seen in the light of this personal tragedy. From this perspective, it shall hopefully be shown that neither has the tragic hero of Hakon Earl the Mighty indulged in sentimentality, nor has his creator lost his otherwise sure command of characterization.

II. As Act V opens Hakon has lost; Olaf and, through him, Christianity are to reign over Norway. That which Hakon, in a moment of fleeting doubt, had earlier anticipated, has come to pass. The old order is dead; thus, it is sadly ironic when Olaf’s messenger, the young, enthusiastic Einar, in order to console Thora, tells her that her fallen brothers are now warriors in Valhalla and that they are seated beside Odin. Shortly after Einar’s departure, Hakon comes to Thora to beg for a hiding place. He declares that if Thora should refuse him, he shall ascend to the highest mountain-top where he shall fall upon his sword. I will ascend the highest mountain crest, And one last time behold the land of Norway, Behold the kingdom that has honored me, And quietly then fall onto my sword. Upon its wings a raging storm shall raise The soul of Hakon to our victor-father, The sun will find the body on the stone, And say: In death as noble as in life.21

Curiously enough, even though Hakon fully realizes his defeat, and feels that he has been marked by the Valkyrie for death, he does not choose this heroic exit ensuring his soul a glorious afterlife, but rather,

21

Ibid., vol. 3, p. 367: “Op vil jeg stige paa det største Field, / Og skue sidste Gang hen over Norge, / Hen over Riget, som har hyldet mig, / Og derpaa falde roligt i mit Sværd. / Da skal den vilde Storm paa sine Vinger / Rask hæve Hakons Aand til Seierfader, / Og Sol skal finde Heltens Liig paa Klippen, / Og sige: Høi i Døden som i Livet.”


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he casts down his pride by asking for help from Thora, whom he has earlier humiliated. This behavior is completely alien to the earlier man, who in his last battle – according to Einar – fought valiantly; and it is a type of behavior which seems to indicate that Hakon, in reality, fears death. For Hakon, then, death has become something different from what it should be according to the beliefs he holds – or has held. As he talks to Thora, he does not anticipate the joys of an afterlife; instead he calls himself a pale shadow, a ghost walking by night, and a man long since forgotten.22 These despairing words apply, of course, not only to his actual situation as a ruler who has lost his realm and all his allies, but to his spiritual state as well. In this self-characterization, he negates completely the attitude he had professed when contemplating suicide, and this change in attitude reveals that he senses the world of the Asagods to be no longer reliable and that he himself must be homeless, in death as now in life. From the moment of his defeat, death – and all that death may mean – occupies all Hakon’s confused and exalted thoughts. A changed man and one placed in what Thora calls “a dangerous, new, appalling condition,”23 this former believer in the old order pitifully asks her how she sees his death: “Do you tell me truly? Do you believe the day is smiling / Here on the other side of the arch?”24 Thora reassures him, but Hakon’s words, after his having consented to descend into the crypt, do not connote light. He identifies Thora with Hæl, the Valkyrie who extinguishes the spark of life in the most agonizing way: the process of death is painfully slow, for man’s courage is gradually smothered by fear as he approaches the moment of death. Hakon’s mind is overcome by anguish; he fluctuates confusedly between various moods, all of which are brought about by his anticipation of death; and it is obvious that he cannot keep in mind his hope of salvation. All that should mean salvation for him – Thora, the crypt – become signs of his impending encounter with death. Hakon and his thrall Karker are left alone in the crypt. Hakon should be safe, but he has endangered himself by bringing along a

22 23 24

Ibid., vol. 3, p. 369. Ibid., vol. 3, p. 370: “en farlig, ny, en rædsom Tilstand.” Ibid., vol. 3, p. 371: “Sig mig oprigtig? troer du, Dagen smiler / Hist paa den anden Side Hvælvingen?” Hakon may, of course, be referring to saving his own life, but he already feels marked for death, and his ensuing words clearly indicate that he rather wonders what he will encounter after death.

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specimen of his most cherished followers, a mindless, superficially obedient and slavish soul, who is aware only of material gain. To Abrahamson, Oehlenschläger pointed out that he intended the suppressor, who treated his fellow man with contempt, to be killed by the one through whom he had found the necessary means for attaining power and safety.25 Although Hakon’s death is thus deserved, and when viewed from the outside is tragically ironic, one must turn one’s attention to something more significant, namely, Hakon’s inner turmoil during his last moments, when he is, spiritually, utterly alone. Death occupies his mind. He anticipates Thora’s death by talking about the deterioration of her beautiful body, and he recalls his own father’s untimely death when reminded of it by Karker. But Hakon associates neither of these deaths with thoughts of the splendors of a new life with Odin. What, then, is death? For one whose basic beliefs about life have crumbled, no answer is available; thus, it is not surprising that Hakon clings to life with a fear earlier unknown to him. When Karker offers to tend the lamp that provides a faint, shimmering light, the horrified Hakon forbids him to do so. To the earl, the weak flame has become a symbol of life, and darkness, an appalling image of death: Sit down! I say, and let the lamp burn on! Were you to put it out, then we would sit In sombre darkness. I don’t understand How people every night can quietly Put out the flame before they go to bed, It is an awful image of our death, And much more black and vile than death itself. What blazes like a candle powerfully? And what becomes of light when it goes out? Please leave the lamp, it’s burning drowsily But burning still. As long as there is life, There’s also hope. Sit down and go to sleep!26

25

26

Adam Oehlenschläger “Svar paa Hr. Capt. Abrahamsons Recension over mine nordiske Digte,” op. cit., p. 272. Adam Oehlenschläger Poetiske Skrifter, op. cit., vol. 3, p. 382f.: “Gaa, sæt dig! siger jeg, lad Lampen brænde! / Du kunde slukke den, saa sad vi her / I Mulm og Mærke. Jeg begriber ei / Hvor Folk saa rolig hver en Aftenstund / Kan slukke Lyset, for de gaae til Sengs, / Det er et hæsligt Billede paa Døden, / Langt mere sort og fælt end Døden selv. / Hvad blusser stærkt og kraftigt, som et Lys? / Hvor bliver Lyset af, naar det er slukt? / Lad Lampen staae, den brænder døsigt; men / Den brænder dog endnu. Saa længe der / Er Liv, saa er der Haab. Gaa, sæt dig, sov!”


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Hakon has become a questioner, and he strongly gives voice to his fear of the unknown when he asks: “And what becomes of light when it goes out?” This is not a sentimental whimpering on part of the protagonist, but the terror of a man whose courage has crumbled and who faces utter chaos. Along with a realization of his plight, Hakon gains a clear insight into his life. He understands that his reliance upon people of Karker’s sort has been unwise; and later, in his somnambulistic state, he subjects himself to a completely devastating selfanalysis which reveals the truth about his past deeds. During these moments he totally relinquishes his belief in the values of his worldorder and surrenders to that of his adversaries. His own awareness of the meaning of life is lost, and he is forced to interpret his own deeds entirely on the terms of his victorious antagonists. This is his truly tragic moment: in deep agony, he must turn against and harshly judge himself. He remembers the friendships feigned for the sake of personal ambition and his fickleness toward women. He then turns to examine the critical act of killing his own son, in the light of his new perception he murdered rather than sacrificed the young boy. The earl’s suffering is clearly revealed by the illogical, but touching words, “Did I strike too deeply?”27 Hakon once again mentions Odin, but he does not do so with the apostrophic form usual in moments of high passion; he now merely states that the symbol of the old belief fell asunder – “and Odin’s picture / sank into ruins.”28 Hakon assumes the consequences of his new clear-sightedness; the light in which he now sees himself is so damning that death is a deserved punishment, and he commands Karker to stab him. Hakon, a man who, only moments before, shuddered at the thought of an unknown darkness, no longer allows himself the privilege of clinging to life. He chooses death, and by doing so, he calls down upon himself the revenge of the new order. Christianity has, thus, won its final victory by the “moral” but self-destructive conversion of Hakon Earl.29

27 28 29

Ibid., vol. 3, p. 385. Ibid., vol. 3, p. 384. It shall readily be admitted that Karker’s dim-witted reply to Hakon’s command to stab him, “Det vil I angre, naar I vaagner, Herre!” (p. 385), is as hard to defend on aesthetic grounds as is the unfortunate fact that, as the scene closes, Oehlenschläger allows Karker to be too wordy and, thus, to divert our attention from Hakon.

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That which dismayed those who found the presentation of Hakon to be unsatisfactory in the last act, may be the swift and drastic changes of emotional fluctuation portrayed in a character who, on the whole, had been static. The only other change in the protagonist had been his monumental realization of his true role as the old order’s defender, but while this transfiguration was apparently deemed to be successful, Hakon’s breakdown, at the end of the play, was judged to be neither psychologically well motivated nor artistically very beautiful. The poet was said to have allowed himself to exploit the sentimental possibilities which these last scenes offered and, accordingly, to have failed to depict the successful development of a character and to give him a graceful exit. It should, however, be possible to suggest that these two central scenes – the two “conversions” – be seen together, for in the latter scene Hakon was to realize that the role he took upon himself in the former had been a tragic mistake. With Hakon Earl the Mighty, Oehlenschläger subtly managed to present a man who, from having gained a full and meaningful, even though faulty, perception of a world-order, is suddenly forced to see that this order does not exist and that his belief in this “false” order has made him commit frightful deeds. He loses the awareness which granted him a meaningful existence, and, accordingly, his thoughts and ideas must abruptly change. Hakon has committed himself to the old, but now defunct, order to such an extent that no new perception of life, which might sustain or save him, is possible. The new understanding, which he eventually attains, conforms completely to his adversaries’ view of him and can only be destructive to him. Hakon is left not only in a void, but finally with a concept of himself which is so crushing that even the newly horrifying aspects of death are to be preferred. Hakon now sees himself clearly; but just as his earlier understanding of the old order and his own role in it was faulty, so too is his final understanding of himself, for it goes cruelly beyond the perspective which Thora gave voice to in the very last scene, and which Oehlenschläger found it absolutely necessary to include, if the play’s meaning should become clearly brought out. You were a Nordic and unequalled king A flower smothered by its winter frost! Some day the Northern chronicle will tell, When time has made the colors fade away, And nothing but the outlines still remain: He was a gruesome, cruel idolator!


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With horror every man will say your name. I do not fear, for you were known to me. The noblest powers and the greatest heart Were sacrificed for errors of the time.30

If the last scenes are carefully read, it should be possible to suggest that, in spite of the fact that some artistic flaws can be detected in the play, Oehlenschläger successfully managed to depict a certain development of character and that Hakon’s development, caused by his change in outlook, not only adds pathos to the play’s closing scenes, but constitutes the essence of its tragedy. Rarely has a so bitterly complete change in character been depicted as that which makes us realize to what depths of despair Hakon has fallen.

30

Ibid., vol. 3, p. 391: “Du varst en nordisk og en sielden Drot, / En Blomst, som qvaltes af sin Vinterfrost! / Engang vil Nordens Krønike fortælle, / Naar Tidens Haand har slettet Farven ud, / Og kun de store Omrids staae tilbage: / Han var en ond, en grusom Afgudsdyrker! / Med Gysen vil man nævne da dit Navn. / Jeg gyser ikke, thi jeg kiendte dig. / De bedste Kræfter og det største Hierte / Blev Offret for sin Tids Vildfarelser.”

“Reason in Imagination is Beauty”: Ørsted’s Acoustics and Andersen’s “The Bell” By John L. Greenway It may come as a surprise to those who do not consort with scientists save under duress to find that Hans Christian Ørsted (1777-1851), the preeminent scientist of the early nineteenth century, and discoverer of the relationship between electricity and magnetism in 1820, was the genial hub of cultural debate in Denmark for a generation. Friend and confidant of poets and critics, Ørsted convinced a dubious Hans Christian Andersen to publish his Tales Told for Children in 1835.1 Andersen wrote to Henriette Wulff on March 16, 1835, “Then I wrote some tales for children, about which Ørsted says that if The Improviser makes me famous, the tales will make me immortal, that they are the most accomplished things I have done, but I don’t think so: he doesn’t know Italy.”2 Discussing Andersen’s use of the supernatural, Paul V. Rubow pointed out that Andersen was able to modernize the world of the eventyr by incorporating Ørsted’s theories of physics and aesthetics.3 Andersen not only found the aesthetic bases of Ørsted’s acoustical 1

1 2

3

Research for this article was conducted under a grant from the Humanities, Science and Technology program of the National Endowment for the Humanities, to which the author expresses his gratitude. You can read a continuation of this investigation of Ørsted in the author’s “‘Naturens hemmlige Urkraft’: Ørsted’s ‘Theory of Light’ and Oehlenschlägers Aladdin,” in Nordische Romantik: Aken der XVII. Studienkonferenz der International Association for Scandinavian Studies (Beiträge zur nordischen Philologie vol. 19), ed. by Oskar Bandle, et al., Basel and Frankfurt am Main: Helbing & Lichtenhahn Verlag 1991, pp. 376-381. Hans Christian Andersen Eventyr, fortalte for Børn vols. 1-2, Copenhagen 1835-42. H.C. Andersen og Henriette Wullf: En Brevveksling vols. 1-3, ed. by H. Topsøe-Jensen, Odense: Flensted 1959; vol. 1, p. 211. Paul V. Rubow H.C. Andersens Eventyr. Forhistorie, Idé og Form, Sprog og Stil, 2nd edition, Copenhagen: Gyldendal 1943, pp. 85-94.

Ørsted’s Acoustics and Andersen’s “The Bell”

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theories congenial, but he used them to regulate the representation of reality in at least one of his eventyr, “The Bell.”4 “The Bell” is not as familiar to English-speaking readers as are others of Andersen’s tales, so a brief summary will help later show the importance of romantic acoustical theory to the story. Along about evening, people hear a sound like a church-bell coming from the woods. The adults search for the source of this sound and, coming to the edge of the woods, promptly set up a store. The Emperor offers a title to the discoverer of the melodious tones’ source, the award going to the theorist who concluded that the sound came from a wise owl knocking its head on a hollow tree. True, he did not go very far into the forest, but he annually published an article about the owl. On a glorious, sunny Confirmation Day, the children hear the mysterious sweetness of this bell and decide to find it. Some stop at the store, another stops at the “kluk!” of a brook, and the others go on until they find a hut with a little bell. Yes, they all say, this must be it. All, that is, but the king’s son, who says that the bell is too small to produce tones “that so could move a human heart.”5 The king’s son goes on alone, for as the others say, “someone like him always wanted to be smarter,”6 meeting a poor boy who had left the group early. They do not go on together: the king’s son goes to the left (the side of the heart): “it was as though an organ played along.”7 The boy goes to the right, for that side looked more beautiful. At sunset, when nature was “a great, holy church”8 and the colors of the day blended with the starry gleams of night, at the shining altar of the sun, in total joy the king’s son “spread out his arms toward the heavens, the sun and the forest.”9 The poor boy joins him then, and holding hands “in the great church of nature and poetry,”10 there sounded around them “the invisible holy bell.”11 4

5 6 7 8 9 10 11

Quoted from Hans Christian Andersen “Klokken” in H.C. Andersens Eventyr vols. 1-8, ed. by Erik Dal, commentary by Erling Nielsen, Copenhagen: Reitzels Forlag 1963-90; vol. 2, Nye Eventyr 1844-48; eventyr optagne i Eventyr 1850; samt Historier 1852-55, 1964, pp. 204-208. Ibid., p. 206. Ibid., p. 206. Ibid., p. 207. Ibid., p. 208. Ibid., p. 208. Ibid., p. 208. Ibid., p. 208.

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Clearly, the story demands interpretation. Grønbech points out that, while Andersen’s literary works resist being regulated by a systematic philosophy, “The Bell” belongs to that class of Andersen’s stories where an idea regulates the narrative.12 True, the transcendent experience is not for all: many are misled by bourgeois motives (the shop) or deceived by empirical evidence (the bell in the hut). Still, the church of nature stands accessible to some, be they rich or poor. It exists; it can be found. So far, so obvious. While “The Bell” should be a charming allegory of romantic innocence, knowledge of the acoustical theories of Andersen’s scientist friend and mentor will allow us to read the story on a deeper level and help explain why, at the end, we do not find the transcendent bell. Now obsolete, Ørsted’s theories lent what would at the time have been a realistic dimension to Andersen’s tale. Ørsted’s lifelong interest in acoustics complimented the studies in electromagnetism which made him famous. In order for us to see the aesthetic role physics plays in “The Bell,” we must enter his imaginative world for a moment and understand the reciprocal relationships Ørsted saw among sound, light, nature, and God. Although Ørsted became famous for his discovery of electromagnetism, his first serious experiments were conducted on acoustical figures. In 1808, he found that if one draws a bow along the edge of a pumice-covered glass plate, symmetrical patterns emerge. In the conclusion of his “Experiments upon Acoustical Figures”13 he suggests that electricity could be generated through sound vibrations, and that light acts on the eye much as sound does on the ear. Anticipating later directions in his research, he then speaks of nature’s “profound incomprehensible reason which speaks to us through the flow of music.”14 He continues this line of thought in his “On the Cause of the Pleasure Produced by Music” in 1808.15 The symmetry of acoustical figures becomes beautiful, he argues, because the oscillations express the underlying “reason in nature.” Although Ørsted modified his theories 12

13

14 15

Bo Grønbech Hans Christian Andersens Eventyr, Copenhagen: Munksgaard 1967, pp. 177-178. Hans Christian Ørsted “Forsøg over Klangfigurerne” in his Naturvidenskabelige Skrifter vols. 1-3, ed. by Kirstine Meyer, Copenhagen: Andr. Fredr. Høst 1920; vol. 2, pp. 30-34 (abbreviated NS). NS 2, p. 34. Hans Christian Ørsted “Om Grunden til den Fornøjelse Tonerne frembringe, en Samtale” in Det Skandinaviske Literatur-Selskabs Skrifter, 1808, pp. 1-57.


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as he matured, he always insisted that nature’s hidden reason expresses itself in tones. In his collection of philosophical essays The Soul in Nature,16 appearing a year before his death, he makes the point explicit by titling an essay, “The Same Principles of Beauty Exist in the Objects Submitted to the Eye and to the Ear.”17 Ørsted’s experiments with acoustical figures seem to have been immensely interesting to non-scientists as well as to scientists, for to Ørsted they demonstrated the scientific basis of beauty’s physical reality. Søren Kierkegaard noted that Ørsted’s inner harmony reminded him of an acoustical figure; the artist Eckersberg painted him with a glass plate in his hand, and Ørsted in a verse used acoustical figures as a metaphor for scientific inquiry.18 Authors as diverse as Frederika Bremer and Carsten Hauch employed the image, and H.C. Andersen refers to acoustical figures in Only a Fiddler.19 We may better understand the importance of acoustics in Ørsted’s imagination, as well as its role in Andersen’s tale, by returning to Ørsted’s repeated emphasis upon the “unity of nature.”20 A second reading of “The Bell” leads one to notice that Andersen emphasizes the day’s bright sunshine, and at the end of the story the king’s son and the poor boy are inundated by color as well as sound. Ørsted would read this ending as subtle and realistic: to Ørsted, electricity, light, heat and sound were all forms of oscillation in the physical world and, hence, express nature’s fundamental unity, symmetry, and essential reason, much as did his early work with acoustical figures. While Ørsted’s theories, with their aesthetic bent, differ markedly from our own, his contemporaries held similar views. Humphry Davy (who read the galley proofs for the second edition of the Lyrical Bal-

16

17 18

19

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Hans Christian Ørsted Aanden i Naturen, Copenhagen 1850. English translation: The Soul in Nature, tr. by Leonora and Joanna B. Homer, London 1852 (reprint London: Pawsons of Pall Mall 1966). Hans Christian Ørsted The Soul in Nature, ibid., pp. 325-351. Vilhelm Andersen Tider og Typer af dansk Aands Historie vols. 1-4, Copenhagen and Kristiania: Gyldendalske Boghandel, Nordisk Forlag 1907-16; vol. 4, Goethe: Det Nittende Aarhundredes Sidste Halvdel, 1916, p. 111. Hans Christian Andersen Kun en Spillemand, Copenhagen 1837. See Sejer Kuehle “H.C. Ørsted og Samtidens unge Digtere” in Gads danske Magasin vol. 45, 1951, pp. 167-81. Paul V. Rubow H.C. Andersens Eventyr. Forhistorie, Idé og Form, Sprog og Stil, op. cit., p. 86 David M. Knight “The Scientist as Sage” in Studies in Romanticism vol. 6, 1967, pp. 65-88, see 82-87.

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lads) held similar theories and expressed them in poetry21 while distrusting Ørsted’s Germanic background. If we look briefly at Ørsted’s view of light, we see that the transcendental epiphany at the end of “The Bell” becomes an aspect of romantic physics, as well as a literary phenomenon, indeed a realistic event if we remember that sound, electricity, and light are but differing expressions of the unity, of the “spirit in nature.” Ørsted saw the significance of his 1820 discovery of electromagnetism as proving just this unity of Kraft (later called “energy”). In 1815-16, Ørsted argues in his “Theory of Light”22 that light comes from a unification of electrical and chemical forces, heat being a slower form of light. In his “Observations upon the Relationship among Sound, Light, Heat, and Electricity,”23 he relies again upon oscillations to show that their interdependence expresses the fundamental unity of nature. In the later “Investigations of Light with a View to the Natural Doctrine of the Beautiful,”24 Ørsted develops the metaphorical implications of this theory: light connects the universe and lets us feel like participants in all creation.25 In “Theory of Light,” Ørsted describes the psychological effect of light as the bringing forth of joy, an assertion to which he repeatedly returned. The assumption of a unity in nature, an assertion which regulated his research (and that of other nineteenth-century scientists in diverse fields as well) led him in his “Observations on the History of Chemistry”26 to conjecture that human neural sensibility might be a form of his earlier “Law of Oscillation,” operating upon the organism as a consequence of sound, light and electricity.27 With “Experiments on Acoustical Figures,” Ørsted argues that this operation cannot be reduced to mere mechanics, for aural effects symbolize nature’s transcendent unity and reason: he says, “in acoustics, that which exalts and enchants us, letting us forget everything while ascending on the stream

21

22 23

24

25 26

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J.Z. Fullmer “The Poetry of Sir Humphry Davy” in Chymia vol. 6, 1960, pp. 102-126, see pp. 118-126. David M. Knight “The Scientist as Sage” in Studies in Romanticism vol. 6, 1967, p. 72. Hans Christian Ørsted “Theorie om Lyset” in NS 2, pp. 433-435. Hans Christian Ørsted “Betragtninger over Forholdet mellem Lyden, Lyset, Varmen og Electriciteten” in NS 2, pp. 479-482. Hans Christian Ørsted “Undersøgelse over Lyset med Hensyn paa det Skjønnes Naturlære” in NS 2, pp. 506-510. NS 2, p. 509. Hans Christian Ørsted “Betrachtungen über die Geschichte der Chemie” in NS 1, pp. 315-343. Hans Christian Ørsted The Soul in Nature, op. cit., pp. 320-323.


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of sound, is not the mechanical excitement of tensed nerves, but it is nature’s deep, infinite incomprehensible reason which speaks to us through the stream of sound.”28 The mind, Ørsted asserts, evolved under the same dynamics as did nature. In “On the Physical Effects of Tones,” Ørsted believes that the “meeting of numerous oscillations, which you assume in the nervous system, is not an exception from the usual mode of operation in nature, but belongs to her universal laws.”29 In the “Investigations of Light”30 he again draws the metaphorical implications of his theory by concluding that light is in essence an image of life, dark of death.31 Ørsted repeatedly admonished his many friends who wrote imaginative literature that narratives set in the present should not violate this underlying reason in nature (and hence, for him, its beauty and divine origin). In The Story of My Life Andersen credits Ørsted’s belief that “I want the poetically represented world, with all its freedom and daring, to be circumscribed nonetheless by the same laws the spiritual eye discovers: that real world, without which it is not worth living in.”32 Andersen was not immune to criticism of this sort, and he took Ørsted’s comments seriously. He relates that when he translated Byron’s “Darkness” into Danish in 1833,33 Ørsted objected that Byron’s bleak vision of entropic anarchy at the end of things was wrong: Ørsted is said to have commented as follows: “‘The artist might well imagine,’ he said, ‘that the sun disappears from the heavens, but he ought to know that something very different from the darkness, from this chill would occur; these occurrences are the imagination of a madman!’”34 Andersen writes that, having thought about it, he agreed. After Ørsted’s death, Andersen recalled that “Ørsted correctly insisted upon strict verisimilitude, even in the chamber of the imagination.”35 As we return to Andersen’s story after this excursion into one aspect of his friend’s physics and the aesthetic judgments stemming 28 29 30

31 32

33 34 35

NS 2, p. 34. Hans Christian Ørsted The Soul in Nature, op. cit., p. 363. Hans Christian Ørsted “Undersøgelse over Lyset med Hensyn paa det Skjønnes Naturlære,” op. cit. Hans Christian Ørsted Naturvidenskabelige Skrifter, op. cit., vol. 2, p. 507. Hans Christian Andersen Mit livs Eventyr vols. 1-2, ed. by Helge Topsøe-Jensen, Copenhagen: Gyldendal 1951; vol. 2, p. 167. Hans Christian Andersen Samlede Digte, Copenhagen 1833, pp. 65-68. Hans Christian Andersen Mit livs Eventyr, op. cit., vol. 2, pp. 10-11. Ibid., vol. 2, p. 245.

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from them, we see how Andersen could well have used Ørsted’s theories of sound and light to underscore his theme with what, at the time, would be realistic detail: realistic in the sense of conforming to contemporary scientific theory. The narrator of “The Bell” says that the sound “affected human hearts so strangely.” Ørsted suggests in “The Physical Effects of Tones” that the harmony regulating the acoustical figures on glass could be extended to human sympathy. We need only recall his emphasis on the unity of nature to see how Ørsted would connect chemical affinity, acoustical effects, and an affinity between nature and mind. “This accordance between nature and mind can hardly be ascribed to chance,” he says in “Observations on the History of Chemistry.”36 Andersen says he wrote to Ørsted that The Soul in Nature prompted his essays on “Faith and Science” and “Poetry’s California” in his collection In Sweden37 where he asserts that “the sunlight of science must penetrate the poet.”38 Ørsted replied, according to Andersen in The Story of My Life, that “perhaps you are going to be that very poet, who will accomplish the most for science.”39 Andersen, when he received the second part of The Soul in Nature, replied that “what above all gladdens me is that here I seem to see only my own thoughts, which I had not previously clarified for myself.”40 Ørsted seems to have had a similar vision of the relationship between literature and science. Years before, in 1807, he wrote to his friend Adam Oehlenschläger that the scientist and the poet begin at different points: the scientist begins with the real world and ends in a sort of artistic experience; the poet, though, begins with intuition, which he strives to clarify for others: “When he has reached the end of his course, he fuses art with science. The poet and the scientist differ at the beginning of their path, only to embrace each other at the end.”41 Some critics have speculated that Georg Brandes’ interpretation of “The Bell” was wrong: the king’s son is not poetry; Andersen saw 36 37

38 39 40 41

Hans Christian Ørsted The Soul in Nature, op. cit., p. 323. Quoted from Hans Christian Andersen Romaner og Rejeskildringer vols. 1-7, ed. by H. Topsøe-Jensen, Copenhagen: Gyldendal 1943-44; vol. 7, I Sverrige, ed. by Morten Borup and H.A. Paludan. (1st edition: I Sverrig, Copenhagen 1851.) Hans Christian Andersen Romaner og Rejeskildringer, ibid., vol. 7, p. 121. Hans Christian Andersen Mit Livs Eventyr, op. cit., vol. 2, p. 117. Ibid., vol. 2, p. 118. Adam Oehlenschläger Breve fra og til Adam Oehlenschläger vols. 1-5, ed. by H.A. Paludan, Daniel Preisz and Morten Borup, Copenhagen: Gyldendal 1945-50; vol. 3, p. 21.


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himself as the poor boy in the story and Ørsted as the king’s son.42 If we accept this conjecture, interesting interpretations unfold: Andersen does not tell of the travails of the poor boy, who takes the path on the right because it is beautiful, but of those of the king’s son, who takes the path on the left because that is where the heart is. The king’s son knows enough empirical acoustics to realize that the small bell the children found was much too small and delicate to be heard so far away, but he is not limited by the empirical. He lets his heart guide his reason to the ultimate, transcendent experience. If indeed Ørsted was the model for the king’s son, Andersen understood his older friend deeply, particularly at the end of the story. After having made a fool of himself early in his career by venturing into the speculative physics of the Naturphilosoph (Gower), Ørsted eventually broke with Schelling and, later, Steffens over their lack of experimental rigor and their belief that one could attain ultimate knowledge through philosophy alone.43 Ørsted had a bitter feud with Grundtvig and the latter’s World Chronicles,44 in part because of Grundtvig’s assumption he could speak with God’s voice. Ørsted insisted that human reason could never be complete unto itself, “for our reason, although originally related to the infinite, is limited by the finite, and can only imperfectly disengage itself from it. No mortal has been permitted to penetrate and comprehend the whole.”45 Importantly, while the bell the children find in the forest is beautiful, the source of the sound is invisible to the king’s son and the poor boy alike. They do not discover the bell but experience transcendence through light. Ørsted maintains that light 42

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Søren Holm “‘Klokken’ og de to store H.C. er” in his Om Filosofi og religion, Copenhagen: Gyldendal 1942, p. 43. Paul V. Rubow H.C. Andersens Eventyr. Forhistorie, Idé og Form, Sprog og Stil, op. cit., 94. Hans Christian Ørsted Naturvidenskabelige Skrifter, op. cit., vol. 1, p. 25. He did, however, retain their faith in the unity of nature, which not only guided his experiments in electromagnetism but later led to the articulation of the Conservation of Energy. See Robert C. Stauffer “Speculation and Experiment in the Background of Ørsted’s Discovery of Electromagnetism” in Isis vol. 48, 1957, p. 39. David M. Knight “Steps Towards a Dynamical Chemistry” in Ambix vol. 14, 1967, pp. 179-197. William Michelsen Om H.C. Ørsted og tankebilledet bag Oehlenschlägers Aladdin (Oehlenschlägers Selskabets Skriftserie, vol. 3), Copenhagen: Bianco Luno 1963, p. 35. Nicolai Frederik Severin Grundtvig Kort Begreb af Verdens Krønike i Sammenhæng, Copenhagen 1812. Kort Begreb af Verdens Krønike, betragtet i Sammenhæng. Copenhagen 1814. Udsigt over Verdens-Krøniken fornemmelig i det Lutherske Tidsrum, Copenhagen 1817. Hans Christian Ørsted The Soul in Nature, op. cit., p. 451.

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allows us to penetrate into nature and not only knits us into the universe, but catalyzes the feeling of joy as it does to the king’s son.46 Michelsen points out Ørsted’s preference for organic metaphors over the abstract: he did not call his final collection of philosophic essays The Idea in Nature, as would a Platonist or a Naturphilosoph, but The Soul in Nature.47 We have no evidence that Ørsted communicated his 1807 views to Andersen, but given the continuity of Ørsted’s views, in particular his belief in the unity of nature, the conjecture is plausible. Indeed, I suspect Andersen pays quite a compliment to his friend and envies the moment of scientific insight: at the moment of transcendence for the king’s son, oscillations fuse, and nature becomes one with mind. The waves of the ocean meet the light of the setting sun, “everything melted together in glowing colors: the forest sang and the ocean sang and his heart sang along.”48 When the poor boy (whose imagination we do not share) arrives, the final synthesis becomes that symmetry Ørsted saw expressing creation’s inner reason: in the great church of nature and poetry the last sounds we hear from the holy bell are hallelujahs of “blessed Spirits.”49 After Ørsted’s death in 1851, Andersen’s view of nature seems to have changed to one extolling the drama of conquest and power, as we see, for instance, in “The New Century’s Muse.”50 In “The Bell,” however, Andersen’s view is the same as that of Ørsted. Ørsted almost paraphrases Andersen’s poetic conclusion with his own elevated prose: “The holy engagement of art does not spring from conscious reflection, but from an unconscious and mystic sanctuary…. Every melting harmony, every resolved dissonance, is again a higher combination, which in itself bears the same stamp of reason, and in which all its parts cooperate towards an inward unity.”51

46 47

48 49 50

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Ibid., p. 113. William Michelsen Om H.C. Ørsted og tankebilledet bag Oehlenschlägers Aladdin, op. cit., p. 36. Hans Christian Andersen “Klokken,” op. cit., p. 208. Ibid. Hans Christian Andersen “Det nye Aarhundredes Musa” in his Nye Eventyr og Historier. Anden Række, Copenhagen: C.A. Reitzels Forlag 1861, pp. 77-86. See Jørgen Holmgaard “Idealets enhed og virkelighedens mangfoldighed. H.C. Andersen – musehalesuppe og midgårdsorm” in Dansk litteraturhistorie vols. 1-9, ed. by Lise Busk-Jensen, Per Dahl, Anker Gemzøe, Torben Kragh Grodal, Jørgen Holmgaard, Martin Zerlang, Copenhagen: Gyldendal 1984-85; vol. 6, pp. 65-66. Hans Christian Ørsted The Soul in Nature, op. cit., p. 351.


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As we have seen, we cannot separate Ørsted’s physics from his aesthetics, and Andersen, I believe, incorporated Ørsted’s physics of sound and light to give his tale a realistic context we no longer recognize. Thanks to Ørsted, “The Bell” displays a physics of spiritual beauty. In a verse to Andersen, Ørsted wrote: “Reason in reason is truth; reason in will is goodness; reason in imagination is beauty.”52

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Hans Christian Andersen Mit Livs Eventyr, op. cit., vol. 2, p. 245.

Thomasine Gyllembourg’s Two Ages and her Portrayal of Everyday Life By Katalin Nun The first half of the 19th century is generally considered the Golden Age of Danish art and literature. It was not only a flourishing time for literature generally, but also the first significant epoch for literature written by women. Like many European countries, including France, Germany or England, Denmark contained an increasing number of women who penned literary works of high quality, often published anonymously or under pseudonyms. These works were not only numerous but also varied with regard to theme and genre. Thus, this period can be regarded as the very beginning of the Danish women’s literature. In spite of its richness, women’s literature of this epoch has generally been neglected in favor of that of the second half of the 19th century. Perhaps the most important Danish female author of the Golden Age was Thomasine Gyllembourg (1773-1856). Between 1827 and 1845 she wrote twenty-four novels and stories, in addition to numerous plays, most of which are completely unknown to modern readers. The book Two Ages (1845),1 Madame Gyllembourg’s last novel, can in some ways be seen as a kind of summing up of her authorship or her general view of life. It is a story about the changes which took place in everyday life, customs and values from the time of the French Revolution (“The Age of Revolution”) until the 1840’s (“The Present Age”). A couple of months after the appearance of the book, Søren Kierke1

Thomasine Christine Gyllembourg-Ehrensvärd To Tidsaldre. Novelle af Forfatteren til »En Hverdags-Historie,« published by J.L. Heiberg, Copenhagen 1845. (All textual references below refer to this first edition, abbreviated in the following as TT.) (Reprinted in Skrifter af Forfatteren til »En Hverdags-Historie« vols. 1-12, collected and published by Johan Ludvig Heiberg, Copenhagen 1851; vol. 11, pp. 1-198; Samlede Skrifter af Forf. til »En Hverdags-Historie,« Fru Gyllembourg-Ehrensvärd vols. 1-12, 2nd edition, Copenhagen 1866-67; vol. 12, pp. 1-243; Thomasine Gyllembourg Drøm og Virkelighed, To Tidsaldre, 2nd edition, ed. by Anni Broue, Copenhagen 1993, pp. 71-230.)

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gaard (1813-55) published a long review of it, which appeared in the form of an independent monograph.2 This review has been translated into English3 thus making Madame Gyllembourg’s name and the title of her novel familiar to anglophone readers, even if not much else is known about her or the work. This is unfortunate because Kierkegaard’s review presents a somewhat idiosyncratic picture of the novel; moreover, very few scholars have taken the trouble to read the original novel in order to compare it with what Kierkegaard says. It is interesting to note that while there exist three different English translations of Kierkegaard’s review, oddly enough Madame Gyllembourg’s novel itself has never been translated into English. The purpose of the present essay is twofold: first, I will give an overview of Madame Gyllembourg’s life and works, followed by an extended discussion of the novel Two Ages. In this discussion, special consideration will be given to the novel’s portrayal of everyday life. Second, I will examine Kierkegaard’s review and compare it with the novel itself, considering first and foremost the way in which the two authors treat their subject matter, i.e. the main differences and points of contrast between the two ages. I will show that while Thomasine Gyllembourg gives an account of the changes which took place in certain aspects of the everyday life from the end of the 18th century to the 1840’s, Kierkegaard, by contrast, uses the ideas and issues of the novel to define the two ages by means of abstract theoretical terms in line with his own thought.

I. Thomasine Gyllembourg – An Overview of her Life and Works Thomasine Gyllembourg (née Thomasine Christine Buntzen) was born in 1773 in Copenhagen as the youngest of four daughters of a wealthy Copenhagen middle-class family. She was not yet 17 years old 2

3

Søren Kierkegaard En literair Anmeldelse. To Tidsaldre. Novelle af Forfatteren til »En Hverdags-Historie«, udgiven af J.L. Heiberg. Kbhv. Reitzel 1845. Anmeldt af S. Kierkegaard, Copenhagen 1846. (Reprinted in SV1 VIII, 1-105.) The Present Age and Two Minor Ethico-Religious Treaties, tr. by Alexander Dru and Walter Lowrie, London, New York: Oxford University Press 1949; Two Ages. The Age of Revolution and the Present Age. A Literary Review by Søren Kierkegaard, ed. and tr. by Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong, Princeton: Princeton University Press 1978; A Literary Review. ‘Two Ages,’ a Novel by the Author of ‘A Story of Everyday Life,’ published by J.L. Heiberg. Copenhagen: Reitzel 1845. Reviewed by S. Kierkegaard, tr. by Alastair Hannay, Harmondsworth: Penguin Books 2001.

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when she married Peter Andreas Heiberg (1758-1841), 15 years her senior. Heiberg, a well-known poet and translator, was condemned to lifelong exile in 1799 as a result of his political liberalism. In 1800 he left Denmark for Paris, where he was to live the rest of his life, while his wife and their 8-year-old son, Johan Ludvig remained in Copenhagen. At the time of Peter Andreas’ banishment, Thomasine Gyllembourg had already fallen in love with the exiled Swedish baron, Karl Frederik Gyllembourg-Ehrensvärd (1767-1815). In September 1801 Thomasine Gyllembourg wrote her “lettre remarquable”4 to her husband in Paris asking him to consent to a divorce because of the changed circumstances. He refused and applied to the Danish authorities for permission to return to Denmark. The crown eventually refused his petition and granted his wife’s request for divorce. She married Gyllembourg in the same year. Thomasine Gyllembourg’s only child, the aforementioned Johan Ludvig Heiberg (1791-1860) became one of the most important literary figures of the Danish Golden Age. He was a poet, dramatist and the leading literary critic of the time. He translated several plays, in addition to penning works on various other topics including philosophy and the natural sciences. In 1831 Heiberg married Johanne Luise Pätges (1812-90), almost 20 years his junior, who became the leading actress of the Royal Theater until her retirement in the 1850’s. Heiberg himself held the position of playwright and later of director at the Royal Theater. Thomasine Gyllembourg lived together with her son and daughter-in-law after their marriage, and their home became an important center of contemporary intellectual life. The three knew most of the famous personalities of the age; they regularly hosted poets, philosophers and theologians, and their home was regarded as something of a literary salon on the French model.5 Thomasine Gyllembourg died in 1856, at the age of eighty-three.6 4

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“Lettre remarquable” in Johanne Luise Heiberg (ed.), Peter Andreas Heiberg og Thomasine Gyllembourg vols. 1-2, introduction and commentaries by Aage Friis and Just Raabek, Copenhagen: Gyldendal 1947; vol. 1, pp. 103-111. For further reading on the Heibergs in English, see Henning Fenger The Heibergs, New York: Twayne Publishers, Inc. 1971. (In Danish as Familien Heiberg, Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum 1992.) For further reading on Thomasine Gyllembourg, see Benedicte Arnesen-Kall Fru Gyllembourg og hendes Værker i Forhold til vor Tid, Copenhagen 1875. Steffen Auring “Thomasine Gyllembourg: En Hverdags-Historie, 1827” in Analyser af dansk kvindelitteratur. Leonora Christina, Thomasine Gyllembourg, Amalie Skram, Erna JuelHansen, Thit Jensen, Olga Eggers, Agnes Henningsen (Litteratur og Samfund, vol. 31), ed. by Birgit Abild Andersen, Copenhagen: Eks-Skolens Trykkeri ApS 1980, pp. 30-58.


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When Madame Gyllembourg began writing novels in 1827 she was already 54 years old with the experiences of a lifetime behind her. This circumstance explains the fact that all of her stories express the same mature and well-defined general view of life. Her literary debut was a series of fictional letters in her son’s periodical, Kjøbenhavns Flyvende Post.7 This story later received the title The Family Polonius.8 In 1828 she published A Story of Everyday Life,9 which is perhaps her best known novel due to the fact that her stories and novels from then on were subtitled “A Story from the Author of A Story of Everyday Life,” which effectively served the function of a pseudonym. Johan Ludvig Heiberg’s name appeared on the title page as the publisher. Thomasine Gyllembourg’s identity as the author was never revealed during her lifetime. The reason for this is that during the first half of the 19th century in Denmark being a writer or other public figure was regarded as inconsistent with a woman’s vocation. Madame Gyllembourg herself shared this opinion, and it would have been unpleasant for her if she had been forced into the limelight by virtue of her literary work. Although a couple of close friends of the family knew with certainty and many others guessed who the author of these novels was, Thomasine Gyllembourg nevertheless insisted on keeping her anonymity. Her Literary Testament, which officially revealed her 7

7 8

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F.J. Billeskov Jansen Thomasine Gyllembourg. Et mindeportræt, Copenhagen: Gæa 1977. Julius Clausen Omkring det Heibergske Hus, Copenhagen: Bianco Lunos Bogtrykkeri Aktieselskab 1934. Johanne Luise Heiberg Peter Andreas Heiberg og Thomasine Gyllembourg vols. 1-2, introduction and commentaries by Aage Friis and Just Raabek, Copenhagen: Gyldendal 1947. Johannes Grønborg P.A. Heiberg og hans Hustru, Copenhagen, Aarhus 1915. Elisabeth Hude Thomasine Gyllembourg og Hverdagshistorierne, Copenhagen: Rosenkilde og Bagger 1951. Anni Broue Jensen Penge og Kærlighed. Religion og socialitet i Thomasine Gyllembourgs forfatterskab, Odense: Odense Universitetsforlag 1983. H. Jæger En gammel Kjærlighedshistorie, Copenhagen 1891. John Christian Jørgensen Litteraturen og hverdagen: nye realismeessays, Copenhagen: Borgen 1979. Grethe Kjær “Thomasine Gyllembourg, Author of ‘A Story of Everyday Life’” in International Kierkegaard Commentary. Early Polemical Writings, ed. by Robert L. Perkins, Macon, Georgia: Mercer University Press 1999, pp. 87-108. Klaus P. Mortensen Thomasines oprør, Copenhagen: Gads 1986. Arthur Aumont J.L. Heiberg og hans Slægt paa den danske Skueplads, Copenhagen 1891. Kjøbenhavns Flyvende Post nos. 4, 6, 9, 12-19, 42-43, 58-59, Copenhagen 1827. “Familien Polonius” in Samlede Skrifter af Forf. til »En Hverdags-Historie,« Fru Gyllembourg-Ehrensvärd, op. cit., vol. 1, pp. 45-160. “En Hverdags-Historie” in Kjøbenhavns Flyvende Post nos. 69-76. Copenhagen 1828. (Reprinted in Samlede Skrifter af Forf. til »En Hverdags-Historie,« Fru GyllembourgEhrensvärd, op. cit., vol. 1, pp. 161-218.)

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identity, was published posthumously in 1862 by Johanne Luise Heiberg as a part of Johan Ludvig Heiberg’s collected works.10 Thomasine Gyllembourg’s stories are all set in the Copenhagen of her day, and her characters are taken from the real life of the time. The protagonist is usually a young woman. Her stories concern everyday life of the Copenhagen middle-class of the Danish Golden Age. Thus, it is hardly an exaggeration to say that Thomasine Gyllembourg’s novels and stories give a reliable picture of the bourgeois culture and mentality of the Danish capital of the 1830’s and 1840’s. Madame Gyllembourg was a master at developing the intrigues and psychology of her characters. Her novels evidence an unusual talent for psychological observations and an extensive knowledge of human nature. The 1820’s, the decade when Thomasine Gyllembourg’s first novels appeared, was a time of important change in Danish literature. The dominant literary genre during the first two decades of the 19th century had been lyric poetry. Modern prose had its breakthrough in Danish literature in the 1820’s, influenced by contemporary literary developments, particularly in Germany, France and England. Madame Gyllembourg was herself a leading exponent of this modern Danish prose. This was due primarily to a new realism with which she portrayed everyday life. But it was also due to the popularity of her novels and stories which were written in a clean and uncomplicated but polished and lively Danish, and had therefore an important influence on the development of a literary Danish language. This is understandable when one considers that the modern Danish language was just beginning to develop at this time, and the use of the mother tongue, for example, in academic circles was by no means a matter of course.11

II. Two Ages and the Portrayal of Everyday Life The novel Two Ages can in many ways be seen as a kind of summingup of Thomasine Gyllembourg’s authorship with regard not only to the characters and the plot but also to the author’s general view of life. 10

11

“Fru Gyllembourg’s Litterære Testament” in Breve fra og til Johan Ludvig Heiberg, Copenhagen: C.A. Reitzels Forlag 1862, pp. 217-222. As an example, one can here mention that Søren Kierkegaard’s On the Concept of Irony (1841) was only the third dissertation to be written in Danish (with a special permission of the king), while the language of the previous ones was Latin. See Kierkegaard’s “Petition to the King” in LD, pp. 23-25 / B&A 1, pp. 17-18. See also SKS K1, 129-132.


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First, the theme of the similarities and differences between the two ages, i.e. that of the French Revolution and that of the 1840’s, also appears in many of her other novels and stories.12 While, in her other novels, this theme serves merely to help define her characters, in Two Ages the plot is built around it. Second, while the portrayal of everyday life is a guiding element of this novel, as in most other stories by Madame Gyllembourg, in Two Ages, it receives its most systematic exposition. Finally, the choice of a young woman as the chief character of the story is characteristic of her works. Due to these common features an analysis of Two Ages can shed light on many elements characteristic of Madame Gyllembourg’s writing in general. I will discuss these aspects of the novel, beginning with a brief overview of its plot. The novel is divided into two main sections: the first is devoted to the “Age of Revolution,” while the second deals with the “Present Age.” The “Age of Revolution” refers to the first few years after the French Revolution. The “Present Age” represents, as mentioned, the period when the novel was written, i.e. the 1840’s. It would, however, be an oversimplification to say that the novel is a straightforward contrast between the period of the Revolution and that of the Restoration. Although the emphasis is on the comparison of these two ages, the novel makes two additional comparisons: the two ages are not merely compared with each other, but in the first part of the novel, the age of revolution is also compared with the 1770’s, i.e. the ancién regime, and similarly, the second part contains references to the 1810’s and 1830’s. Moreover, the story told in the first part covers almost an entire decade and thus spans the period from the 1790’s until the first years of the 19th century. Thus, there emerges a much more complex picture for comparison and contrast than what at first glance might seem to be the case. The “Age of Revolution” is presented through the story of Claudine, a young woman, living in Copenhagen in the house of her uncle, the well-to-do wholesaler Valler. In 1794 a French legation comes to the Danish capital with the aim of establishing diplomatic contacts between the new French republic and the neutral Denmark, and buying grain for the French army. Claudine’s uncle comes into contact with members of the legation in his capacity as a businessman, but he also enthusiastically embraces the ideas of the French Revolution. The members of the legation are frequent guests in his home, and 12

For example, Familien Polonius (1827), Extremerne (1835-36), Montanus den Yngre (1837), Nær og Fjern (1841) or Korsvejen (1844).

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Claudine falls in love with one of them by the name of Lusard. Her lover fights a duel and, after being wounded, finds refuge in Valler’s summer house, where Claudine takes care of him. After his recovery Lusard must leave Denmark in order to join his unit in the French army and go to war. Nine months later Claudine gives birth to a son and, finding herself unable to comply with her uncle’s demand to surrender him to a foster family, decides to leave Copenhagen with her child in order to avoid a scandal. She lives with a widow in a small village, working and waiting faithfully for Lusard, from whom she receives no word for nine years. Finally, she learns that he is alive and well and living as a farmer in Jutland. They are reunited and live happily together on Lusard’s estate until their death. The second part of the novel takes up the story again forty years later. The main character is now Claudine’s and Lusard’s fifty-yearold son, Charles Lusard de Montalbert. He has been on a long journey abroad after the death of his parents and now, being unmarried and childless seeks heirs for his properties. He hopes to find them in his mother’s family in Copenhagen. Lusard once studied in the capital which permits him to observe the changes which have taken place since his last visit in the 1810’s. He visits Christian Valler, the son of wholesaler Valler (thus the cousin of his mother), and his family. They continue to live in the same house as their ancestors a half century earlier. In the end Lusard finds there the heirs he has been looking for: Mariane, Christian Valler’s eldest daughter and her fiancé, Ferdinand Bergland. The latter is the grandson of Ferdinand Valler, the cousin of Claudine and Christian Valler. Both sections of the novel contain descriptions of dinners and evening parties, which constitute the central passages of the novel. This setting allows the author to discuss, or rather let her characters discuss, diverse aspects of the two ages: the guiding ideas of the French Revolution, love and ethics, customs, values, behavior, and the concept of being “cultured” or “cultivated” (dannede). Although Madame Gyllembourg has her characters present arguments both pro and contra while discussing the two ages, it is nevertheless clear that she personally identifies with the age of revolution, i.e. with the time of her own youth. Her Preface makes this evident, when she briefly sketches the main issue of her novel and describes the prevalent manners of the present age as “wanton, immodest and raw.”13

13

TT, p. VII.


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Thus, Madame Gyllembourg defends the age of revolution when she compares it with the time of the ancién regime. The initial scene of the first section contains a description of a dinner where the whole Valler family is gathered. The discussion at the table concerns the French Revolution and Robespierre’s bloody reign. One of the guests, chancellor Dalund, discusses the benefits of the Revolution as follows: …and I hope that from all of this there also issues a great benefit for the world, and already now we cannot deny that more than one oppressive cross has been removed from the shoulders of humanity with the French Revolution and the liberal principles, which already from the times of the American War have made an inroad into all civilized countries, for example, the domestic despotism, perhaps the most intolerable of all, under which children and servants in most families sighed.14

The key phrase in this passage is “domestic despotism,” i.e. the unquestionable authority and control of a patriarch over his family, which became less strict as a consequence of the Revolution. The brother of wholesaler Valler represents this old kind of patriarch, and treats his son accordingly. Madame Gyllembourg also illustrates the discrepancy between the idea of freedom and equality and its realization in real life. Wholesaler Valler insists that his wife and Claudine wear scarfs in tricolor, the gifts they received from the members of the French legation, at an evening party to which the legation is invited: “But I want you to wear them. I am indeed, I believe, the master in my house. Tomorrow I will see you both with the gifts which the polite Frenchmen have been so good as to send you.”15 Likewise, although wholesaler Valler’s nephew, Ferdinand Valler complains that he must accompany his father to a tedious dinner, he is nevertheless obliged to do so: “Ferdinand followed him [his father] and said to Claudine, in passing by, ‘You see, now I have to go with him for the time being. Uncle can say what he wants, but however much one would like to, one cannot free oneself from deep-rooted prejudices.’”16 The question of love is of central importance among the diverse issues discussed in the novel. As Madame Gyllembourg summarizes in her Preface, in the age of revolution if one was in love, the circumstances were regarded as being of secondary importance. By contrast, in the 1840’s lovers were ready to subordinate their love to external cir14 15 16

TT, p. 10. TT, p. 24. TT, p. 21.

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cumstances.17 This difference between the two ages is clearly demonstrated through Claudine’s and Mariane’s respective romantic affairs: Claudine and Lusard abandon themselves fully to their love, without hesitation or consideration of the fact that Lusard must leave Denmark and their future is completely uncertain. Mariane’s fiancé Ferdinand Bergland, by contrast, is willing to give up his love because of the difficulties he anticipates he will have in earning a living for them.18 Mariane herself would never consider letting problems of this kind stand in the way of a true love, and is prepared to wait patiently. However, Mariane’s patience, steadfastness, and deep feelings represent a contrast to the superficiality of the mainstream of the young generation of the 1840’s. This is the reason Lusard chooses her as his heir. The related question of ethics is also an important theme of the novel. The age of revolution is characterized as a rather light-headed, even immoral time with regard to ethics and matters of love. This approach is, however, justified by the power of true love. By contrast, in the 1840’s people pay much more attention to keeping up the appearance of being moral and upstanding, without this appearance necessarily being supported by anything substantial. In fact, the same human passions remain in the background, and only the form of their appearance is different. Furthermore, flirting is portrayed as a very common practice in the 1840’s. If one of the two ages is rejected on account of its attitude towards love and ethics, it is the second one, since flirting makes love ridiculous. The discussion of these issues forms part of a long conversation that takes place when Charles Lusard is invited to a dinner at the home of Christian Valler’s family. In this circle Lusard himself and Dalund, who is now over 80 years old, favor the age of revolution, whereas Christian Valler’s wife and a few young men who embody the new behavior of the 1840’s defend the modern age. Madame Valler is portrayed as a shallow, unreflective person. Despite being married she has no scruples about flirting with her young guests and seems to be oblivious to the possibility that there could be something wrong with her behavior. On the contrary, she is convinced that she is a good example of upstanding morality and criticizes the age of revolution for being immoral.19 The main criticism of Madame Valler’s behavior is, however, her lack of good taste, a commodity the author suggests 17 18 19

TT, p. VII. TT, pp. 200ff. TT, pp. 219-233.


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was generally in short supply during the 1840’s. And the conclusion is that it is better to be a married woman who has a lover (as, for example, wholesaler Valler’s wife does with Dalund) and is able to treat the affair with discretion than to be a woman who does not have such affairs, but flirts with every man who happens along. What is crucial is thus to have a sense of good taste, which in this case means tact and discretion in the affairs of love.20 The aspects of the two ages described here support the claim that the picture of the age of revolution is a fairly positive one, whereas that of the 1840’s makes a noticeably negative impression. However, Madame Gyllembourg tries to be fair when judging the two ages. Thus, the passages in the text where Charles Lusard compares the Copenhagen he knew as a young student to that of the 1840’s, give a positive impression of the modern age: With inward pleasure Charles Lusard looked around the Danish capital, which in the many years which had passed since he left it as a young student, seemed to him to have increased extraordinarily in liveliness and pleasantness. The popular life that had newly awoken and manifested itself on the avenues and streets, the swarm of people which he encountered as he was entering the city itself, streaming out of its western gate, the resonating music and shining lights of Tivoli’s illuminated alleyways and gondolas that greeted him, put him in the most cheerful of moods and filled his heart with joyful expectation.21

Here, Lusard with pleasure enjoys contemplating the progress which has taken place since the second decade of the century when Denmark had just experienced its worst economic crisis as a result of the war with England.22 It should be noted here that Lusard compares the 1840’s with the 1810’s and not with the age of revolution, which he could hardly do, given that he was born in 1795. Furthermore, the reference to the “awakening of the popular life” and “the swarm of people” on the streets is important since these aspects are also subject of discussion at the dinner mentioned above. Here, Lusard mentions the newly opened Tivoli and Dyrehaven, another place of entertainment in the suburbs of Copenhagen, where people from different classes can gather to amuse and enjoy themselves in an innocent and proper way.23 He believes that these places 20 21 22

23

TT, p. VII. TT, p. 187. For further reading on Denmark’s history in English, see Palle Lauring A History of Denmark, Copenhagen: Høst og Søn 1995, for the first half of the 19th century, see pp. 189-221. Cf. George Pattison “The Present Ages: the Age of the City” in Kierkegaard Studies. Yearbook 1999, pp. 1-20.

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can contribute to a better culture of the masses because people of lower cultivation and education can learn from the classes with a higher one. One of the guests, however, replies that such places of entertainment can cause people to become hedonistic and spend more money for their amusement than they can actually afford. Another negative aspect of such places is that many people go there not to see something, but rather to be seen by others, which results in vanity.24 Like most of Thomasine Gyllembourg’s other novels, Two Ages has a positive and optimistic end. The last scene of the book is in Jutland, on Charles Lusard’s estate when he, Mariane with her husband and other guests are gathered and sitting in a bower in the garden at the dinner table. This situation is exactly the same as 50 years earlier when Claudine and Lusard had their last evening together in the summer house of wholesaler Valler, and 40 years earlier when Lusard learnt that Claudine had not married a German businessman as he had believed. Everything is the same: a September evening, a bower, pleasant weather and a beautifully set table. Moreover, just like 50 years earlier when Ferdinand Valler read aloud from his newly published collection of poems, Charles Lusard, remembering this, reads them again for his guests. A further repetition is that two lovers have found each other (Mariane and her husband, Ferdinand Bergland) like Claudine and Lusard 50 years earlier. The discussion at the table is a kind of summing up: both the personal and the historical matters of this world repeat themselves. And although, as Charles Lusard says, it is unlikely the struggling powers will ever be fully reconciled or that a new golden age of mankind is possible, nevertheless human relations will become more beautiful, clear and free.25 All the discussions about the two ages mentioned here have the everyday life of the Copenhagen middle-class bourgeois as their backdrop. The furnishings, clothes, the arranging of lunches and dinners, their course, and the typical behavior of people at such occasions are all methodically described in great detail. Furthermore, the description of Claudine’s life in the small village appears to represent the blueprint of an ideal everyday life: it is peaceful, quiet and harmonious. Things are kept clean and orderly and are arranged with delicacy and good taste.26 The ability to arrange everyday life like this is the proof of genuine good taste. This is in turn the reflection of a noble 24 25 26

TT, pp. 224-227. TT, p. 285. TT, pp. 113-114.


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and cultivated mind, which is one of the best “penates” of domestic life in both good and bad fortune.27 The life of the character Claudine in particular resembles elements in Thomasine Gyllembourg’s own biography. Claudine has, like many other young female protagonists of Madame Gyllembourg’s stories, an exceptional talent for arranging the ideal form of everyday life. We know from the recollections of her family and from other contemporaries that Thomasine Gyllembourg paid particular attention to arranging her everyday life in the described ideal way.28 Claudine’s faith in true love also has its point of departure in Thomasine Gyllembourg’s biography, if one considers her willingness to sacrifice everything to become the wife of her lover, Gyllembourg. Madame Gyllembourg’s letters show she was influenced by the idea of the romantic love and was convinced that marriage should be based on true love.29 Finally the passages of the novel which describe the visit of the French legation are based on real events in Thomasine Gyllembourg’s own life: Peter Andreas Heiberg was a disciple of the ideas of the French Revolution, and there was a real legation that visited Denmark at that time and whose members were regular guests at the Heibergs. In this connection it is worth dwelling a moment on the figure of Claudine. She embodies the ideal kind of woman due to her virtues in cultivation and education. This has a twofold appearance: on the one hand, she is able to bear the burdens of her life while living alone with her son for whom she can secure a happy childhood despite her difficulties. On the other hand, she can arrange her everyday life in a way that seems to be attractive to other people as well. The fact that Claudine is not merely cultivated but also well-educated, means in this context that she is a widely read woman who speaks foreign languages. This education enables her to take a stand on the historical events of the time and to have an independent opinion on topical questions. Her uncle, wholesaler Valler, expresses it as follows: “‘You are a magnificent girl! It is not for nothing that you are my niece; there flows a noble blood in your veins. Would God grant that our 27 28

29

TT, p. 114. One can here mention, for example, Johanne Luise Heiberg’s memoirs, Et liv genoplevet i erindringer vols. 1-4, 5th revised edition, Copenhagen: Gyldendal 1973; vol. 1, p. 146. See, for example, her aforementioned letter from September 11, 1801, the “lettre remarquable” in Johanne Luise Heiberg Peter Andreas Heiberg og Thomasine Gyllembourg, op. cit., vol. 1, pp. 103-111. Cf. Elisabeth Hude Thomasine Gyllembourg og Hverdagshistorierne, op. cit. pp. 20ff.

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women were like you, then things would be different in our country!’”30 This passage demonstrates that well-educated women such as Claudine were the exception and not the rule. Although Claudine is well-educated, she considers love to be the real meaning of her life. This opinion reflects the current attitude towards the role of women in the society. Claudine’s cousin, Ferdinand Valler summarizes it as follows: I swear to you that he [Lusard] is fatally in love with you. He said it himself to me the other day when we were leaving here together. “Je suis fou de cet enfant,” he said, and since then he said with a melancholy earnestness that the happiness of love was not for a poor soldier who did not dare court except for honor or death. But I answered that the fate of being loved by a man like him already contained so much happiness and honor that the memory of it should be enough to fulfill a woman who knew how to love and appreciate what is glorious, for few have in their trivial daily life a memory of this kind to raise themselves with.31

Although Claudine identifies with this belief, she appears ambivalent, for example, at the beginning of the novel, when she says that her ideal is Jeanne d’Arc, who after all became a soldier. Claudine does not of course go to war, but she is nevertheless able to be active and to make decisions about her own life independently: she has the courage to set herself against the will of her uncle and to flee with her child to a wholly uncertain situation. Furthermore, she has the power to live on her own, to look for work and to earn a living for herself and her child. All these qualities are evidence of a considerable independence in her thinking. Thomasine Gyllembourg’s generation did not directly question the status quo with respect to equality between the sexes and the emancipation of women. These issues were first directly raised by a younger generation of women writers including Mathilde Fibiger (1830-72), Athalia Schwartz (1821-71) and Pauline Worm (1825-83) during the second half of the century. Nevertheless, Thomasine Gyllembourg’s description of female characters like Claudine provided an alternative based on the real possibilities of the then contemporary society. Finally, it is interesting to note that, due to the qualities mentioned, Claudine’s character is portrayed in a very positive manner in spite of the fact that she gives birth to a child out of wedlock. In society at that time this subject was tabu despite its being a common reality of life. The fact that Madame Gyllembourg dares to thematize it in this novel 30 31

TT, p. 15. TT, pp. 19-20.


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is further evidence of the realism of her portrayal of the everyday life of her time. The idea of culture (Dannelse) is a central theme not just of Two Ages but of many stories by Thomasine Gyllembourg. This concept is of particular importance not only in Madame Gyllembourg’s texts, but also, for example, in the works of her son, Johan Ludvig Heiberg.32 The determining influence for the development of this idea in Denmark was above all the concept of Bildung and Erziehung of the classical period of German literature, in particular the works of Goethe and Schiller. This in turn was clearly influenced by the ancient Greek conception of the ideally educated and cultivated human being. It means in short a harmonious and general education of human beings, the perfect development of the physical, intellectual, emotional and social competences which will result in an inner perfection and an outward beauty and grace. Thus, this concept of a general education consists in the education of the intellect, the emotions, the strength of will, the sense of taste, social competence and the body. The education of the sense of taste, i.e. the sense of aesthetics is especially emphasized by the ancient Greeks and their modern disciples. This concept of education was likewise appropriated by many educational reformers of the Enlightenment, including Pestalozzi and Rousseau. Madame Gyllembourg’s use of this conception in Two Ages and her other works has two main aspects, namely the aesthetic and the ethical “Dannelse.”33 This means specifically that a person who is educated both aesthetically and ethically is able to arrange the external aspects of everyday life with taste and to bear the burdens of life in both good and bad fortune. In the character of Claudine, for example, this conception of “Dannelse” is manifest in her ability both to organize the external aspects of her everyday life while living alone with her child and to maintain an inner ethical strength of character. In short, the ethical and the aesthetic “Dannelse” are required for a person to manage his or her everyday life in an aesthetic as well as an ethical way. 32

33

See Johan Ludvig Heiberg Om Philosophiens Betydning for den nuværende Tid. Et Indbydelses-Skrift til en Række af philosophiske Forelæsninger, Copenhagen 1833, pp. 15, 53. Indlednings-Foredrag til det i November 1834 begyndte logiske Cursus paa den kongelige militaire Højskole, Copenhagen 1835, pp. 5, 35. For this concept in Thomasine Gyllembourg’s other works, see for example “Drøm og Virkelighed” in Samlede Skrifter af Forf. til »En Hverdags-Historie,« Fru Gyllembourg-Ehrensvärd, op. cit., vol. 3, pp. 16-49 passim. Or “Mesalliance” in Samlede Skrifter af Forf. til »En Hverdags-Historie,« Fru Gyllembourg-Ehrensvärd, op. cit., vol. 3, pp. 103-132 passim.

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III. Søren Kierkegaard’s Literary Review of Two Ages Thomasine Gyllembourg’s novels were well-known and in fact very popular among contemporary readers. The stories were often followed by diverse reviews in the newspapers and periodicals of the time. In addition to Kierkegaard’s review, which I will examine in detail, two other reviews of Two Ages are worth mentioning. The first is a shorter critique in the periodical, Almindelig dansk og norsk Literatur- og Boghandels Tidende;34 the other is a longer analysis in the periodical, Den Frisindede.35 The two articles are in agreement about the importance of the author’s contribution to Danish literature generally, and both also note that many elements of the author’s other works can be found in “his” latest story.36 However, the reviews are otherwise rather critical with regard to some of the details of the text. The first emphasizes the lack of real intrigue and excitement and, in addition, accuses the author of subordinating an idea to character development and plot; the second review stresses grammatical deficiencies and criticizes the images invoked by the text as sentimental or illogical.37 Kierkegaard’s extended review of the Two Ages differs from these two analyses in its length and its purpose. While the two other critical pieces are reviews in the proper sense of the word, i.e. they give an account of the text itself, Kierkegaard analyzes Thomasine Gyllembourg’s novel primarily to explore and develop his own assessment of his own age. These considerations were influenced by two main elements, one biographical and one theoretical. First, it will be useful to explore a few biographical facts which played a role in the origin of the Review and are reflected in its contents. Second, Kierkegaard’s analysis is based upon theoretical categories which he developed in other works before ever reading Madame Gyllembourg’s novel. Thus,

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35

36

37

[Anonymous] “Novelleliteraturen” in Almindelig dansk og norsk Literatur- og Boghandels Tidende no. 2, November 15, 1845, pp. 1-2. [Anonymous] “To Tidsaldre” in Den Frisindede vol. 11, no. 139, November 27, 1845, pp. 553-555. Since Thomasine Gyllembourg published her works anonymously, her contemporary critics referred to her as a male author, regardless of whether or not it was clear for them who the real author actually was. Søren Kierkegaard, for example, knew in all probablity that Thomasine Gyllembourg was the author of the “Everyday Stories,” but for the sake of discretion he also refers to her works as “his.” For further commentaries to Thomasine Gyllembourg’s literary works by her contemporaries, see, for example, C.L.N. Mynster Nogle Erindringer og Bemærkninger om J.P. Mynster, Copenhagen 1877, p. 16.


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although Kierkegaard’s work on the surface is a review of Thomasine Gyllembourg’s novel, his text cannot be understood on the basis of the novel itself but only in the context of his life and his own world of ideas. A. Biographical Background In the context of the biographical references there are two main points to be noted. The first is the importance of the year 1846 in Kierkegaard’s authorship as a whole. In this context, we have to explore some of the circumstances which explain Kierkegaard’s choice of Thomasine Gyllembourg’s novel as a work to be reviewed. Second, we must examine Kierkegaard’s conflict with the periodical, the Corsair, which also played an important role with regard to the contents of the Review. Kierkegaard began to write the Review while he was waiting for the proofs of the Concluding Unscientific Postscript in winter 1845-46. In The Point of View for My Work as an Author38 he designates the Postscript as the turning-point in his authorship. He writes in a journal entry dated February 7, 1846 that he was considering giving up writing in favor of becoming a priest.39 As another entry two days later demonstrates, writing reviews appeared to Kierkegaard to be an interim solution to his dilemma about his future as a writer: Up to now I’ve been of service by helping the pseudonyms to become authors. What if I decided from now on to do in the form of criticism what little writing I can allow myself? I’d then commit what I have to say to reviews in which my ideas developed out

38

39

PV, p. 55 / SV1 XIII, 542. First, the Postscript lies between Kierkegaard’s “aesthetic” (pseudonymous) and religious (signed) works, and is conceived as bringing these two parallel authorships together. (Cf. Niels Jørgen Cappelørn “The Retrospective Understanding of Søren Kierkegaard’s Total Production” in Kierkegaard. Resources and Results, ed. by Alastair McKinnon, Montreal: Wilfred Laurier University Press 1982, pp. 18-38.) Second, Kierkegaard was convinced that he would die at the age of 33, and planned therefore to complete his authorship before reaching the age of 34. (Cf. PJ, pp. 260-261 / SKS, 20, 122f., NB: 210.) In this plan the Postscript was to be the final work; thus in this light, the word “concluding” takes on a second meaning, i.e. it was not just the conclusion to Philosophical Fragments but also the concluding work of the authorship as a whole. “My idea is now to qualify myself for the priesthood. For several months I have prayed to God to help me further, for it has long been clear to me that I ought not to continue as an author, which is something I want to be only totally or not at all. That’s also why I haven’t begun anything new while doing the proof-reading, except for the little review of Two Ages which is, once more, concluding.” PJ, p. 204 / SKS, 18, 278, JJ: 415. (Cf. LRP, pp. x-xi.)

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of some book or other, so that they could also be found in the book. At least I’d escape being an author.40

This passage helps to explain Kierkegaard’s intention with the review. What is especially significant is the phrase “my ideas developed out of some book.” This implies that Madame Gyllembourg’s text is the welcome opportunity for Kierkegaard to write, without, however, the necessity of being an author in the proper sense of the word. As he says in “A First and Last Declaration” from the Postscript, part of his motivation for writing under pseudonyms was to undermine any authority that the reader might wish to ascribe to him as an author.41 Kierkegaard was of course interested in writing and in exploring philosophical, literary and theological ideas, but had no desire to impose his ideas on others, and did not want his readers to adopt his ideas on the strength of his authority. The use of the pseudonyms thus effectively distanced him from the ideas presented in his works. The passage quoted above seems to indicate that Kierkegaard regarded writing a book-review as serving more or less the same function since, although the review appeared under his own name, the ideas discussed in it were ostensibly not his but those of the author of the book under review. This seems to imply that after the planned completion of the authorship and the “First and Last Declaration,” Kierkegaard was experimenting with a new kind of authorship which, although not pseudonymous, would nevertheless undermine attempts to ascribe any substantial authorial authority to him. It was not an accident that Kierkegaard selected Two Ages for review. As he mentions at the end of the long Introduction to his review, with this book he comes back to his earlier interest in the “Everyday Stories.” Seven years earlier, in his first publication, From the Papers of One Still Living, he devoted a few appreciative pages to these stories.42 As is well known, Kierkegaard regarded Either/Or as the beginning of his authorship.43 Thus his first publication, From the Papers of one Still Living,44 which was written before Either/Or, and the Review, which was written after the Postscript, both lie outside the authorship, thus defined, and both are literary reviews with regard to 40 41 42 43 44

PJ, p. 204 / SKS 18, 279, JJ: 419. (Cf. LRP, pp. x-xi.) CUP1, pp. 625ff. / SKS 7, 569ff. EPW, pp. 64ff. / SKS 1, 20ff. PV, p. 30 / SV1 XIII, 521. The aforementioned From the Papers of One Still Living was ostensibly a review of H.C. Andersen’s novel Only a Fiddler. (Kun en Spillemand, Copenhagen 1837.)


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genre. This presents an interesting symmetry in which the Review is a kind of repetition which constitutes a part of the frame surrounding Kierkegaard’s formal authorship. In the context of Kierkegaard’s biography we have finally to mention his conflict with the witty, gossipy and satirical periodical, the Corsair, which began when he was writing the Review. This conflict arose from a literary polemic between Kierkegaard and Poul Ludvig Møller (1814-65), a talented literary critic and poet, who hoped to receive a position as professor at the University of Copenhagen. In December 1845 Møller published a critical review of Kierkegaard’s Stages on Life’s Way45 in his own aesthetic periodical, Gæa. In response Kierkegaard wrote an article in the newspaper, Fædrelandet,46 in which he attacked Møller and revealed his connection with the Corsair, thereby breaking the customary rules of discretion regarding anonymous writing. The consequences were serious for both Møller and Kierkegaard: Møller had to abandon his ambitions of receiving an academic position in Copenhagen and shortly afterwards left Denmark; Kierkegaard had to face the attack of the Corsair which over the next few months caricatured his person and appearance.47 With these circumstances in mind, certain passages of the Review become easier to understand. There he explores concepts such as “chatting.” We read: “What is to chat? It is to have repealed the passionate disjunction between being silent and speaking. Only the person who can remain essentially silent can essentially speak; only the person who can remain essentially silent can essentially act. Silence is inwardness.”48 Then, Kierkegaard brings these concepts of chatting, speaking and being silent into connection with the press and the public. He writes: Because of this chatting the distinction between private and public is nullified in a private-public chattiness, which is just about what the public amounts to. For the public is that publicity that is interested in what is for the most part private. What no one would dare present to a meeting, what no one would be able to speak about, what even chat-

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47

48

“A Visit in Sorø. Miscellany by P.L. Møller” in Gæa, ed. by P.L. Møller, Copenhagen 1846, pp. 144-187 / COR, pp. 96-104. “The Activity of a Traveling Esthetician and How He Still Happened to Pay for the Dinner” in Fædrelandet no. 2078, December 27, 1845. For further reading see the Historical Introduction in COR, pp. vii-xxxviii. Elias Bredsdorff “The Corsair” in Kierkegaard as a Person (Bibliotheca Kierkegaardiana, vol. 12), ed. by Niels Thulstrup and Marie Mikulová Thulstrup, Copenhagen: C.A. Reitzels Forlag 1983, pp. 128-142. LRP, p. 87 / SV1 VIII, 91.

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terers would scarcely admit to having chatted about, can very well be put in writing for the public and known by them in the guise of the public.49

This passage precisely describes the characteristics of the Corsair: the periodical was based on a “private-public chattiness.” Its audience was interested in very personal matters, such as a person’s odd appearance and uneven trousers. Personal insults which could not be spoken about were fair game for the Corsair to share with its reading public. These passages from the Review can be understood in part as an expression of Kierkegaard’s frustration caused by the Corsair’s attacks on him, which resulted in his person becoming a laughingstock for his contemporaries. Thus, the Review lies somewhat at a crossroads in Kierkegaard’s authorship. It was written when he had just acknowledged his pseudonymous authorship and was uncertain about his future as a writer and when he had to face the consequences of his conflict with the Corsair, a crisis in part of his own making. All these facts in Kierkegaard’s life influenced the content of the Review, which deviates significantly from Thomasine Gyllembourg’s novel. B. Theoretical Categories Apart from its Introduction, the Literary Review is divided into three main parts. The first is a very short overview of the content (“Prospectus of the Contents of Both Parts”50), while the second constitutes an analysis of the text (“An Aesthetic Reading of the Novel and Its Details”51). The last part (“The Results of Observing the Two Ages”52), which constitutes half of the total text, contains abstract descriptions of some aspects of the two ages based on some of the central categories from Kierkegaard’s own world of ideas. Kierkegaard does not analyze the novel by starting from the premises of the text itself; on the contrary, he works with his own already developed theoretical categories. He explores these by means of the story in a way that draws attention to the elements of the novel which are useful for his own purposes. Thus, although he does analyze the characters and story in the second part of his review, he does so in terms of the

49 50 51 52

LRP, pp. 89-90 / SV1 VIII, 93. LRP, pp. 21-26. LRP, pp. 27-52. LRP, pp. 52-101.


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ideas which he then explores and develops in the last part, which can clearly be regarded as a more independent piece of writing. Kierkegaard frequently employs conceptual pairs which are dialectically related. The most important of these for our purposes is the contrast between “passion” and “reflection.” He claims that in his own age people are overly reflective instead of being active. He thus defines his own age as a reflective one, which he considers a negative designation. In Kierkegaard’s eyes, the contrasting term to reflection is passion, and he describes the age of revolution as a passionate one.53 He discusses not only the contrast between the two ages in terms of their being passionate or reflective but also the contrast between a passionate, i.e. an inward religious, and a reflective, passionless view of life of an individual.54 He then uses these concepts as a starting-point from which to deduce further categories in order to describe the two ages. He thus argues that the consequences of passion include “inwardness” and “an immediacy of reaction,” and that an age which is passionate is “essentially cultured.”55 By contrast, he claims, the consequences of being reflective include lack of inwardness and an immediacy of reaction.56 If one looks at Kierkegaard’s other works, such as Either/Or (1843), Fear and Trembling (1843) or the Concluding Unscientific Postscript (1846), it is not difficult to find the conceptual pair of passion-reflection used in connection with historical ages and with a general view of life. In the “Diapsalmata,” from the first part of Either/Or Kierkegaard’s aesthete laments that the age is passionless. He writes: “Let others complain that the times are evil. I complain that they are wretched, for they are without passion.” He continues: “People’s thoughts are as thin and fragile as lace, and they themselves as pitiable as lace-making girls. The thoughts of their hearts are too wretched to be sinful….Their desires are staid and dull, their passion drowsy.”57 Finally, he compares his passionless age with other more passionate ones: “That is why my soul always turns back to the Old Testament and to Shakespeare. There one still feels that those who speak are human beings; there they hate, there they love, there they murder the enemy, curse descendants through all generations – 53 54 55 56 57

LRP, pp. 58, 53 / SV1 VIII, 64, 60. LRP, p. 72 / SV1 VIII, 76. LRP, pp. 54, 57-58 / SV1 VIII, 60-61, 63. LRP, pp. 68-69 / SV1 VIII, 73. EO1, p. 27 / SKS 2, 36.

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there they sin.”58 Like those written two years later for the Review, these passages contrast and judge different ages on the basis of their having or lacking passion. In the Preface to Fear and Trembling, Kierkegaard’s pseudonymous author claims that he is “by no means a philosopher. He has not understood the system, whether there is one, whether it is completed.” He then writes: “He easily envisions his fate in an age that has crossed out passion in order to serve science.”59 Reflection is here understood specifically as philosophy or system. Later in the same book the concept of passion appears as the condition of a movement of infinity, illustrated by the following story: “A young lad falls in love with a princess, and this love is the entire substance of his life, and yet the relation is such that it cannot possibly be realized, cannot possibly be translated from ideality into reality.”60 However, the hero of this story decides for his love in spite of the fact that it will be never consummated. This decision represents the “movement” which “requires passion.” Kierkegaard’s pseudonym concludes: “Every movement of infinity is carried out through passion, and no reflection can produce a movement….What our generation lacks is not reflection but passion.”61 Thus, passion and reflection are again contrasted and Kierkegaard’s age again condemned for being overly reflective. Finally, in the Postscript, in the Appendix to Part Two (“A Glance at Danish Literature”) Kierkegaard’s pseudonym writes about other pseudonymous works published prior to the Postscript, including Either/Or, Fear and Trembling and Repetition. He complains that the age has become very sensible and no longer knows what it means to exist and to have inwardness. He writes: “What happens? During the same time, I receive a book from Reitzel titled Repetition. It is not didactic, far from it, and it was precisely what I wished, since in my view the misfortune of the age was that it had come to know too much and had forgotten to exist and what inwardness is.”62 As in the Review, the present age is characterized as reflective and lacking in passionate inwardness. Later, in the conclusion of this work we read: “Psychologically, it is ordinarily a sure sign that a person is beginning to relinquish his passion if he wants to treat the object of his passion objectively. It is 58 59 60 61 62

EO1, p. 28 / SKS 2, 36. FT, p. 7 / SKS 4, 103. FT, p. 41 / SKS 4, 136. FT, p. 42 / SKS 4, 138. CUP1, pp. 262-263 / SKS 7, 238f.


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ordinarily the case that passion and reflection exclude each other.”63 These and other passages from Kierkegaard’s earlier works make it clear that he had developed his views on the passion-reflection dichotomy, which the Review uses to evaluate Two Ages, well before he actually read the novel. The review imposes these categories on Thomasine Gyllembourg’s novel and examines the characters by means of them. In other words, Kierkegaard uses the characters and the plot of the novel as concrete examples to illustrate his abstract ideas, as far as these support his claims. For example, while analyzing the characters of the novel in the second part of the Review, Kierkegaard says that practically all of the characters of the first part “are in a state of passion,” and “essentially possess the passion of an ideal.”64 From this statement he concludes that the characters of the second part of the novel appear much more clearly than the figures of the first part who are “more hidden in the inwardness of a more universal passion.”65 These categories, however, appear nowhere in Madame Gyllembourg’s text. What is at issue for her is not passion and reflection but the contrast between true love in the age of revolution and the flirtation and superficiality of the present age. Another category Kierkegaard explores in the Review is “levelling” which appears as the consequence of various elements which characterize a reflective and passionless age. One of these elements is “envy,” which Kierkegaard regards as the “negative unifying principle” of a reflective and passionless age, in contrast to “enthusiasm,” which is the unifying principle of a passionate age. Envy, which has gained a foothold in a passionless age, is, in Kierkegaard’s eyes, synonymous with levelling. As he writes: “In the end, the tension of reflection assumes the status of a principle and, just as in a passionate age enthusiasm is the unifying principle, so envy becomes the negatively unifying principle in a passionless and very reflective age.”66 He continues: “This self-establishing envy is levelling, and while a passionate age accelerates, raises and topples, extols and oppresses, a reflective, passionless age does the opposite – it stifles and impedes, it levels.”67 Thus, levelling receives in this context a very negative character as “hindering,” “repressing” or “restraining.” 63 64 65 66 67

CUP1, p. 611 / SKS 7, 555. LRP, p. 30 / SV1 VIII, 32. LRP, p. 30 / SV1 VIII, 33. LRP, p. 72 / SV1 VIII, 76. LRP, p. 74 / SV1 VIII, 79.

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Kierkegaard then writes about two other concepts connected with levelling, the “public” and the “press.” He claims the public is an abstract thing which can only develop in a passionless age by means of the equally abstract press, since in a passionless age nothing concrete happens. In a passionate age, by contrast, there is no abstract public because such an age has concrete parties and events.68 Finally, illustrating his theory about the process of levelling, Kierkegaard writes: Anyone who has read the ancient authors knows the number of things an emperor could think up to make time pass more quickly. The public in the same way keeps a dog for its amusement. This dog is literary contempt. If someone superior appears, even someone of distinction, the dog is prodded and the fun begins. The snapping dog tears at his coat-tails, indulges in all sorts of unmannerly rudeness – until the public tires of it and says, “That will do now.” The public has then levelled.69

These parts of Kierkegaard’s review can be regarded as a theoretical description of the way press, public and levelling are connected with each other and collectively function in a modern age. These criticisms are obviously motivated by his aforementioned conflict with the Corsair. This is supported not only by the allusions to the Corsair which can found in the passages quoted but by a journal entry, in which Kierkegaard writes: The Corsair’s position Levelling good-natured envy (its elevating quality) contemptible envy A desire to tear down the great – with the help of a contemptible person so that there is nothing left.70

Like the conceptual pair of passion-reflection, the categories of levelling, the public and the press appear nowhere in Thomasine Gyllembourg’s text and have in fact nothing to do with it. After its publication in March of 1846, Kierkegaard sent two copies of the Review to Johan Ludvig Heiberg; one was intended for Heiberg himself, as the publisher of the book and the other for the author.71 A couple of weeks later, on the 26th of April 1846, Thomasine Gyllembourg wrote a letter to Kierkegaard, signed The Author of “A Story of Everyday Life,” and sent by her son.72 After having 68 69 70 71 72

LRP, pp. 80-81 / SV1 VIII, 84-85. LRP, p. 84 / SV1 VIII, 88. COR, p. 176 / Pap. VII 1 B 43. Cf. LD, pp. 191-192 / B&A 1, p. 151. LD, pp. 196-198 / B&A 1, pp. 154-157.


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expressed her gratefulness for Kierkegaard’s Review, Thomasine Gyllembourg writes: A dual feeling has filled me on this occasion: I feel myself elevated by the honor you have shown me and embarrassed because it is greater than my literary merits could hope. On the other hand, it is a great recommendation for my little work that it has been the cause of a book like yours; but, on the other hand, when I compare my novel with your book, so richly equipped with such profound, such apt, and such witty observations, then my work appears to me a simple romance from which a poet has taken the subject and wrought a drama.73

These words suggest Thomasine Gyllembourg herself thought Kierkegaard used her text as a springboard for his own concerns. The phrase about taking the subject and writing a drama describes exactly what Kierkegaard does: he takes the issues of the novel and develops them into something completely different. As we have seen, Madame Gyllembourg writes about two concrete ages, the age of her youth and that of the 1840’s. Her concern is not to characterize the ages in abstract terms but to illustrate how they influenced the concrete aspects of everyday life, customs, and behavior. Even if her characters have a representative function and even if behind the story there is also a general view of life, she concentrates throughout on concrete lives and on concrete existential problems. By contrast, Kierkegaard is primarily interested in his own theoretical categories, most of which he developed prior to Two Ages. These are explored in the Review, but the novel itself serves only to illustrate these categories. Thus, Thomasine Gyllembourg’s novel provided a welcome opportunity for Kierkegaard to be able to write in a difficult phase of his life when he, on the one hand, could not help but continue writing, but, on the other hand, did not know in what form he should do so. As mentioned above, writing reviews generally appeared to him at this time as one possible method for continuing his authorship. This genre served as a kind of pseudonym by making it possible for Kierkegaard to hide himself and his ideas behind the text he was writing about. By making his reader believe that the ideas he wrote about in his review were from the book under review, he hoped to prevent the reader from making any connection between these ideas and himself as author. Kierkegaard’s strategy seems to be misleading or manipulative since, given this analysis, it is clear that the primary goal of his Review is to develop his own ideas rather than explore those set forth in Two Ages. Although he wants the naive 73

LD, p. 196 / B&A 1, pp. 154-155.

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reader to ascribe the ideas treated in the review to the author of the novel, they are clearly those of Kierkegaard himself. It is generally known that the relationship between philosophy and actuality is a central motif in Kierkegaard’s thought.74 As an illustration of this, one can quote from a letter by Frederik Christian Sibbern (1785-1872), professor of philosophy, Kierkegaard’s teacher at the University of Copenhagen and one of the most important thinkers of the time. In this letter, written to his daughter (on October 3, 1863), he recalls a conversation with Kierkegaard: …there was one time we met at Gammeltorv that he spoke of something I have not forgotten. It was during the period that he occupied himself with Hegelian philosophy. He wanted me to tell him what the relationship between philosophy and life is in reality. The question astonished me because I did not have, nor do I now have, any other understanding of philosophy than that it is an attempt to penetrate to the very ground of reality and to its most fundamental conditions, or as it has also been expressed, to solve the riddle of existence.75

Furthermore, Kierkegaard is well known for his criticisms that idealist philosophers have forgotten the existential aspects of life and neglected the individual human being. That Kierkegaard chose to review this particular novel by Thomasine Gyllembourg can be explained by the fact that her text contains an idea and its reflection in everyday life, which is exactly the problem Kierkegaard was interested in, namely the connection between philosophy and actuality. Kierkegaard was not alone in his concern with this problem; several other contemporary authors, philosophers and theologians openly polemicized against what they portrayed as overly abstract theories and ideas which had lost touch with reality. In this context one can mention Sibbern, the theologian N.F.S. Grundtvig (1783-1872) or another of Kierkegaard’s teachers, Poul Martin Møller (1794-1838).76 Thus, we can say that the works of Madame Gyllem74

75

76

See, for example, EO1, p. 32 / SKS 2, 40. SBL, pp. 335-36 / SKS 19, 305, Not11:2. JP 5, 5230 / SKS 18, 84, FF:41 / SKS 19, 245, Not8:51; 246, Not8:53. JP 3, 3716, 3717 / Pap. X 4 A 528, 529, pp. 347-348. JP 3, 3317 / Pap. X 5 A 113 p. 125. JP 4, 3870 / Pap. XI 2 A 117 pp. 122-124. Bruce H. Kirmmse (ed.) Encounters with Kierkegaard. A Life as Seen by His Contemporaries, Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press 1996, p. 215. See, for example, Grundtvig’s polemic against the rationalistic theology of H.N. Clausen (1793-1877) in 1825. Cf. Bruce H. Kirmmse Kierkegaard in Golden Age Denmark, Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press 1990, pp. 210214. To Poul Martin Møller, see Peter Thielst’s article in the present anthology.


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bourg and Kierkegaard can be seen as two examples of a single dominant direction in the then contemporary Danish literature. However, in contrast to Kierkegaard, Madame Gyllembourg concentrates throughout her text on concrete figures and the immediate problems of everyday life, and the general view of life behind the story is expressed in the novel by means of concrete terms. In contrast to the aforementioned authors and thinkers, Thomasine Gyllembourg shows herself in Two Ages and her other works to be concerned primarily with the immediate aspects of life. Her concrete, real figures and problems are taken from contemporary actual life, and there is no attempt to develop any additional theoretical structure. Although the other thinkers claim to be interested in existential problems of the individual, their works are nevertheless, in spite of their rhetoric, highly theoretical. This is exactly the contradictory attempt we have seen in Kierkegaard’s review of Two Ages: on the one hand, the work is supposed to be a review of a text about the everyday life of the time. On the other hand, as shown, the novel merely serves as a point of departure for Kierkegaard to develop his own theories which, in the end, have nothing directly to do with the text under review.

IV. Literary and Dramatic Criticism

Kierkegaard: A Literary Approach By Henning Fenger Among the many existing Kierkegaards there is one who is little known even in Scandinavia – Søren Kierkegaard, the man of letters. This expression should be taken in its broadest sense. Kierkegaard was not only an author of philosophical and theological books, he was an aesthete, a critic and a novelist; one might even say a poet, though he never wrote a verse in his life. To Fear and Trembling he gave the subtitle “a dialectic lyric,” and the finest passages in his books are prose poems, unrivalled in the Danish language. The literary Kierkegaard whose contributions to Danish letters fall between 1838 and 1848, is not an isolated phenomenon, a genius fallen from the sky as some non-Scandinavian writers would have us believe. He is a genuine product of a well-defined literary milieu, the Copenhagen of the 1830’s and the 1840’s. His aesthetic writings can only be understood and explained if one takes the trouble to plunge oneself into that period. It is worthwhile, for this was the zenith of Danish literature, two decades which saw the writings of Kierkegaard, Hans Christian Andersen and Grundtvig and which, besides these three famous names, included a considerable number of outstanding authors and poets. The key to understanding Ibsen’s formative years is also to be found in this period which the Danes are, I think, entitled to call “the Golden Age.” On the 17th of December 1834 the journal Copenhagen’s Flying Post, edited by Johan Ludvig Heiberg, published Kierkegaard’s first article. It was called “Another Defence of Woman’s Great Abilities” and was a sarcastic and badly written contribution to the debate on emancipation.1 The article was followed up in 1836 by four more in

1

A. “Ogsaa et Forsvar for Qvindens høie Anlæg” in Kjøbenhavns flyvende Post, Interimsblad no. 34, December 17, 1834. In English: EPW, pp. 3-5.

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the same ironical and humorous style, equally badly composed and all directed against the growing of liberalism in Denmark.2 So Kierkegaard’s first steps as an author took place under the protection of the almighty Heiberg, and the relations of the two men were from the very beginning that of master and disciple. Later on, even in his most furious attacks on Heiberg, Kierkegaard remembered “how at the time the youthful mind felt intoxicated by daring to believe that a contribution would not be rejected,” and he pointed out that “no young cadet could look up more enthusiastically to the famous general under whose banner he is to fight than I did to the Flying Post’s unforgettable editor.”3

I. Who is this man Heiberg to whom Kierkegaard expresses his gratitude so strongly? Johan Ludvig Heiberg (1791-1860) was born into a unique position in Danish literary life. His father, P.A. Heiberg (1758-1841), a well-known author from the last decades of the eighteenth century, was forced into exile in 1800 by the Danish king for his liberal ideas and spent the rest of his life in Paris, where for some years he was Talleyrand’s secretary. His mother, Thomasine Buntzen, did not go with her husband to Paris, but stayed in Denmark, where, after her divorce in 1801, she married the Swedish count and exile Carl Frederik Gyllembourg, who died in 1815. She devoted the rest of her life to her son and to creative writing in which she acquired fame for an anonymous series of novels, published between 1827 and 1845. She is known in Danish literary history under the name of Fru Gyllembourg (1773-1856). The young Heiberg received an excellent education in Copenhagen, where from his boyhood he moved in the best social circles and became acquainted with all leading people in literature. He studied sciences, languages, philosophy and especially literature, in which he gave early proofs of unusual formal capacity, particularly in lyric 2

3

These articles are the following: “The Morning Observations in Kjøbenhavnsposten no. 43” in EPW, pp. 6-11. “Kjøbenhavnspostens Morgenbetragtninger i Nr. 43” in Kjøbenhavns flyvende Post, Interimsblad no. 60, February 18, 1836. “On the Polemic of Fædrelandet” in EPW, pp. 12-23. “Om Fædrelandets Polemik, 1-2” in Kjøbenhavns flyvende Post, Interimsblad no. 82-83, March 12-15, 1836. “To Mr. Orla Lehmann” in EPW, pp. 24-34. “Til Hr. Orla Lehmann” in Kjøbenhavns flyvende Post, Interimsblad no. 87, April 10, 1836. P, pp. 47-48 / SKS 4, 508-509. Translation slightly modified.

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poetry and in drama. At the same time he demonstrated his gifts for aesthetic criticism and polemics, and after a dissertation on the poetry of Calderón he left Copenhagen and joined his father in 1819. After three gay and sparkling years in Paris, where he was highly impressed by French drama and theater, followed three dark and miserable years as Danish Lecturer at Kiel, where he was the first Dane to be converted to the philosophy of Hegel. In 1825 he established himself in Copenhagen, where in a decade he obtained most impressive results. He introduced the philosophy of Hegel, with which for more than forty years the whole spiritual life of Denmark was to be imbued. He founded a new aesthetic criticism based on Hegelian conceptions, and he proved by his own writings that he was a penetrating and brilliant critic of a refined and classic, if somewhat formalistic, taste. He literally conquered the Royal Theater, drove out the cloying and sentimental German comedies and dramas of Iffland, Kotzebue and Laurens and replaced them by French vaudevilles and comedies by dramatists such as Delavigne and especially Scribe, who obtained a tremendous influence in Denmark. Finally, he succeeded in producing a series of vaudevilles and plays of his own, thus setting the model for a whole new school of dramatists. In theory and practice Heiberg changed the climate of Danish literary life in a few years, being in person virtually a Supreme Court in the world of letters. His influence continued right up to 1871, when Georg Brandes succeeded him, and it extended itself to Norway. Both Brandes and Ibsen began as Heibergians. No wonder that Heiberg created a literary school, and by “school” I mean not only a group of writers with common ideals. A literary school must have periodicals to express its philosophical and critical standpoints. The Heibergians had The Flying Post (1827-36), Perseus (1837-38) and the Intelligence Papers (1842-44), to mention only the three most influential of the reviews which Heiberg published. In 1831 Heiberg married a brilliant young actress at the Royal Theater, Johanne Luise Pätges (1812-90), generally supposed to be among the leading European actresses of the time, second only to Mademoiselle Rachel. Although Fru Heiberg came from the lower social classes, she became in a few years time the Queen of Copenhagen and charmed everybody by her wit, talent and dazzling, exotic beauty. Most of the poets fell in love with her, and the dramatist Henrik Hertz (1798-1870) spent his life in writing roles for her, producing a very successful repertoire, ranging from realistic comedies to highly romantic and poetic dramas. Hans Christian Andersen was in this

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field the unhappy rival of Hertz; and for a time he felt unhappy because the Heibergs did not appreciate his dramatic attempts. It is important to realize the predominant position of the theater. To every civilized Dane the center of Copenhagen and the world was the Royal Theater, where the Heibergs governed, he as the official poet and dramatic expert of the house, she as prima donna assoluta. Besides the Comédie-Française in Paris and the Burgtheater in Vienna, the Royal Theater in Copenhagen was the only European theater to nourish an important school of dramatists, many of whose plays are still considered classics. Andersen, the eternal and untiring traveller, gives many examples of the international scope of this theater; and Andersen never paid tributes to the Danes without reason. The successes of the Royal Theater extended to Norway, where they greatly influenced two young dramatists who, after more than twenty years of hesitations and sidetracks, created the realistic drama, Ibsen and Bjørnson. In a magnificent poem Ibsen praised Johanne Luise Heiberg for the unforgettable theatrical adventures she gave him when he first came to Copenhagen in 1852.

II. Kierkegaard grew up in this atmosphere of Hegelianism, Heibergianism, aestheticism and theatrical frenzy, and his journals from the 1830’s show us a good, loyal Heibergian. True enough he reacted early against Hegel’s system, probably under the influence of his teachers, Frederik Christian Sibbern (1785-1872,) and Poul Martin Møller (1794-1838) with their philosophy of personality, but it is a mistake to believe that Kierkegaard did not fall under the charm of the Hegelian thought. It is hard to find a more subtle and refined dialectician, and Hegelian triads appear everywhere in his writings, even when he tries to kill the System. As an aesthete, Kierkegaard belongs to the Hegel-Heiberg school. Heiberg never finished an aesthetic system, but his essays and reviews give important sketches for one, sketches which Kierkegaard’s journals prove he studied carefully. Large sections of Either/Or, Stages on Life’s Way and Fear and Trembling should be interpreted as attempts towards completing an aesthetic system. Even in the Concluding Unscientific Postscript, intended as the death-blow to the System, pages are devoted to the aesthetic problems of the Hegelian school. The difference between Heiberg and Kierkegaard is that the former is more occupied with technical questions such as the corre-


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spondence between the idea of a drama and its structure, while Kierkegaard wants to solve problems such as the borderlines between the comic and the tragic or define the category of the interesting (det interessante). If one takes the trouble to deduce the aesthetic conceptions hidden in Kierkegaard’s writings, one has to admit that they are both subtle and profound. But as a critic he stands no comparison with Heiberg, who can be considered the outstanding representative of the Hegelian aesthetes, Vischer included.

III. The studies in the nature of “the Beautiful” naturally led Kierkegaard to an intense study of literature which must have begun at least by 1834, four years after his admittance to the University. Heiberg was compared by his admirers to Goethe and even called the Danish Goethe, and Kierkegaard seems to have identified himself with Faust, a young titanic Faust not knowing where to direct his tremendous spiritual energy. From Goethe’s Faust he went on to a study of the Faust figure in general and from there continued to other literary figures, such as Don Juan and Ahasverus, the wandering Jew. These three figures in myth and literature seem to have been the main study of Kierkegaard from 1834 to 1838, the years of his wild romantic period in which he enjoyed sharing the skepticism of Faust, the sensuality of Don Juan and the gloom and despair of Ahasverus. Arranging these three favorites in a Hegelian triad was not an easy task, and Kierkegaard tried most of the six combinations. He began with Faust as the first stage who developed into Don Juan to end with Ahasverus as the synthesis of both; but a note in his journal from December 1835 shows a revision of this first opinion: “It is interesting that Faust (whom I perhaps more properly place in the third stage as the more mediate) embodies both Don Juan and the Wandering Jew (despair). It must not be forgotten, either, that Don Juan must be interpreted lyrically (therefore with music); the Wandering Jew epically, and Faust dramatically.”4 So the starting-point of Kierkegaard’s literary studies was the Hegelian-Heibergian triad of lyric poetry, epic and drama. As his studies continued he felt more and more personally attracted to Ahasverus, but he had to give up his ambitious plans of a work on these three figures when in 1837 he read, in Heiberg’s Perseus an 4

JP 2, 1179 / SKS 19, 94, Not2:7.

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essay on Faust with special reference to Lenau’s Faust.5 “Oh, how unhappy I am,” he wrote in his journal. “Martensen has written a treatment of Lenau’s Faust.”6 The author was none other than Heiberg’s new friend, the young brilliant theologian Hans Lassen Martensen (1808-74), who in 1854 followed Mynster as Bishop of Zealand, and who consequently became Kierkegaard’s later main enemy. This explains why Kierkegaard’s Faust studies only left few traces in his productions, the most prominent being in Fear and Trembling and in Either/Or, particularly the essay on Don Giovanni and the Silhouettes. However, Kierkegaard had still Don Juan and Ahasverus, the wild seducer and the sorrowful Jew, in reserve, and he had no troubles in identifying himself with the latter. Was he not himself an outcast of society? Was he not eternally condemned to expiate the curse which hung upon his father and the whole family? So in the final triad Don Juan represents the first immediate stage, repeated and assimilated in Faust, with these two themes meeting in the sombre, tortured Jew as the top figure. In the middle of the 1830’s Kierkegaard lived in a fanciful world of his own, sketching novels, dramas and short stories and closely watching the literary life of the capital, especially the Royal Theater. He was extremely nervous and sensitive, fleeing from himself, avoiding conscientiously all duties and reacting strongly to the authority of his father. These are his Sturm und Drang years, and we do not know nearly as much about them as some scholars suggest. His journals are, especially in this period, a gigantic jigsaw puzzle, and it is amusing to see the strange combinations which the Kierkegaard addicts are able to make out of the pieces, normally neglecting the literary ones. Kierkegaard seems, however, to have thrown away his leisure in restaurants, where he spent quite large sums.

IV. The year 1838 brought a decisive change. In March Kierkegaard lost his beloved teacher in philosophy, Poul Møller, and in August his father. He seems to have been touched by an emergence of strong reli5

6

Hans Lassen Martensen “Betragtninger over Idéen af Faust med Hensyn paa Lenaus Faust” in Perseus, Journal for den speculative Idee no. 1, 1837, pp. 91-164. JP 5, 5225 / Pap. II A 597. See also JP 2, 1183 / SKS 17, 49, AA:38. JP 5, 5226 / SKS 18, 83, FF:38.


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gious feelings, in which he experienced for the first time the grace and love of God. For the next five years he strove heroically to reach a real, not a fictitious contact with life. He gave up his romantic occupation with the demoniac figures, concentrated on his examinations in theology which he passed in July 1840, completing them in September of the next year with a dissertation on Socrates. He even thought of marriage and in September 1840 became engaged to Regine Olsen. Before embarking on this new bourgeois life he wanted to make his debut as an author. In May 1838, aided by the counsels of Heiberg, he wrote a review of a novel which Hans Christian Andersen had published the year before under the title Only a Fiddler.7 Kierkegaard’s essay was originally intended for Heiberg’s Perseus, but it appeared as an independent book in September 1838 under the title From the Papers of One Still Living. It is a strange coincidence that Kierkegaard should begin his literary career with this badly written, almost unreadable book on one of the weakest novels by Andersen. It is a long penetrating, arrogant and cruel annihilation of the poor unsophisticated poet, whose first fairy tales had appeared three years before. Nothing is left of his book. The novel is condemned as an insignificant expression of Andersen’s weak, sentimental personality, with its self-pity and lack of serious philosophy and character. Kierkegaard, incidentally, seized the opportunity to praise the novels of Fru Gyllembourg, Heiberg’s mother. Scholars have tried many different interpretations of Kierkegaard’s first book. Brandes considered that Kierkegaard felt personally insulted by Andersen’s conception of genius as a plant needing warmth, nourishment and kind appreciation, whereas genius to Kierkegaard was a flame growing into a stormy fire. The different explanations probably contain some parts of the truth. The main thing is that Kierkegaard behaved as a good Heibergian in thus condemning Andersen, who behaved at that period almost like a naughty child towards his former benefactor. So Kierkegaard’s relations with Heiberg were excellent in those years. Heiberg talked ex auditorio at Kierkegaard’s public defence of his dissertation, and he could only be flattered that in Either/Or Kierkegaard inserted a long essay on The First Love, a one-act play by Scribe which Heiberg had translated and in which his wife played one of her famous parts.

7

Hans Christian Andersen Kun en Spillemand, Copenhagen 1837.

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Henning Fenger

So far Heiberg’s importance to Kierkegaard is clear. He had encouraged his first literary steps, helped him and advised him whenever it was possible. By his elegance and wit Heiberg became the model for Kierkegaard, who imitated his light, fluid prose, the style of a man of the world, able to be ironical and sarcastic without becoming trivial. Kierkegaard’s first awkward writings show his hard struggle to obtain the elegance and grace of Heiberg’s Copenhagen style. Gradually and slowly he made progress, but he was never uniformly successful for long. Sooner or later he could not resist the temptation to write as a theological student, quoting in Latin and Greek, using private allusions and puns or hinting at local events. Kierkegaard also submitted himself to the tremendous influence which the Heiberg home in Christianshavn exercised on the whole of Copenhagen. The bourgeois families of the time anxiously studied the articles in The Flying Post, in which they were told how to behave, how to dress or how to lay a table. In the novels of Fru Gyllembourg they found hundreds of formulae for good manners. As Kierkegaard does not seem to have seen much society in his youth, he must have felt it a great honor when in the middle of the 1830’s he was invited to the beautiful home in Brogade, where the guests never numbered more than the Muses and never less than the Graces. It was a distinction much envied and desired. The fact that in their daily lives the three Heibergs realized their aesthetic principles completely, was obvious from the brilliant conversation, the neatly arranged tables and the exquisite wines. “No other Danish poet has such a cellar,” said Andersen with reluctant admiration.8 After the death of his father in August 1838, Kierkegaard was able to adopt the same way of life. He received an inheritance Of 31,335 rix-dollars, most of it in shares, bonds and cash. It was quite a considerable sum in those days and would probably correspond to £40,000 today. Even with an interest of 4% Kierkegaard had the equivalent of the income of a university professor, which should have allowed him, as a bachelor, to live an easy life in those pre-income tax days. It did not. Kierkegaard used up not only his income but the capital itself in seventeen years. Not because he spent it on charity or in financing the publication of his books, but simply because his daily life was very 8

“Letter to Henriette Hanck,” August 21, 1838 in H.C. Andersens Brevveksling med Henriette Hanck 1830-1846 vols. 1-2, ed. by Svend Larsen, Copenhagen: Ejnar Munksgaards Forlag 1946; vol. 1, p. 267.


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extravagant. He spent more money than he earned, retaining to the end of his life the habits which he had acquired in his dandy years of the 1830’s. He went frequently to restaurants and very often to the theater. Whenever he wanted to take some air, he hired a carriage. If the summer was fine, he went several times a week on long promenades around Zealand with his carriage, his coachman and his faithful footman, Anders. Kierkegaard loved the possessive pronoun “my” and spoke in his journals of my horses, my barber and my little secretary. He was all his life a great egocentric. At home his habits were even more luxurious. He was very particular about his lodging, changed his flat if he did not like the noise or the smell of the place, and always chose large and expensive flats with at least five or six rooms of his own, besides the rooms for the domestics. He often had a cook in addition to the famous Anders, about whom he said: “He is, in reality, my body.”9 He loved big rooms in which he could walk around, all of them heated, exactly to 18 degrees centigrade, all lighted and provided with paper, pen and ink. Several witnesses have given us accounts of Kierkegaard’s daily life, which was based on two sound principles: the first that nothing was allowed to disturb his sensitive nerves, the second that everything should be of the best quality to be found in Copenhagen. Kierkegaard did not lead a social life and saw no one in his home except his only friend, Emil Boesen (1812-81). His daily dinner consisted of very strong soup, poultry or fish (he loved salmon) and fruit. He drank wine or sherry with his meals, which all ended with very strong coffee, using a different cup every day. He had a collection of more than fifty china cups as well as a collection of sticks and canes. He continued his habit of eating at restaurants, where he was often seen dining alone with half a bottle of good Burgundy. All in all a bachelor could hardly do more to realize the Heibergian ideals of a consistently aesthetic life. The main difference is that Heiberg considered women an indispensable part of this way of life. Kierkegaard was happier without them.

9

Hans Brøchner “Erindringer om Søren Kierkegaard” in Det Nittende Aarhundrede, Maanedsskrift for Literatur og Kritik, March, 1876-77, § 14. English translation cited from Encounters with Kierkegaard. A Life as Seen By His Contemporaries, tr. and ed. by Bruce H. Kirmmse, Princeton: Princeton University Press 1996, p. 232.

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V. The good relations between the two men came to an end when Heiberg introduced Either/Or to the readers of his Intelligence Papers.10 He had only had a few days to read or rather run over the 900 pages, and his review is superficial and unimportant, yet neither hostile nor condescending, even though he disliked the “Diary of a Seducer.” Kierkegaard reacted with foaming rage and fury. From now on he was an outspoken enemy of Heiberg, and the three books he wrote on literature all deal with the intimate Heiberg circle. They are not all of the same kind. They demonstrate subtly that the feelings of Kierkegaard resembled those of a discharged mistress. They all three prove the existence of the love-hate which Kierkegaard felt for the whole Heiberg family – Heiberg himself, his mother and his wife. He started with the master himself, publishing in June 1844 a polemical masterpiece entitled Prefaces, a collection of essays, consisting only of prefaces, edited by a certain Nicolaus Notabene, who tells us in the Introduction that he had been obliged, for the sake of domestic peace, to promise his wife never to write books, but that he has been allowed to write prefaces. In witty and malicious essays Kierkegaard ridicules Heiberg’s alliance with theologians such as Mynster and Martensen, as well as his unfinished aesthetic system and his preoccupations with science and astronomy. Heiberg is indeed served in his own spiced sauce, after having carefully taught Kierkegaard the recipe for polemical tactics. Yet Kierkegaard’s relationship with Heiberg, who was too wise to answer, remained complicated and ambiguous. On the one hand, he continued teasing and mocking him in his other books, especially Stages on Life’s Way and the Concluding Unscientific Postscript; on the other hand, he thought he was rendering Heiberg an important service when he opened the so-called Corsair feud. In doing so Kierkegaard tried to humiliate the young critic Peder Ludvig Møller (1814-66), who had, as the first of a new generation, started an opposition against Heiberg. The same ambiguity is found in the two writings on Fru Gyllembourg and Fru Heiberg, the only two aesthetic essays in the religious period after the Postscript. In his own explanation ad usum delphini, The Point of View of My Life as an Author,

10

Johan Ludvig Heiberg “Litterær Vintersæd” in Intelligensblade vol. 2, no. 24, March 1, 1843, pp. 285-292.


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Kierkegaard had some trouble in explaining the appearance of these two essays in the religious stage. The first one came out as an independent book in March 1846 under the title A Literary Review of “Two Ages,” Two Ages being the last of Fru Gyllembourg’s many novels of which Kierkegaard had been a faithful and enthusiastic reader. He apparently wanted to show Heiberg how a review should be written, as a careful analysis of the book in question, of its figures, situations and themes. Of course, he was unable to resist the temptation to rewrite the philosophical theme of the book, the contrast of the revolutionary period with the 1840’s, and rewrite it in a more subtle and profound manner with new and clever observations. In July 1848 Kierkegaard wrote four articles which were published posthumously as an independent book.11 The strange title is “The Crisis and a Crisis in the Life of an Actress,” and although her name is not mentioned, the essay deals with Fru Heiberg, who as a mature woman took over, for the second time in her life, the part of Juliet which a young actress had proved incapable of playing. It is one of the finest and most profound analyses ever written on the psychology of acting. Kierkegaard praises Fru Heiberg as the perfect example of the aesthetic type, but he hints at another kind of actress, the “ethical” actress, whom he prefers, still without mentioning any names. The verbal resemblance of the text to a three-page-long footnote in Stages on Life’s Way makes it clear whom he meant.12 It was Fru Anna Nielsen, Fru Heiberg’s only rival in the Royal Theater. She was married to the actor N.P. Nielsen, the leader of the opposition against Heiberg in the theater. Kierkegaard was a diabolical friend and admirer, and he never gave roses without thorns. Many things might have been different in Kierkegaard’s life if the Heibergs had not preferred the company of Mynster and Martensen to his. Even though it is hard to prove, this Heiberg complex – for that is the only right expression for this love-hate – undoubtedly pushed Kierkegaard further out in his reaction against the idols of his former master, Goethe and Hegel. 11

12

Søren Kierkegaard “Krisen og en Krise i en Skuespillerindes Liv, af Inter et Inter. En Artikel i Anledning af ‘Romeo og Julies’ Gjenoptagelse paa Repertoiret ved Nytaarstid 1847” in Fædrelandet vol. 9, nos. 188-191, July 24-27, 1848. Søren Kierkegaard Krisen og en Krise i en Skuespillerindes Liv, ed. by J.L. Heiberg, Copenhagen, Kristiania 1906. (In English: The Crisis and a Crisis in the Life of an Actress, tr. by Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong, Princeton: Princeton University Press 1997.) SL, pp. 131-132fn. / SKS 6, 123-125fn.

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VI. However, Kierkegaard’s literary production cannot be understood exclusively from a knowledge of his relations to the Heiberg school. Being twenty-two years younger than Heiberg, it was to be expected that he should feel attracted to a more modern literature than one based on the classic patterns set by the Weimar humanism. Kierkegaard turned, as did his contemporaries, to the spirit and temper of the modern literature of the day, the romanticism of Hugo and his school in France, of Hoffmann and Heine in Germany and of Byronism in England. Except for the Germans, Kierkegaard was not too well acquainted with these writers, for his ignorance of French and English literature is profound. Yet Kierkegaard was imbued with the passions and sentiments of demonic romanticism. He felt so attracted to this dangerous world that, in the years of his studies in Don Juan, Faust and Ahasverus, it almost threatened to dissolve his personality. It is easy to trace in Kierkegaard’s fictive writings the predominant moods of Byronism. Here is both the English spleen, the German Zerrissenheit and the French maladie du siècle, three labels covering the whole range of passionate feeling, of loneliness and contempt as well as of irony and bitter sarcasm. Depression and despair are virtues which conceal a bleeding heart that suffers from the contact with a low, materialistic world. The Kierkegaardian hero of these years, whether nameless or called Johannes the Seducer, is filled with pessimism, nihilism and some degree of sentimentality. He has the mark of Cain on his forehead and demonstrates as many interesting poses as do the heroes of Byron. Like the English poet, Kierkegaard scorned society and believed in individualism, but he lacked the positive aspects of the Byronic gospel, the cult of Nature and Liberty, of Woman and Love. Kierkegaard accepted only the attitudes and costumes of Byronism. The great skeptic in Kierkegaard never went so far as to doubt God, his father, the Danish monarchy, or conservative ideals. Behind the Byronic fancy dress, there is always the loyal subject of Frederik VI or Christian VIII. In the Heibergian Copenhagen, Byronism became a temptation to the young lions of the avant-garde. Such poets as Christian Winther (1796-1876) and Emil Aarestrup (1796-1876) translated Byron and praised woman, sensuality and passion. Hans Christian Andersen showed in his novels, especially The Improvisor from 1835,13 influence 13

Hans Christian Andersen Improvisatoren, Copenhagen 1835.


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of the couleur locale of Walter Scott, Mérimée and Hugo. The minor writer Carl Bagger (1807-46) lived a completely Byronic life in Copenhagen, described in his naive but bold novel The Life of My Brother, which also appeared in 1835.14 Frederik Paludan-Müller (1809-76), who was eventually to become a religious poet, made his first literary steps as a true dandy in the best style of the noble Lord, most visible in his novel The Dancing Girl (1833), in Byronic verse.15 The incarnation of this avant-garde ideal was Kierkegaard’s later enemy, P.L. Møller, one year younger and one of the angry young men of Copenhagen. Like Kierkegaard, he pretended to study theology, occupying himself instead with philosophy, literature and aesthetics. He was famous for his wit and irony and is said to have been the only person able to compete with Kierkegaard in discussions. But in contrast to Kierkegaard he had a very bad reputation as a seducer, not only in theory but in practice. He seems to have considered love in what one could call the modern Scandinavian style, and many stories were whispered about his debauched life as a Don Juan. He was even said to have sold the skeleton of his late fiancée to a hospital. She was a poor seamstress, of course. Some scholars have maintained that P.L. Møller was the one who lured Kierkegaard to a brothel and that he was the model of Johannes the Seducer. It is of no importance whether this is true or not; the main thing is that all the sentiments and passions of Byronism were present among the young literary dandies of the 1830’s, and that Kierkegaard, with his usual wish to surpass everybody else, wanted to show the connoisseurs how he interpreted these diabolic and demoniac ideas.

VII. When in 1841-42, after his dissertation, his broken engagement and his four-and-a-half-month stay in Berlin, Kierkegaard gave himself over to literature in order to write himself out of the Regine story, he had only to return to his Byronic studies of Don Juan, Faust and Ahasverus. He plunged again into his old moods and feelings. But feelings to Kierkegaard were the same as ideas, and more than anyone else Kierkegaard became an author of ideas. His comprehensive and vivid imagination needed ideas as their inspiration and subject-matter. The triad 14 15

Carl Christian Bagger Min Broders Levnet, Copenhagen 1835. Frederik Paludan-Müller Dandserinden. Et Digt, Copenhagen 1833.

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Don Juan-Faust-Ahasverus developed naturally into the three stages, the aesthetic, the ethical and the religious stage, but no one able to read a text can persuade himself that Kierkegaard’s own heart was occupied with the ethical stage. Personally he was not in the least interested in marriage, children, a job, or a normal and humdrum life. He considered himself an artist and a genius with strong and fatal forces in his soul, and demonic possibilities for good and evil. Scholars never know how much they dare identify Kierkegaard’s views with those of his pseudonyms. The problem need not worry us here since Kierkegaard’s journals and private letters give us abundant evidence that if ever there were a Kierkegaardian aesthete in Copenhagen, it was Kierkegaard himself. Even the role of the seducer was not too hard for the little philosopher with his slight hunch-back: “Once a girl has made a strong impression on me,” he wrote to Emil Boesen, “then I am in my element, and war itself is my delight. That a girl should be unconquerable, that thought has never yet been entertained in my recalcitrant, if you will, or proud head. Do you not hear the martial music, is not your soul all emotion?”16 Kierkegaard might well have signed the famous remark of the Seducer: “my sidelong glance is not forgotten so easily.”17 What interests Kierkegaard in the aesthetic part of Either/Or is love or, more precisely: Kierkegaard’s idea of love. His studies in Faust had led him to stress the seducer in Faust, the Gretchen story, and to pay no attention to the universal doubts of the hero. Now he understood that he had to make a distinction between the two sorts of seducers, the immediate one, seducing like Mozart’s Don Giovanni by his physical presence, and the reflective seducer. To Kierkegaard, Don Giovanni does not seduce in the proper sense of the word. He desires women and arouses their desire in such a way that they fall into his arms. Don Giovanni is not an individual, but an abstraction of desire and sensuality, a force in nature. Though he admired Mozart’s opera, or rather idolized it, Kierkegaard was not content with this seducer, representing the lowest level of love. So he invented Johannes, the intermediate seducer, whose genius does not reside in the senses but in the erotic idea which he incarnates. He does not desire women as such, as bodies, he wants them as stimulation and inspiration. Woman to him does not exist as an individual, but as an infinity of possibilities. As the erotic idea cannot be real16 17

LD, p. 124 / B&A 1, p. 96. EO1, p. 316 / SKS 2, 307.


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ized just by one woman, Johannes is faithful in loving many, namely faithful to his idea, to the Idea. What interests him is not the pleasure of the senses, but the planning and tactics, the cunnings and persuasions which finally will lead the happy woman to the moment in which she realizes her idea, which is abandoning herself to love. After that Johannes leaves her, having done his duty. She can do no more for the Idea. Few questions have occupied Kierkegaard more than the problem of true love. He even thought of giving a series of twelve lectures at the University on friendship and love, and he considered himself especially gifted for the art of loving. One often has the feeling that the living Regine was not nearly as important as the fictitious one which he created in her name. He might seriously have thought of their love as one of the greatest loves in history, and his journal gives evidence of bitter disappointment when, by her engagement to Mr. Schlegel, Regine proved that she was not worthy of his love: “How fine it is for the girls, I thought, that they do not have to be buried every time they die.”18 Still more revealing is this note in a journal from 1854, one year before his death: Alas, yes, I am only good at only one thing – and for this I perhaps have an eminent genius – I am only good for loving. Therefore I am completely superfluous, a sheer luxury item in this practical world….But love I can! You women, come to me or, or to say the same thing in another way, do not come to me. How good are you for loving, you maidens and madams of this miserable generation. No, I am good for loving, and if this were my only genius – it was raised to the second power – concealed in the incognito that I was the most selfish of all men….But just as the archer whose bow is strung unusually taut has to ask that an object placed at a distance of ten feet for him to shoot at be placed at a distance of 150 or 200 yards, so it was for me. In order to love I had to place the object out at a distance.19

VIII. Kierkegaard’s three novels on love, “The Diary of a Seducer,” Repetition and “Guilty/Not Guilty” are exemplifications of this theory. Love and woman are brought out at a still greater distance, seen more and more as abstractions. Johannes cannot do without women; he must have new impulses to be faithful to the Idea. The young man in Repetition has no need whatsoever for his fiancée and is quite content only to dream of her. In “Guilty/Not Guilty” Quidam draws the final conclusion of this conception of love. To him the beloved woman is only a 18 19

SL, p. 55 / SKS 6, 56. JP 6, 6899 / Pap. XI 1 A 424.

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pretext, an occasion for remembrances; the more he physically is removed from her, the better for the Idea. As a novelist nourishing his art with ideas, Kierkegaard ran into the paradox that the closer he came to the pure idea, the more he injured his literary art. Paintings have proved able to fascinate even when they are pure abstractions, but novels do not lend themselves surely to this procedure. The French nouveaux roman does not prove the opposite, as it deals with people and concrete objects, not with ideas. “The Diary of a Seducer” is the first of Kierkegaard’s novels and the most traditional. It can be read outside its context with the other aesthetic papers of A. in Either/Or. It belongs to the literary traditions of German Romanticism which Kierkegaard had dealt with in his dissertation from 1841, On the Concept of Irony, with Special Reference to Socrates. This heavy book shows a considerable progress compared with the book on Andersen: Kierkegaard’s style has become more natural, leisurely and pleasant to read. Johannes the Seducer belongs to a long series of German heroes such as Tieck’s Frantz Stembald, Jean Paul’s Titan, Novalis’ Heinrich von Ofterding, and particularly Julius in Friedrich Schlegel’s Lucinde from 1799, a novel which Kierkegaard studied carefully, but whose outspoken sensuality shocked him. The composition and form, too, are traditional. The novel of journals and letters was very popular in the last decades of the eighteenth century, for instance in Choderlos de Laclos’ famous Les liaisons dangereuses from 1782, translated into Danish in 1832, and Goethe’s Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre (1794-96) and Wilhelm Meisters Wanderjahre (1794-9). Kierkegaard owned the collected works of Goethe, and he read and took notes from the two novels in the spring of 1836. In Danish literature, too, Kierkegaard could find novels using the form of the journal and letters, for instance Blicher’s famous Journal of a Parish Clerk from 1824,20 or Sibbern’s Posthumous Letters from Gabrielis from 1826,21 a Danish Werther-novel. In 1843 Fru Gyllembourg even published a novel with the title A Correspondence,22 and both she and Heiberg had previously dealt with the Seducer – Heiberg in his play on Don Juan from 1814,23 Fru Gyllembourg in her 20

21 22

23

Steen Steensen Blicher “Brudstykker af en Landsbydegns Dagbog” in his Læsefrugter: samlede paa Literaturens Mark, Aarhus 1824, pp. 145-187. Frederik Christian Sibbern Efterladte Breve af Gabrielis, Copenhagen 1826. Thomasine Christine Gyllembourg-Ehrensvärd En Brevvexling, meddeelt af Forf. til »En Hverdags-Historie,« Copenhagen 1843. Johan Ludvig Heiberg Marionettheater, Copenhagen 1814; consisting of two works, Don Juan and Pottemager Walter.


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novel All in One, 1840.24 It is impossible to be more in the traditions of Danish and German Romanticism than Kierkegaard was. The story of Johannes seducing Cordelia is probably best at a second reading, when the structure of the novel becomes apparent. For it is not evident at first sight that Kierkegaard has inserted eleven sketches in the narrative, which he himself calls actiones in distans, meaning actions or plans directed towards a distant mark. They have nothing to do with the Cordelia story, but show us simply that an experienced seducer should have several fishing lines in the river at the same time. These actiones may be considered Kierkegaard’s most perfect accomplishment as a writer, spirited and merry poems in his most brilliant prose. The one called “The Dance of the Zephyrs through Copenhagen”25 is a masterpiece of humor and grace. In “The Diary of a Seducer” Kierkegaard respects form, composition and structure, though he might have achieved more concentration. As he continues to pursue his more and more abstract conception of love, he grows lax, neglecting the artistic demands on purpose to dig deeper and deeper into the idea. Repetition is an incoherent mixture of a philosophical essay, theatrical impressions and letters, dealing with the problems of Job. “Guilty/Not Guilty” is a novel, based on the writing of journals of a very sophisticated sort: the hero notes in the morning what happened a year before, and at midnight what has happened during the day. One has the impression that Kierkegaard, who is now in a religious phase, could dispense entirely with aesthetic considerations. Here, too, Kierkegaard inserts sketches, some of which are pure pastiche, for instance of the Old Testament, Shakespeare and even Fru Gyllembourg. Kierkegaard had a unique talent for imitation and pastiche. From a purely literary point of view Kierkegaard’s masterpiece is unquestionably “In Vino Veritas,” the aesthetic part of Stages on Life’s Way. Had it not been for the anti-climatic and insipid ending, which Kierkegaard unfortunately found necessary as a transition to the ethical part, the piece would have been faultless. It is a rewriting of Plato’s Symposium, five spirited speeches of five aesthetes, all of whom mock woman and love in the most delicious way. Most brilliant is, of course, Johannes the Seducer, who tells the myth of Hesiod: when the Gods wanted to punish man, they sent the first woman. To 24

25

Thomasine Christine Gyllembourg-Ehrensvärd Een i Alle. Novelle af Forf. til »En Hverdags-Historie,« Copenhagen 1840. EO1, pp. 354-359 / SKS 2, 343-348.

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Johannes all men are caught in this trap except the erotic man, who eats the bait without taking the hook. Kierkegaard cannot possibly be identified with Johannes, who is a rather light-hearted cynic. No, the true Kierkegaard delivers the magnificent speech in Either/Or, called “The Unhappiest One.” Here we meet Ahasverus as an aesthete, the eternally unhappy man, to whom life is nothing but madness, belief nothing but foolishness, and love nothing but vinegar in open wounds, the miserable outcast who firmly believes that sleep and death are the only blessings of this life. This Ahasverus has the same feeling as Kierkegaard: reality is something to avoid and flee from, for the so-called real life is vulgar and insignificant, and nobody wants true feelings or deep passions. Kierkegaard wrote about himself in his journal: “Where feelings are involved, my experience has been like that of the Englishman who had troubles; even though he had a hundred pound note, there was no one around who could change it.”26 All his life Kierkegaard suffered from being a genius in a small town, and he suffered most of all because no one was able to understand his real message: that passion was the only important thing in life and that even ideas had to be passions in order to be true. When Kierkegaard broke his engagement, Regine’s brother, Jonas Olsen, sent him a furious letter, in which he told him that he would hate him as no one had ever hated before. Kierkegaard calmly noted in his journal: “Passion is still the main thing; it is the real dynamometer for men. Our age is so shabby because it has no passion. If my good Jonas Olsen really could hate as no one has ever hated before, as he wrote in that memorable letter, I should count myself fortunate to be his contemporary, fortunate to be the object of this hate – this is still a battle.”27 It is hard, not to say impossible, to find out what Kierkegaard really meant. The many Kierkegaards wore masks. From an aesthetical point of view the pseudonyms can be considered as theatrical roles, invented by and played by Kierkegaard with the purpose of concealing his true self. He, too, is the child of a milieu to which theater meant life. One sometimes wonders if he did not invent his own God in order to have a worthy antagonist on his private stage. Kierkegaard was a religious genius who lived his daily life in aesthetic categories. That is one of his many paradoxes and possibly not the least significant.

26 27

JP 5, 5738 / SKS 18, 219, JJ:245. See also SL, p. 388 / SKS 6, 360. JP 1, 888 / SKS 19, 237, Not8:39.

Søren Kierkegaard: A Theater Critic of the Heiberg School By George Pattison Addressing the Student Association of Copenhagen University, the young Søren Kierkegaard commented that “from a poetic genius’ position of immediacy, form is nothing but the coming into existence of the idea in the world, and that the task of reflection is only to investigate whether or not the idea has acquired the properly corresponding form.”1 This definition of the task of reflection also defines the fundamental principle of literary criticism as Kierkegaard understood it. In this article I shall show whence Kierkegaard derived this principle and how he employed it in his critical practice, with particular reference to his theatrical reviews. From the standpoint of the history of literature, Kierkegaard’s writings on aesthetics and his own “literary” output form a bridge between the formal, idealist aesthetics of J.L. Heiberg (1791-1860) and the more psychologically orientated aesthetics of Georg Brandes (1842-1927). His espousal of the principle of the correspondence of idea and form is particularly indicative of his debt to Heiberg, and his theatrical reviews can be seen as some of the best examples of the critical work of the Heiberg school. Heiberg is little known in the English-speaking world except as the specific butt of Kierkegaard’s attack on Hegelianism.2 Although a lightweight in philosophy, Heiberg was one of the dominant figures in Danish literature from the 1820’s through until the 1840’s. Indeed one historian has described him as the “Pontifex Maximus” of Danish literature

1 2

EPW, p. 47 / Pap. I B 2, p. 172. See, for example, CUP1, p. 184 / SKS 7, 169f. The high-point of Kierkegaard’s published polemic against Heiberg was the satirical work Prefaces, although journal entries relating to Either/Or and Repetition include extensive passages of argument, satire and, sometimes, downright abuse directed at Heiberg.

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in this period.3 He was eminent as playwright, poet, critic and editor – it was in one of his journals that Kierkegaard’s first publication appeared. The chief aim of Heiberg’s critical enterprise was the improvement of “taste.”4 Taste, he maintained, is not mere subjective feeling but is the acknowledgement of what genius has made objective. Taste has to do with the maintenance of correct distinctions in art, particularly distinctions of form, the ignoring of which is the hallmark of dilettantism.5 The object of criticism, he claims, is therefore the form in which the artistic idea is made manifest.6 The question of form is, however, importantly influenced by genre. For, Heiberg argued, within each genre form and content are related in a specific way. It is thus impossible simply to transfer a story (content) from one genre (e.g. dramatic poetry) to another (e.g. opera), for the content itself is affected by the choice of form – a point Heiberg illustrates by reference to Beaumarchais’ Barber of Seville and Mozart’s Figaro.7 Likewise, epic poetry may contain supernatural elements which cannot be presented in the theater without overstretching the audience’s suspension of disbelief.8 There are, however, general rules governing the interrelationship of genre, form and content, rules that can be deduced from well-established aesthetic principles. Thus, Heiberg declares that “All art is either plastic or musical, depending on how it is made objective, whether in space or in time.”9 Poetry, which Heiberg calls art’s art (as he calls logic “philosophy’s philosophy”)10 contains both elements: in its lyrical aspect it is musical, in epic it is plastic. Dramatic poetry combines both aspects, being lyrical in the portrayal of character, epic in depicting situation.11 3 4

5 6 7 8 9 10

11

P.M. Mitchell A History of Danish Literature, Copenhagen: Gyldendal 1957, p. 135. Johan Ludvig Heiberg Om Vaudevillen og andre kritiske Artikler, ed. by Hans Hertel, Copenhagen: Gyldendal 1968, p. 32. Hereafter abbreviated as OV. Translations from this and other Danish titles are my own. The most comprehensive discussion of Heiberg available in English is Henning Fenger The Heibergs, tr. by Frederick J. Marker, New York: Twayne Publishers Inc. 1971. OV, p. 15. OV, p. 130. OV, p. 25f. OV, p. 35. OV, p. 35. Johan Ludvig Heiberg Grundtræk til Philosophiens Philosophie eller den speculative Logik. Som Ledetraad ved Forelæsninger paa den kongelige militaire Højskole, Copenhagen 1832, p. 6. OV, p. 36.

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Opera and ancient tragedy represent the lyrical, character-orientated pole; modern comedy emphasizes situation. But, whatever the form of art, “every work which answers to the requirements of the form of poetry under which it is categorized is good, and if it answers perfectly to its concept then it is masterly.”12 Heiberg develops a schematization of genres on the basis of Hegelian dialectics as he understood them. Accordingly, every form of art has an immediate and a reflective stage, and, finally, a speculative stage, which is the higher unity of the two preceding stages. Poetry in general is thus divided into the immediate (= the lyrical), the reflective (= the epic) and the higher unity of the two (= the dramatic). Dramatic poetry in turn is further subdivided, culminating in comedy. Comedy has an ironic consciousness of the limitations which the different moments of a work impose upon each other. Such irony is clearly very close to what Heiberg calls “taste.” But within comedy itself the threefold dialectic is repeated. Heiberg himself sought to realize a “speculative comedy” with his play Fata Morgana (1838). Although much praised by a fellow-Hegelian, Prof. Martensen,13 “in the theater it was a fiasco,”14 and Heiberg refrained from further experiments in this direction. How far Heiberg’s theories are genuinely “Hegelian” is highly questionable. If we now turn to Kierkegaard, it is clear that although he had reservations about the details of Heiberg’s schematization of genres, he accepted the basic principle concerning the relationship of form, content and the task of criticism. I shall now proceed to look at his theatrical reviews in the light of this principle. Kierkegaard’s first major published work, Either/Or (1843), contains a great deal of material on aesthetics in general and dramatic art in particular. In the first volume of this two-volume work there are, moreover, two sections which can be regarded as free-standing pieces of theatrical criticism. These are entitled “The Immediate Stages of the Erotic, or the Musical Erotic,” essentially an appreciation of Mozart’s Don Giovanni, and “The First Love,” a review of Scribe’s play of the same name.

12 13

14

OV, p. 43. Hans Lassen Martensen “Fata Morgana, Eventyr-Comedie af Johan Ludvig Heiberg. 1838. 125S. 8º. Kjøbenhavn. Schubothes Boghandling” in Maanedsskrift for Litteratur vol. 19, 1838, pp. 361-397. Oluf Friis Poetisk Realisme og Romantisme in Dansk Litteratur Historie, Copenhagen 1965, vol. 2, p. 467.

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The nub of the Mozart piece is that Don Giovanni is an authentically “classical,” an “immortal” work, because of the perfect coincidence of the subject-matter with the nature of the musical form. The subject-matter is the character of Don Giovanni himself: he is sensuous immediacy incarnate. Christianity, Kierkegaard argues, by excluding the sensuous-erotic from the realm of Spirit and by categorizing it as the demonic, made it into a free-standing principle. Thus the legendary character of Don Juan developed on the Christian soil of the late Middle Ages.15 He is “the demonic determined as the sensuous.”16 Kierkegaard now has to show that music is the appropriate medium for this “idea.” Language is “the one absolutely spiritually qualified medium,”17 but music is akin to language. It addresses itself to the ear,18 it has time as its element,19 and negates immediate sensuousness, reducing it to the level of instrumentality.20 But only language has an intrinsic reflection which excludes the immediate absolutely, so only language is absolutely spiritual. Music thus expresses an immediacy which is qualified by its relationship to Spirit (its kinship to language) but qualifies it in such a way that it is excluded from the spiritual (its distinctness from language). This is the same relationship of immediacy and Spirit which was exemplified in the figure of Don Juan, ergo music is the perfect medium for the artistic treatment of this figure. Don Giovanni is thus not only a great opera, but “there is a qualitative difference between it and all other operas, which certainly cannot be looked for in anything but the absolute relation between idea, form, subject matter, and medium.”21 The other “review” contained in the first part of Either/Or is of The First Love. Again Kierkegaard has chosen a work that he is happy to praise. But since this is a comedy its characteristic excellence will, in accordance with Heibergian principles, be of a different kind from that which he found in the opera. Following Heiberg’s categorization of comedy as involving the elevation of situation over character, Kierkegaard writes, “the personal 15 16 17 18 19 20 21

EO1, p. 89 / SKS 2, 94. EO1, p. 90 / SKS 2, 95. Translation modified. EO1, p. 67 / SKS 2, 73. Translation modified. EO1, p. 68 / SKS 2, 74. EO1, p. 68 / SKS 2, 75. EO1, p. 68 / SKS 2, 75. EO1, p. 72 / SKS 2, 78.


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substance of the poetic character is commensurate with the dialogue; the effusions of the monologue are made superfluous.”22 Although the speeches and dialogue are in themselves witty enough, they are comically intensified by their setting in the situations “so that the lines arise out of the situation and in turn illuminate it.”23 A comedy of this kind will appeal to the “contemplative nature” which has a taste for situation, and which relishes the mental re-enactment of the situation. There is more to stimulate such reflection in a comic than in a tragic work, for the contemplation of a tragic situation induces a quiescent state in the mind, but in the comic situation “reflection is moving within it; and the more it discovers, the more infinitely comic the situation becomes within itself and all the more dizzy one becomes, and yet one cannot refrain from gazing into it.”24 The appreciation of comedy is thus a highly intellectual activity. Kierkegaard likens it to the pleasure of the smoker who quietly contemplates the patterns of tobacco clouds. This casual reference to tobacco hints at his own taste for expensive cigars, a part of his “dandyism,” and it is tempting to associate the tone of his aesthetic formalism with the typical dandy pose of the refined connoisseur. In any case, just as the contemplation of tobacco clouds is essentially contentless, a contemplation of nothing except the mind’s own dreamy projections (and thus pure reflection), so comedy hinges on the revelation of the nothingness of the characters and their relationships. “In it there must not be a single character, not a single stage situation that could claim to survive the downfall that irony from the outset prepares for each and all in it.”25 The heroine, Emmeline, exemplifies this destiny. She is a young girl in love with a romantic dream, which she is unable to distinguish from a prosaic reality. “She has pathos, but since its content is nonsense, her pathos is essentially chatter; she has passion, but since its content is a phantom, her passion is essentially madness…she wants to sacrifice everything for her passion – that is, she wants to sacrifice everything for nothing.”26 Since she is such a self-contradictory person she cannot be presented “immediately.” The comic interest of the play subsists precisely 22 23 24 25 26

EO1, p. 247 / SKS 2, 240. EO1, p. 262 / SKS 2, 254. Translation modified. EO1, p. 263 / SKS 2, 256. Translation modified. EO1, p. 273 / SKS 2, 265. EO1, p. 253 / SKS 2, 246.

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in the destruction of the immediate. “The immediately actual situation is the unreal situation; behind it appears a new situation which is no less absurd, and so forth. In the situation we hear the dialogue: when it is most reasonable, it appears most crazy, and as the situation recedes, so the dialogue follows along, more and more meaningless in spite of its reasonableness.”27 It is perhaps significant that the two “reviews” contained in this volume relate to opposing poles of the aesthetic spectrum, Don Giovanni representing the immediate, or musical, with its emphasis on character (in Kierkegaard’s view the character of the Don is the content of the opera), and The First Love representing the annulment of immediacy – reflection – where all depends on situation and the ironic annihilation of character. By taking such contrasting pieces, Kierkegaard throws the basic criteria of aesthetic judgment into more vivid relief, namely the correspondence of idea and form. It is this which the two works have in common. In his novelistic book Repetition (1843) Kierkegaard has a small section on the presentation of farce at the Königstädter Theater in Berlin. In Heiberg’s scheme of things farce or burlesque represents the lowest level of comedy. It therefore manifests the characteristics of the immediate – spontaneity, singularity, contingency, etc. – and stands opposed to the ideal or the universal. Kierkegaard’s comments on farce presuppose the self-same conceptual framework. In farce, he says, the effect “depends largely on the self-activity and the viewer’s improvisation, the particular individuality comes to assert himself in a very individual way and in his enjoyment is emancipated from all aesthetic obligations to admire, to laugh, be moved, etc. in the traditional way.”28 This is because farce is too immediate to permit the intellectual appreciation appropriate to a “higher comedy” such as The First Love. The actors most suited to farce are “not so much reflective artists who have studied laughter as they are lyricists who themselves plunged into the abyss of laughter and now let its volcanic power hurl them out on the stage. Thus they have not deliberated very much on what they will do but leave everything to the moment and the natural power of laughter.”29

27 28 29

EO1, p. 277 / SKS 2, 268f. Translation modified. R, p. 159 / SKS 4, 34. R, p. 161 / SKS 4, 36. My italics.


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The way in which such a work is to be appreciated is related to the essential nature of the work itself. “Thus did I lie in my theater box, discarded like a swimmer’s clothing, stretched out by the stream of laughter and unrestraint and applause that ceaselessly foamed by me.”30 The burlesque theater is no place for coolly observing the patterns of tobacco smoke; its atmosphere is positively Dionysian. Perhaps for this reason this section on farce is not a formal review of an actual production, but rather attempts to conjure up the atmosphere of the theater itself describing the audience, and commenting on particular details from various productions. Two years after Either/Or Kierkegaard returned to Don Giovanni in a small critical article entitled “A Cursory Observation Concerning a Detail in Don Giovanni.”31 However, for a perfectionist such as Kierkegaard no detail is insignificant. If one detail is faulty this suggests that the idea of the work has not been correctly grasped. The detail in question here is the scene between Don Giovanni and the peasant girl, Zerlina. The article, in a not too indirect manner, implies a fundamental critique of the whole production. The character of Zerlina, according to Kierkegaard, is one of natural, unreflective simplicity. “If reflection is attributed to her…the whole opera is a failure.”32 He therefore criticizes the emphasis which the singer puts into the line “No, I will not,” in that it implies that Zerlina is struggling to come to a decision.33 Don Giovanni, as immediate sensuousness incarnate, is in his element with Zerlina; he commands her by the force of the power of nature which he embodies, and he addresses himself directly, commandingly to her. But Herr Hansen, the male lead, sings as if he were singing for her, as if he were a seducer involved with a more sophisticated girl, using his song indirectly as a part of a strategy of seduction. In terms of thoughtful and feeling delivery Herr Hansen is excellent “but when we have to do with an opera and that is our concern here, then this excellent delivery is quite out of place.”34 In Kierkegaard’s terms the opera has been conceived too reflectively – and therefore misconceived. It does not express the immedi30 31 32 33 34

R, p. 166 / SKS 4, 40. COR, pp. 28-37 / SV1 XIII, 447-456. COR, p. 30 / SV1 XIII, 449. COR, p. 30 / SV1 XIII, 449. COR, p. 34 / SV1 XIII, 454. Translation modified.

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ate passionate force which for Kierkegaard is Don Giovanni the man, the idea, the opera. The production has committed the cardinal sin of ignoring the proper boundaries of idea and form. In the two remaining reviews Kierkegaard returns to his favorite mood of unstinted praise. The first, entitled “The Crisis and a Crisis in the Life of an Actress” is a tribute to Heiberg’s wife, Johanne Luise Heiberg, one of Denmark’s leading actresses. At the age of 35 she returned to the role of Juliet, and Kierkegaard contrasts the excellence of her interpretation of the part with what one might expect from a teenage actress making her debut. What the public wants is an “idol,” or as we would say “a star.” It wants “a damned pretty and devilishly pert wench of eighteen years. These eighteen years, this damned prettiness and this devilish pertness – this is the art criticism – and also its bestiality.”35 For the genuine aesthetician things are different. Such a youthful star – however “talented,” however intuitively “right” her acting might be – more likely than not “has never essentially been an actress but has created a sensation on stage in quite the same way that a young girl creates a sensation in social circles for one or two winters.”36 If she has the makings of an actress, if “in the mood of immediate passion she is attuned to idea and thought,”37 a genuine aesthetician will nonetheless perceive that her time has not yet come. It comes with what Kierkegaard calls “the metamorphosis.” If she has feminine youthfulness merely “in the ordinary sense she will not be able to receive the metamorphosis. This will only occur if her genius corresponds to the idea of feminine youthfulness. If this is so then time, by stripping away the purely external bloom of youth, will in fact serve to make the idea more manifest. An actress who returns to the role of Juliet with the gain of maturity will play the part ideally. “[N]ow, in full and conscious, in acquired and dedicated command of her essential power, she is truly able to be a servant of her idea, which is the essential aesthetic relation.”38 Although this review restricts itself to one single role, it accords with Heiberg’s emphasis on the importance of ideality, of form in higher dramatic art, and his analysis of the “ironic” element in artistic ability. 35 36 37 38

C, p. 305 / SV1 X, 325. C, p. 306 / SV1 X, 326. Translation modified. C, p. 311 / SV1 X, 331. C, p. 322 / SV1 X, 341.


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The last review to be examined, completed but not published by Kierkegaard, also focuses on a particular actor in a particular role, namely Herr Phister in the comic role of Captain Scipio. Here the point is made straightforwardly: “Herr Phister’s forte is: reflection.”39 Phister’s virtuosity makes great demands on the critic, who has to understand and be able to re-enact in his own consciousness the reflection which Phister puts into every detail of his performance: “Admiration in relation to reflection must be expressed in the language of reflection and not in the language of immediacy. Reflection is this: ‘why? – because’ why is the whole thing structured in this way? – because; why is this little line here? – it is because, etc. Everything is consciousness. Admiration is then able to discover and to understand the whole thing: why? – because. In the relation between reflection and reflection (and only like understands like), true admiration is therefore the perfect understanding, neither more nor less.”40 Kierkegaard once more contrasts the relationship between artistic and critical reflection with the popular response to art. The latter is crudely immediate, articulate only in interjections – Bravo, Bravissimo, etc. No more than Heiberg would Kierkegaard accept “immediate grief and laughter”41 as the standard of aesthetic criticism. It is significant in the light of the Heibergian categorization of the genres of dramatic art that Phister, the reflective artist, is a comic actor. As we have seen, comedy involves the negation of the immediacy of character. Comic character is character involved in self-contradiction. So Captain Scipio, the character in question, is a captain in the Papal Police. As such he already contains a contradiction. He is a soldier, he wears a military uniform and so lays claim to the grandeur and authority of the military – but he is also a policeman, a civilian, a civil servant, someone who is perhaps in charge of keeping the gutters and sewers unclogged.42 In Phister’s performance “at every moment the accidental characteristics of the civilian make the uniform of the military man look ridiculous, or the civilian makes the military man look ridiculous.”43 There is a further contradiction. “Scipio is a man who is not drunk, far from it, but nevertheless goes around in a continual state of foggi39 40 41 42 43

C, p. 330 / Pap. IX B 68, p. 384. Translation modified. C, p. 331f. / Pap. IX B 68, p. 386. OV, p. 131. C, p. 335 / Pap. IX B 68, p. 390. C, p. 335 / Pap. IX B 68, p. 390.

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ness.”44 “In a certain sense it is the easiest thing of all…to portray a man who is drunk,”45 but Captain Scipio is not a burlesque drunk, he “has approached the maximum at which he cannot get drunk.”46 “The problem of conveying…this is altogether more difficult than playing a drunk…it must never be directly seen that he is drunk, for he is not drunk in that way. The task therefore contains a contradiction: to present…a man who is drunk and yet is not drunk.”47 In the portrayal of this contradiction Phister’s reflective genius is fully revealed. The review is now moving in a completely reflective dimension. The role itself is reflective in its self-contradiction; the actor brings to the role his own reflective genius; the critic applies to the portrayal his appreciative reflection. But Kierkegaard goes one step further. The review has not been inspired by a current production of the play (Ludovic). “This brief article is a recollection. It has been many years since its author saw Ludovic….The usual theater critics attend on the first evening that a new play is presented; and merely seeing it that one time is all they need in order to pass judgment” on an actor who has “brought many months and all his genius, his thoughtfulness, his diligence to the interpretation of his role.”48 The review is thus an extremely sophisticated exemplification of the philosophy of the dandy observing the patterns of his cigar smoke. It is cool, reflective, detached, and yet appreciative. This is the essence of Kierkegaard’s – and Heiberg’s – “taste.” And yet Kierkegaard’s philosophy is generally seen as a protest against just such a detached attitude, and he polemicizes continually against Hegelianism in general and Heiberg in particular. How is this to be explained? How do these theatrical reviews relate to the rest of his authorship? Kierkegaard distinguished three fundamental modes in which people exist, which he called the aesthetic, the ethical and the religious. Sometimes he referred to these as different “life-views,” sometimes as “stages” of human existence. We need not, however, force the whole of his authorship into this threefold schema in order to arrive at the point I wish to make: that, for Kierkegaard, the autonomy of the aesthetic is always circumscribed by other dimensions of or approaches to exist44 45 46 47 48

C, p. 333 / Pap. IX B 68, p. 388. C, p. 339 / Pap. IX B 68, p. 394. Translation modified. C, p. 339 / Pap. IX B 68, p. 395. Translation modified. C, p. 340 / Pap. IX B 68, p. 395. Tranlsation modified. C, p. 343f. / Pap. IX B 68, p. 399f. Translation modified.


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ence that render the aesthetic questionable. Kierkegaard’s practice as a literary critic indicates what was for him the essence of the aesthetic stage: it is the life-view of the reflecteur who deliberately maintains a critical distance from the immediate object of consciousness in order to judge this object in the light of its relationship to ideality. Within the sphere of aesthetics in the narrow sense Kierkegaard accepts the validity of this attitude. What he does not accept is its application to the personal life, when it leads to human beings treating their emotional and personal existence like a work of art. By emphasizing form and ideality as the key categories of aesthetics, Kierkegaard places limitations on the power of art to give a total interpretation of human existence, which, as he sees it, is characterized by anxiety, despair, guilt and sin, and which demands commitment, concern, and faith on the part of those who seek to exist authentically. Kierkegaard therefore rejects Heiberg’s extension of the scope of art to the “speculative” level, where it is endowed with the task of resolving the ultimate questions of religion and philosophy.49 To attempt this is, perhaps, the worst of all errors of taste, since it is to attempt to articulate the most important “content” of all by means of an entirely inappropriate form.

49

Kierkegaard is particularly scathing about Heiberg’s play A Soul After Death from the collection Nye Digte (Copenhagen 1841). A general indication of his understanding of the relationship between religion and poetry is given in Frater Taciturnus’ “Letter to the Reader” in the conclusion of Stages on Life’s Way.

Towards Transparency: Søren Kierkegaard on Danish Actresses By Janne Risum Translated by Annette Mester

From the time of his earliest writings, the Danish existential philosopher Søren Kierkegaard was writing dramatic drafts and theater commentary interwoven with his unsparingly honest, Christian contemplations of his time and himself. It is no mere chance that he wrote under a system of pseudonyms, each one commenting on the aesthetic, ethical or religious contributions of the others and in direct contrast to the Christian sermons published in his own name. All of this puppet theater, as it has been called, corresponded to the way he planned his personal life. The movement was, as he says, “away from ‘the poet’…to becoming a Christian,”1 and, through the indirect mode of communication made possible by the pseudonyms, to provoke his individual reader into taking an existential stand. Of course he overestimated the effect of this staging of the self, but Copenhagen at that time was so uneventful a capital, easily taken in at one glance, that the publicity he attained in this way was considerable. Most people walked when they had business in the city, which was characterized by thrift in this period following the Napoleonic Wars. On Sundays he went to church, and he often went to the Royal Theater, which, until the end of absolute monarchy in 1848, had a theater monopoly. He particularly enjoyed the numerous performances of Mozart’s Don Giovanni there. The young aesthete of Either/ Or from 1843 describes how he closes his eyes in order to hear better: I have sat close to the front; I have moved back more and more; I have sought a remote corner in the theater in order to be able to hide myself completely in the music. The bet1

PV, p. 78 / SV1 XIII, 563.

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ter I understood it or thought I understood it, the further I moved away from it – not out of coldness but of out love, for it wants to be understood at a distance. There has been something strangely enigmatic about this in my life. There have been times when I would have given everything for a ticket; now I do not even need to pay one rix-dollar for a ticket. I stand outside in the corridor; I lean up against the partition that shuts me off from the spectators’ seats. Then it affects me most powerfully; it is a world by itself, separated from me; I can see nothing but am close enough to hear and yet so infinitely far away.2

Wearing the costume of the idler as a disguise, Kierkegaard was secretly writing Either/Or, in which the life of the aesthete is contrasted with Judge William’s matrimonial ethics. Either he let himself he seen at the theater, or he stayed at home, hiding behind his desk. When I was reading the proof pages of Either/Or, I was so busy that it was impossible for me to spend the usual time strolling up and down the street. I did not finish until late in the evening – and then in the evening I hurried to the theater, where I literally was present only five to ten minutes…to be seen every night for five minutes by several hundred people was enough to sustain the opinion: So he doesn’t do a single thing.3

His interest in the theater was genuine, and it is apparent from his works and journals that his knowledge of dramatic art was extensive. Kierkegaard’s bills from the bookseller from the late 1840’s make it possible to follow his purchases of the small, newly published booklets in the repertoire series put out by the Royal Theater. They presented the texts of the novelties of the season, relatively close to the opening night. He upheld the tradition of reading the text before going to the theater, even when the play was one of Scribe’s insignificant dramas or vaudevilles. He paid particular attention to some of the better contemporary actors. He wrote detailed studies of roles played by the male comedians Phister and Rosenkilde. The former was his neighbor for a while; the latter was his friend. An analysis of the actors playing in farces performed at the Königstädter Theater in Berlin (the only capital other than Copenhagen known to him) is included in Repetition (1843). The actresses he studied are all Danish and will be mentioned in the following. Having no special interest in the overall stage effect, Kierkegaard’s method is to call attention to a specific individual achievement or a detail in the performance and make that the object of close scrutiny. This method appears to have been deliberately chosen, when one considers

2 3

EO1, p. 120 / SKS 2, 122. PV, p. 61 / SV1 XIII, 547.

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his recurring emphasis on the existential task of “the single individual”; it is also evidenced by this isolated note in his journals from 1845: It is more difficult to describe a particular actor than it is to write a whole esthetic, more difficult to describe one single performance of his than to describe the particular actor. The more limited the subject matter is (all this about Chinese drama and the Middle Ages and Ancient Scandinavia, Spain etc. etc.), the more difficult the task, because the task directly tests the descriptive powers. The more one dares use the method of general survey, the easier it is, for when the volume of material is so great, one still seems to be saying something with these completely abstract observations which everyone knows by rote. The more concrete the task is, the more difficult. God knows how long philosophers will continue to grow fat on the illusion they have gotten themselves and others to believe – namely, that surveys are the most difficult.4

Kierkegaard applies this same art of observing specifics to the characters in his works, and he often makes use of an actor or the dancer to illustrate it. In Works of Love from 1847 he describes the “double accounting” of observation thus: If one wishes to observe a person, it is very important for the sake of the observation that one, in seeing him in a relationship, look at him alone. When one actual person relates himself to another actual person, the result is two, the relationship is constituted, and the observation of the one person alone is made difficult….If you could manage to see someone shadowboxing in dead earnest, or if you could prevail upon a dancer to dance solo the dance he customarily dances with another, you would be able to observe his motions best, better than if he were boxing with another actual person or if he were dancing with another actual person.5

That is why, says Kierkegaard, “the work of love, to remember someone who has died” most especially becomes “the occasion that continually discloses what resides in the one living.”6 It is a little like Mozart’s music which “wants to be understood at a distance.”7 To remember someone who has died and to play a role is still the same thing in some cultures. Kierkegaard, the Christian, was obviously aware of the psychological similarities. Speaking in his own name in Works of Love, Kierkegaard uses the aesthetic comparison in a different manner from the way it is used in the works ascribed to the aesthetic and ethical pseudonyms. The only accessible path in Kierkegaardian research is to follow Kierkegaard’s own system of pseudonyms and to let each pseudonym speak for himself in concert with the rest, and such will be the approach here. Only 4 5 6 7

JP 3, 3305 / SKS 18, 274-275, JJ:404. WL, p. 347 / SV1 IX, 329. WL, p. 347 / SV1 IX, 329. EO1, p. 120 / SKS 2, 122.


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through the indirect mode of communication do the very few treatments of stage representations by women really assume an outline and avoid degenerating into mere biographical anecdote. “I am infatuated, like a young girl, with Mozart,”8 exclaims the young aesthete A. in the great Don Giovanni analysis in Either/Or which sets up a range of psychological developments in a tripartite division of immediate erotic or musical erotic stages. These subconscious stages or “metamorphoses” are the awakening of male sensuality, which A. finds expressed musically in Cherubino the page in Figaro, in Papageno in The Magic Flute, and in Don Giovanni himself. All three operas were performed regularly and in Danish, but they were performed without recitatives, and the dialogue was spoken as in a light opera. As the immediate precedes ethical awareness, it is A.’s opinion that it must be due to the stupidity of the librettist that these characters are “given speech” once in a while. They represent pure ideas expressed through situation. Thus, Cherubino is not an individual but a figure of myth. “As yet desire is not yet awake; it is intimated in the melancholy. That which is desired is continually present in the desire; it arises from it and appears in a bewildering dawning.”9 In this connection it is interesting that Cherubino is written for a soprano. Kierkegaard does not mention the singer, but from 1833 the part was sung by one of the best contemporary sopranos, Ida Fonseca, who had studied with the Italian singer Guiseppe Siboni. Her contemporaries criticized her in any event for assuming an Italian accent in the recited speech, in several parts to such a degree that it became mannered and incomprehensible.10 Kierkegaard’s aesthete, then, had more than one reason for not granting speech to his mythical page. However, he finds confirmation of his theory in the female voice: In accord with the description of the first stage given here, it very significant that the music for the role of the Page is arranged for a woman’s voice. The inconsistency in this stage seems to be suggested by this contradiction; the desire is so vague, the object so little separated from it, that what is desired rests androgynously in the desire, just as in plant life the male and female are in one blossom. The desire and the desired are joined in this unity, that they both are neutrius generis.11 8 9 10

11

EO1, p. 48 / SKS 2, 56. EO1, p. 75 / SKS 2, 81. Among others Heiberg in his theater review “Tancredo. Fruentimmerhævn” in Kjøbenhavns flyvende Post no. 102, 1827. (Reprinted in Heiberg’s Prosaiske Skrifter vols. 1-11. Copenhagen: C. A. Reitzel 1861-62; vol. 7, pp. 131-133.) EO1, p. 77 / SKS 2, 83.

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The unconscious feminine sensuality also emerges from this paradise in the shape of the peasant girl Zerlina in Don Giovanni. Zerlina is an ordinary girl, as the aesthete points out: “Zerlina is young and beautiful, and she is a woman; this is the extraordinary that she shares with hundreds of others,”12 and this is why Don Juan desires her. Elvira, however, is dangerous to him, not because she is less ordinary, but “because she has been seduced.”13 She has acquired an individual ethical consciousness which Don Juan lacks, and therefore, unlike him, she can rightly “have lines to speak.”14 The all-important seduction scene depends, then, to Kierkegaard’s aesthete on the interpretation of Zerlina as naive immediacy. In 1829-39 the part of Zerlina was sung by Boline Abrahamsen, who in 1833 became Madame Kragh. When the beautiful and admired Boline Kragh died in childbed in 1839, someone else took over the part until 1840. The opera was not performed again until the opening with a new cast, on February 23, 1845, with Ulriche Augusta Stage as Zerlina. Whereas Boline Kragh had sung Zerlina with the Italian Giovanni Battista Cetti, Augusta Stage sang the part with the Danish singer Christian Hansen, who had studied with Siboni. Both women also performed the parts of gay and naive ingenues in light operas and took turns singing the part of Susanna in The Marriage of Figaro. When Don Juan was performed with a new cast, the aesthete A. was again brought out of the desk drawer. He published “A Cursory Observation Concerning a Detail in Don Giovanni” in the paper The Fatherland on May 19-20, 1845, signed A.15 (The new cast performed 5 times during the spring: February 23 and 25, March 1, April 7, and May 5.) “The theater criticism in the newspapers always constrains me to extreme modesty and ascetic abstinence from any conclusion”16 he tartly remarks, but does mention that the reinstatement of Mozart’s own recitatives is “an absolute triumph.”17 The only detail he wishes to dwell on is the duet with Zerlina in the first act. (I, 9). Mozart certainly knows what he is doing, and a Zerlina is deemed not to have the qualifications of individuality that define a different conception….Zerlina’s seduction is a quiet wedding, that goes off without any fuss. The situation is essentially this: she did not know how it happened, but it did, and so she was seduced; and the result of Zelina’s 12 13 14 15 16 17

EO1, p. 97 / SKS 2, 101. EO1, p. 98 / SKS 2, 102. EO1, p. 97 / SKS 2, 101. COR, pp. 28-37 / SV1 XIII, 447-456. COR, p. 28 / SV1 XIII, 447. COR, p. 28 / SV1 XIII, 448. Translation changed from “the absolute prize.”


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most strenuous mental exercise is this: It cannot be explained. This is very important for an understanding of Zerlina. Therefore, it was a mistake for an otherwise fine actress, Madame Kragh, to sing the line, “No, I will not,” with force, as if it were a resolve fermenting in Zerlina. Far from it. She is confused, dazed, and perplexed from the start. If reflection is attributed to her at this point, the whole opera is a failure.18

In pointing to the detail, then, A. points to what is essential to the interpretation of the opera. Taking his point of departure in the idea that Don Juan and Zerlina are in an immediate musical relation to each other as a force of nature is to its natural purpose, he goes on to give advice to the new singer of the part. The continuation: “Masetto’s soul will bleed” (Mi fa pieta Masetto) must “not be sung otherwise than is appropriate for its being au niveau with spontaneous gestures, for example, clutching her apron or repulsing Don Giovanni’s embrace.”19 Also it is “completely wrong” to hear the aria Batti, batti, o bel Masetto (I, 13) as an “act of reconciliation”20 with Masetto, and whereas Elvira has tragic pathos, at the same time partaking of the comic because of her passionate mission, Zerlina must be unable to understand the least bit of what Elvira tells her. Therefore, an actress who portrays Zerlina must not – as was done when the opera was given in the past – be shocked, gripped by anxiety, because of Elvira’s speech – that is much too much. She should be astonished at this new surprise, and so astonished that a good spectator almost smiles at the situation while at the same time he grasps the tragic in Elvira.21

The passing comment, then, resembles stage directions. We do not know if Madame Stage, a great actress, took the advice, but contemporary society agreed that Zerlina remained one of her best interpretations. The next day’s continued comment concentrates on Christian Hansen, who was also admired by his contemporaries. A. sees him as a less reflective singer, not capable of a great range of mood or character, but one who can sing with imagination. And that is precisely the problem. Hansen sings seductively for the girl not to the girl. “Calm, yet insinuating in tone, dreamy and full of longing, yet distinct in phrasing, with every letter so articulated that nothing is lost or wasted, he achieves a rare effect.”22 “He, of course, does not look at her, not one glance, not one desiring look.”23 But Don Juan is “no mawkish 18 19 20 21 22 23

COR, p. 29f. / SV1 XIII, 449. COR, p. 30f. / SV1 XIII, 450. COR, p. 31 / SV1 XIII, 450. COR, p. 33 / SV1 XIII, 452. COR, p. 34 / SV1 XIII, 454. COR, p. 33 / SV1 XIII, 453.

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zither-player”24 and the seduction duet must be sung unreflected, but with “decorum and grace.”25 “The dreamy generality”26 of the accompaniment must be clearly audible when Don Juan as the personification of a natural power addresses Zerlina, and when Mozart’s accompaniment to the first “Be mine” (Vieni, mio bel diletto!) is not “ingratiating, but energetic and decisive,”27 then the singer should be so too, if Zerlina is to be seduced. Mr. Hansen might also “squander a little time practicing how to walk and how to stand.”28 In short, Kierkegaard’s aesthete has greater hopes for Madame Stage’s Zerlina than for the all too narcissistic male singer. In December 1846 Kierkegaard amused himself by writing a nonsense satire in his journal on stereotypical theater reviews. The occasion was the revival of Sheridan’s School for Scandal on December 14, with the best actors and actresses of The Royal Theater in the main parts. It was one of those comfortable theater evenings when everybody apparently knows what to think. Last evening Shakespeare’s glorious masterpiece, The School for Scandal was performed for the first time….Herr Dir. Nielsen’s performance as Sir Oliver Surface was masterful….Madame Nielsen’s performance was also very good and Herr Phister as Snake was likewise excellent. But Fru Heiberg’s mastery surpassed them all and every description. We would have to describe all that she did with the role if we were to give the reader a sense of the way in which she delivered her lines or of the lines she spoke.29

Sheridan is not Shakespeare, and Nielsen was not Surface but Sir Peter, but otherwise it is all true. The clichés of the jest are frames for the commonly accepted view of the two actresses who interested Kierkegaard most: Anna Nielsen (1803-56) and the main star of the theater, Johanne Luise Heiberg (1812-90), a character actress of international standing, married to the leading Danish dramatist and critic of the time, Johan Ludvig Heiberg. Kierkegaard knew them all personally, but took a strong yet ambivalent polemic stand against Heiberg’s taste for Hegelianism, not to mention his vaudevilles and his love of Scribe. Fru Heiberg, on the other hand, he greatly admired, and there are many similarities between the way Kierkegaard saw himself as the author writing under pseudonyms and his perception of a successful actor’s difficulties

24 25 26 27 28 29

COR, p. 34 / SV1 XIII, 454. COR, p. 35 / SV1 XIII, 454. COR, p. 35 / SV1 XIII, 455. COR, p. 36 / SV1 XIII, 455. COR, p. 36f. / SV1 XIII, 456. WS, pp. 78-79 / Pap. VII 2 B 274.6.


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on stage. In the Concluding Unscientific Postscript (1846), for instance, he lets Johannes Climacus compare the masquerade of the pseudonyms with the costumes of the celebrated actress: …the difference in costumes occupies the gallery, which therefore very likely also assumes that the greatest actress is the one who can play not only in various fantastic female costumes, but even in trousers and jacket with collar attached, since the range of the artistic performance is determined by the range of costumes, and therefore the actress playing chiefly the parts in which she acts in her own clothes is considered to be the poorest actress.30

From his place in the parterre, however, Kierkegaard was himself part of the problem. Inspired by Fru Heiberg’s performance as the novelconsuming ingenue Emmeline in Scribe’s play The First Love, the young aesthete of Either/Or from his standing place in the parterre had written thus: Look at Madame Heiberg; lower your eyes, for perhaps Emmeline’s charm might become dangerous to you; hear the girl’s sentimental languishing voice, the childish and capricious insinuations, and even if you were dry and stiff like a bookkeeper, you still must smile. Open your eyes – how is it possible? Repeat these movements so quickly that they become almost simultaneous in the moment, and you will have a conception of what is being performed. Without irony, an artist can never sketch; a stage artist can produce it only by contradiction, for the essence of a sketch is superficiality. Where character portrayal is not required, the art is to transform oneself into a surface, which is a paradox for the stage performance, and it is given to only a few to solve it….Emmeline’s whole nature is a contradiction and therefore cannot be represented spontaneously. She must be charming, for otherwise the total effect of the whole play is lost in another sense.31

The upright Judge William displayed great ethical indignation concerning A.’s debauched theater experiences, and imagined – not based on fact, unfortunately – how the effeminate and probably perfumed fellow found consolation in the theater “intoxicated with aesthetic pleasure,” but nevertheless readily admitted that “I do not care very much for the theater.”32 Still, there was one actress whom William liked and must have paid attention to: Anna Nielsen. He uses her as an example of his thesis that feminine beauty grows with age, a thesis which answers the frivolous symposium in Stages on Life’s Way (1845). Anna Nielsen was tall, blond and gentle with big, blue eyes, a beautiful voice and brilliant diction. Her calm emotive acting made her the 30 31 32

CUP1, p. 289f. / SKS 7, 264. EO1, p. 278f. / SKS 2, 269f. EO2, p. 122 / SKS 3, 122.

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incarnation of the romantic ideal of the Nordic woman: virgin, wife, and mother. She was divorced after a first unhappy marriage – a brave act considering the norms at the time. She never attracted a large audience but came to represent the ideals of both the older and the younger generations: the height of romanticism as well as early realism on stage – a reaction against the artificial vaudeville atmosphere of the Heiberg period. The epic-ethical William grows almost lyrical in his description of her: The character she presents, but not immediately, the voice which she uses so skillfully in the play, the inwardness that animates the interaction, the introverted absorption that makes the spectator feel so secure, the calmness with which she grips us, the authentic soulfulness that disdains all sham mannerisms, the even, full sonority of mood that does not drift into wild ranting, does not pretentiously procrastinate, does not violently erupt, does not pant for the inexpressible, but is true to herself, is responsible to herself, always promptly at every moment and continually reliable – in short, her whole performance brings to a focus what could be called the essentially feminine….But just as her range is essential, so also is her triumph not the transitory triumph of a moment but the triumph that time has no power over her. In every period of her life she will have new tasks and will express the essential as she did at the beginning of her beautiful career. And if she attains her sixtieth year, she will continue to be perfect.33

Anna Nielsen, then, performed “in her own clothes,” in a continuous feminine giving of self that came naturally to her, the ethical value of which she, along with her educated contemporaries, viewed as a consummation that did not entail any sacrifice. Magistrate William speaks on behalf of many when he praises Anna Nielsen for everything that she is not, and celebrates the expressive calm she radiates in such abstracted tones that he does not mention even one of the parts she played, but sums up his impressions of her in the idea of femininity itself. The magistrate, then pays homage to Anna Nielsen as an ethical actress, and strikes a religious note when he likens her acting as a young woman to “the dedication, which is the pact of pure femininity itself with the imperishable.”34 Kierkegaard’s original draft continues: “I otherwise hate the snobbery of calling artists priests, but Md. N. one could rightly call a priestess.”35 At a time when the role of the ingenue in the comedies of intrigue was worshipped almost as a cult, Kierkegaard maintained an ethical understanding of the actress’ sense of worth and her maturing as an art33 34 35

SL, pp. 131-132fn. / SKS 6, 124fn. SL, p. 132fn. / SKS 6, 125fn. Pap. VI B 2.


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ist beyond the limits set by age and youthful looks. In the momentary description of the leading ingenue of the time, Fru Heiberg, in The First Love, he let his aesthete express fascination with this dark-eyed actress’ erotic aura and the masterly ease of her performance. In the aesthete’s advice to Madame Stage as Zerlina, he showed how the immediate erotic belonging to this part could be integrated into a weighty, artistic interpretation of the whole. The portrait of Anna Nielsen goes one step further in demonstrating how the personal growth of an actress may be expressed through roles that change with her age but continue to represent ethical values of primary importance in the performance of the plays. He elaborates this view in his last – and longest – contribution on the subject of Danish actresses, “The Crisis and a Crisis in the Life of an Actress,” written in 1847 and signed Inter et Inter (Between and Between). It was not published until July 24-27, 1848, in four issues of The Fatherland.36 The occasion was the revival of the performance of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet on January 23, 1847, starring the 34year-old Johanne Luise Heiberg as Juliet. When she was fifteen years old, she had played the role in the first staging of the play in Denmark, which ran six times in 1828-30. Not until the second staging, she writes in her memoirs, did she master Juliet’s entire development from innocence to feminine pathos.37 Kierkegaard now compares the immediate but arbitrary “good fortune”38 of young actresses in “the light forms of fleeting fairy tale creatures,”39 the indefinable ability to be “in proper rapport with the on-stage tension,”40 to the superior reflective achievement as Juliet the second time around. Kierkegaard, who was a year younger than Mrs. Heiberg and from a strict and pious home, cannot have seen the first production, but in 1845 Emma Meier, the sixteen-year-old pupil of Mrs. Heiberg had her debut as Juliet and played the part seven times during 1845-46. The audience described her as “a perfect replica of Mrs. Heiberg,”41 and so 36

37

38 39

40 41

Søren Kierkegaard “Krisen og en Krise i en Skuespillerindes Liv, af Inter et Inter. En Artikel i Anledning af ‘Romeo og Julies’ Gjenoptagelse paa Repertoiret ved Nytaarstid 1847” in Fædrelandet vol. 9, nos. 188-191, July 24-27, 1848. Johanne Luise Heiberg Et liv genoplevet i erindringen, vols. 1-4, 5th revised edition, Copenhagen: Gyldendal 1973; vol. 2, pp. 163ff. C, p. 308 / SV1 X, 328. C, p. 322 / SV1 X, 241. Translation changed from “the light characters of the fleeting sea nymphs.” C, p. 312 / SV1 X, 331. Gunnar Sandfeld Komedianter og skuespillere: Dansk teaterliv uden for hovedstaden o. 1790-o. 1870, Copenhagen: Nyt Nordisk Forlag, Arnold Busck 1971, p. 219.

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she was to some extent in looks. Still, she was found to be not quite beautiful enough for Juliet. Later on she became a respected touring actress, but it may have been the somewhat sad replica in the shape of this actress making her debut which caused Inter et Inter categorically to dismiss Juliet as a role for a young actress: …the gallery wants to see Miss Juliet, a devilishly lovely and damnably pert wench of eighteen years who plays Juliet or passes herself off as Juliet, while the gallery is entertained by the thought that it is really Miss Jane Doe. Therefore the gallery can, of course, never get it into its head that in order to represent Juliet an actress must essentially have a distance in age from Juliet.42

Inter et Inter stresses the artistic importance of Anna Nielsen and Johanne Luise Heiberg as two qualitatively different types of serious actresses. Time holds no power over either of them: “Both phenomena are essential rarities, and both have this in common, that they become more rare with each year. Just because they are dialectically compounded, their existence year after year will also remain dialectical. Each year will make the attempt to demonstrate its thesis about the power of the years,” but their ability to transform themselves will in their different ways “triumphantly refute the thesis of the years.”43 Inter et Inter would like to show just “how safeguarded, despite the years, the future of the essential actress is,” for he knows all too well that “there is enough misunderstanding of the proper conception of an actress’ future, while the same misunderstanding that mistakenly and unaesthetically overrates the beginning mistakenly and unaesthetically takes a wrong view of what comes later or, more correctly, of the highest.”44 What then is the highest of all? The highest of all is related to the capacity for metamorphosis, for creating an artistic time which transcends the biological measure of time. Anna Nielsen’s metamorphosis is one of continuity, which in turn, more closely defined, is a process, a succession, a steady transformation over the years, so that the actress as she grows older, gradually changes her sphere, takes older roles, again with the same perfection with which she at a younger age filled younger roles. This metamorphosis could be called straightforward perfectibility. It has especially ethical interest.45

She plays an older part, but she herself does not become an old actress.

42 43 44 45

C, p. 321 / SV1 X, 340. C, p. 324 / SV1 X, 343. C, p. 325 / SV1 X, 344. C, p. 323 / SV1 X, 342.


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Conversely, Johanne Luise Heiberg’s metamorphosis has sprung from the biological ties of the role of the ingenue, out of the immediacy and the appreciation in “gallery categories” so that she gains “yet another life” from the “distance” of recollection: “the best power is the consciousness and transparency that know how to make use of the essential powers, but note well, in the service of an idea.”46 This metamorphosis is one of “potentiation, or it is a more and more intensive return to the beginning.”47 It “will completely engage an aesthetician, because the dialectic of potentiation is the aesthetic-metaphysical dialectic.”48 The capacity for transformation in potentiation resides in reverting always to the same thing, through the years cultivating the same aesthetic conception of “the idea of femininity”: the young woman. Even if the actress from the standpoint of temporality becomes older, on stage she becomes younger. The two ways of acting stand in complementary relation to each other. Whereas “continuity” forever repeats the same thing, namely, femininity, at still new age levels, “potentiation” repeats or recaptures the young femininity in spite of growing age. The naturalism that contemporary society valued in Anna Nielsen’s acting was partly due to the fact that she made use of her own age as a realistic effect in her portrayals. She has then a “naturalistic” intention, as far as that could be had in her profession during the time between Diderot and Stanislavskij. Johanne Luise Heiberg’s “potentiation” was, on the contrary, that of the traditional actress, and as regards method she belongs with the actresses of commedia dell’arte, her contemporary Mlle. Mars, and the great portrayers of women in the traditional theater of the East, such as Mei Lanfang. The difference between the two actresses is the difference between identification and distance. In her memoirs Mrs. Heiberg describes three fields for the art of acting within which actresses also operate:49 (1) the emotive actresses, into which category she puts Anna Nielsen: “The emotive actress lets every part enter into herself, in order to let it radiate forth to the audience through the individual emotion”;50 (2) the comic actresses; and (3) the character actresses, into which category she puts herself. They take their point of

46 47 48 49 50

C, p. 321 / SV1 X, 340. C, p. 324 / SV1 X, 343. C, p. 324 / SV1 X, 343. Johanne Luise Heiberg Et liv genoplevet i erindringen, op. cit., vol. 3, pp. 218ff. Ibid., p. 219.

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departure in what pertains to character in their conception, and they must be able to bring into their acting the capacities of the first as well as the second category, both the tears and the laughter without completely giving themselves over to either the soft, longing accents of emotion or the burlesque life of laughter….This type of talent more quickly dries away the tears and more quickly tames the laughter in order to see more clearly, more sharply, more distinctly….They do not seek to make the image bend to their individual being, but bend their individuality to the poet’s image in order to seize its nature and being.51

Inter et Inter gives each type its fair share, but there is no doubt where the focal point is. The whole article is a tribute to the character actress. The essential aesthetic relation is that of consciousness and transparency: It is this serving relation to the idea that is actually the culmination; precisely this conscious self-submission under the idea is the expression of the eminent elevation of the performance….Time has asserted its rights; there is something that has become a thing of the past. But then in turn an ideality of recollection will vividly illuminate the whole performance…she will not childishly or plaintively long for the blazing of what has vanished, because in the metamorphosis itself she has become too warm and too rich for that. This pure, calmed, and rejuvenating recollecting, like an idealizing light, will transilluminate the whole performance, which in this illumination will be completely transparent.52

This existential transparency created by the reflective attentive presence on stage is as close as the theater can come, in Kierkegaard’s opinion, to the existential task, for the simple reason that the theater is not real. “Poetry is and will always be lovable,” says Frater Taciturnus in Stages on Life’s Way. “It is not wrong of the spectator to want to lose himself in poetry, that is a joy that has its reward, but the spectator must not confuse the theater and actuality, or himself with a spectator who is nothing more than a spectator at a comedy.”53 If the light Kierkegaard throws on specific actresses turns out to cover the entire range of development and modes of expression – from immediacy to the reflective and transilluminated presentation – it is due to the fact that he never confuses the actress with the part or the woman with the profession.

51 52 53

Ibid., p. 222. C, pp. 322-323 / SV1 X, 341-342. SL, p. 461 / SKS 6, 426.

Johan Ludvig Heiberg and his Audience in Nineteenth-Century Denmark By Peter Vinten-Johansen Johan Ludvig Heiberg – son of the exiled republican critic and dramatist, Peter Andreas Heiberg, and the author, Thomasine (Heiberg) Gyllembourg; husband of the actress, Johanne Luise Heiberg; and in his own right a journalist, educator, playwright, and Director of the Royal Theater in Copenhagen – was a dominant force in the intellectual and cultural life of the Danish capital from the mid-1820’s until his death in 1860. Heiberg’s authority stemmed from the popular acclaim accorded his vaudevilles and the coherent critique he launched against many fellow writers during an extended period of popularizing activity from 1825 to 1840. These fifteen years during a half-century in Danish literary history known as the Golden Age was the time of Adam Oehlenschläger, N.F.S. Grundtvig, Søren Kierkegaard, Hans Christian Andersen, B.S. Ingemann, Steen Steensen Blicher, and Frederik Paludan-Müller, among others. But it was J.L. Heiberg’s era. The purpose of this essay is to assess the size and range of Heiberg’s ideal public during this period as he sought to venture beyond the intelligentsia (who constituted a significant element of his purchasing public) to include other Danes whom he hoped would be stimulated by his vaudevilles to become part of his reading public as well. Most Heiberg scholars have overlooked his popularizing phase because they evince distinct historical biases in favor of academic burghers and the style of life they represented in nineteenth-century Denmark. For example, Sven Møller Kristensen interprets Heiberg’s efforts to influence non-academic Danes as a short-lived, opportunistic ploy to curry recognition at the expense of his erstwhile academic colleagues.1 1

1

Dale Land (Department of History) and Damon Williams (Honors College), Michigan State University, prepared an electronic version of the original article, which I then revised for the present anthology. Sven Møller Kristensen Digteren og samfundet i Danmark i det 19. århundrede vols. 12, 2nd edition, Copenhagen: Munksgaard 1970; vol. 1, p. 86.

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The self-styled elite among Golden Age writers were, by and large, studenter – that is, men who passed the university matriculation examination (whether or not they elected to study at the university thereafter) and thereby attained the social status of academic burgher. They comprised a relatively homogeneous group trained in ancient Greek and Roman literature and languages as well as Nordic mythology. And they generally assumed that their audience had the educational experiences expected of a student. Kristensen appears to share the notion that Golden Age academics represented the purest expression of fundamental cultural values in nineteenth-century Danish society and spoke for the “true” interests and aspirations of other social groups. Such a preference for academics and their literature explains why Kristensen’s concept of the Danish public in the first half of the nineteenth century is limited primarily to the world-view of several thousand academic burghers. Although Kristensen cites subscription lists in support of his thesis on the dominance of academics in the Golden Age public, he found no subscription list for any of Heiberg’s works. Nevertheless, Heiberg did put together a list of projected subscribers in the latter part of 1830 when he sought to interest Schubothe in publishing an interim, bi-weekly format for Copenhagen’s Flying Post, a journal that Heiberg had been editing for several years already.2 While this list does not document actual purchasers, it does show that academics constituted a significant percentage of Heiberg’s ideal public. Of the 132 persons listed, 83 (63%) are identifiable in Copenhagen street guides and can be classified by social ranks. Fifty-seven, or almost two-thirds of these individuals, were either verifiable academic burghers or belonged to occupations typically staffed by academics. Closer examination of the 49 subscribers who are more difficult to identify suggests that Heiberg’s journal had developed a substantial non-academic audience as well. It is highly unlikely that a significant percentage of these unidentifiable individuals were academics residing in the provinces. Their names do not appear on studenter lists; Heiberg himself mentioned on several occasions that he had very few subscrib2

Kjøbenhavns flyvende Post, Copenhagen: Printzlau 1827-28, 1830. Since in the original text there are no page numbers, page numbers have been added in brackets to facilitate referencing. These refer to the page numbers in the photomechanical reproduction of Kjøbenhavns flyvende Post vols. 1-4, by Uffe Andreasen, Copenhagen: C.A. Reitzels Boghandel A/S 1980-84. The manuscript listing possible subscribers is housed in the J.L. Heiberg Archiv, # 5590, in Rigsarkivet (Copenhagen) and also reproduced in Morten Borup Johan Ludvig Heiberg vols 1-3, Copenhagen: Gyldendal 1947-49; vol. 2, pp. 213-215.

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ers beyond the environs of Copenhagen; and we know that in April 1834, only 18 subscription copies of Copenhagen’s Flying Post: Interim Papers (7.2% of the total edition of 250 copies) were sent by package post to the provinces.3 There is no evidence to indicate that the situation was any different in 1830. Therefore, given the improbability that many of the 49 unidentifiable individuals on Heiberg’s list were academics living either in Copenhagen or in the provinces, the most reasonable supposition is that they were non-academics outside Heiberg’s circle of regular friends and acquaintances but known to him nonetheless as supporters of his journal. Some uncertainty about the proper spelling and precise occupation of these individuals would not have disturbed Heiberg since he presumably assumed that Schubothe would make a thorough canvas of potential subscribers if he considered it essential. If one adds the 49 unidentifiable names to the 26 identifiable non-academics on Heiberg’s list, more than half of his anticipated subscribers to a continuation of the Flying Post were probably non-academics. In fact, there is no evidence that Schubothe bothered to circulate a subscription list of his own when publishing The Interim Papers between 1834 and 1837. By the second quarter of the nineteenth century, most Danish publishers used subscription lists only in situations where a projected work’s reception was uncertain. Heiberg’s reputation and the prior popularity of Copenhagen’s Flying Post assured an audience of sufficient size to make Schubothe’s venture profitable. The diminished use of the subscription list, however, calls into question its significance for analyzing the purchasing public of Golden Age writers. Therefore, it is perplexing why Kristensen relied so heavily on subscription lists in his study, given his awareness of their limitations for the Golden Age period. Numbers of copies printed are better indicators than subscription lists of the purchasing public in Denmark’s Golden Age. Ledgers from Schubothe’s publishing house show that issues of the Flying Post. Interim Papers averaged 250 copies each, occasionally reaching 330 copies when public demand justified a second printing of particular issues. Individual subscribers constituted less than 10% of printed copies.4 Exact printing figures for Copenhagen’s Flying Post when 3

4

Letter to Peder Hjort in Danske Politiske Breve fra 1830erne og 1840erne vols. 1-4, ed. by Povl Bagge and Povl Engelstoft, Copenhagen: Rosenkilde og Bagger 1945-58; vol. 1, no. 108; Kjøbenhavns flyvende Post. Interimsblade, Copenhagen: Schubothe 183437, Generalpostdirektionens Arkiv, Resolutionsprotokol, I:191 (Rigsarkivet). Schubothes Hovedjournal, 1827-1837 (Håndskriftafdelingen, Det kongelige Bibliotek), especially 32, 40, 76a, 88-89.

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Printzlau was the publisher are more difficult to determine, although Heiberg’s editorials stated that numbers of copies varied considerably from quarter to quarter. He may have begun with up to 500 copies in 1827, but interest declined significantly in 1828 and 1830, especially if he could only contemplate 132 individual subscribers in the latter part of 1830.5 Subscriptions were entirely dispensed with for most of Heiberg’s plays and essays intended primarily for mass-market audiences. For example, Schubothe published Heiberg’s 1844 talk on the Swedish balladeer, C.M. Bellman in an edition numbering 8,000 copies without soliciting a single subscriber. While subscription and circulation figures show that Heiberg’s purchasing public included both academic and non-academic readers, he hoped that Copenhagen’s Flying Post would also reach the non-purchasing public – “That much larger mass who only read to kill an idle hour.”6 Part of that “larger mass” belonged to the dozen or so literary or cultural clubs and reading societies in Copenhagen during the 1820’s and 1830’s, some of which carried a variety of domestic and foreign newspapers, journals, and books. Total membership in the societies with reading rooms was less than two thousand during the 1830’s. Among the larger were Athenæum with 500-600 members, many of them studenter, and The Reading Society with less than 500 members, a majority of whom were non-academics; both reading societies carried works by Heiberg. Provincial reading societies appear to have been less popular and their holdings less extensive than their counterparts in the capital. Consequently, educated men and women in the provinces often found it necessary to depend on their friends in Copenhagen to lend them reading materials. The practice appears to have been widespread. For example, in the late summer of 1830, a pastor in Ribe thanked a civil servant friend in Copenhagen for sending him another packet of books and journals, including Copenhagen’s Flying Post, and promised that he would pass the journal on to other interested readers.7 Heiberg himself regularly dispatched personal copies of his writings 5

6 7

See the first part of the review, “Recensenten og Dyret” in Kjøbenhavns flyvende Post no. 18, 1827, column 7 [p. 84]. See also the article, “Brevvexling imellem Abonnenterne og Redactionen” in Kjøbenhavns flyvende Post no. 21, 1827, column 4 [p. 94]; and Heiberg’s open letter to his readers and subscribers, “Nytaarsgratulation” in Kjøbenhavns flyvende Post no. 105, 1827, column 5 [p. 431]. “Om Tegnérs Frithiof” in Kjøbenhavns flyvende Post no. 81, 1827, column 2 [p. 333]. P.C. Adler to P.V. Jacobsen in Peter Adler’s Breve til P.V. Jacobsen, ed. by August F. Schmidt, Brabrand: Eget Forlag 1937, p. 40.


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to friends and relatives in the provinces and abroad. In addition, business and trade establishments in Copenhagen and the provincial towns made copies of newspapers and journals available to clients. Heiberg also depended on rental and parish libraries to reach a growing number of non-purchasing readers – “users of lending libraries and countless novel readers, especially women.”8 The public Heiberg had in mind extended beyond a relatively small number of purchasers to include non-purchasing readers from many burgher ranks, be they men or women, master artisans or apprentices, civil or domestic servants, studenter or non-academics. Copenhagen’s Flying Post was his most extensive and time-consuming attempt to reach urban Danes, most of whom he considered more amenable to intellectual enlightenment than the minimally educated peasantry. As a popularizer, Heiberg believed it was his task “to guide thought from everyday reason – representation – to the point where ideas – and therefore philosophy – begins.”9 The content of Copenhagen’s Flying Post reflected Heiberg’s attempts to influence “individuals with very diverse educational backgrounds and personal inclinations.”10 Heiberg wrote, translated, and solicited articles, stories, and reviews that he thought would, over an extended period of time, “entertain the well-educated” and likewise “address the lesser educated in a manner that would cultivate their taste for things that they formerly could not appreciate.”11 He would, at times, review literature and plays of current interest primarily to an academic audience. Yet, he translated quotations from both ancient and modern foreign languages and explained the meaning of classical allusions for the benefit of non-academic readers. Heiberg’s journal also contained commentaries on topics of current political importance, such as shifting ideological positions among English political parties, constitutional developments in Spain, the French Revolution of 1830, and the Danish constitutional reform movement. Moreover, he reduced complex theological, philosophical, and aesthetic issues to their essential components 8 9

10

11

“Om Tegnérs Frithiof” in Kjøbenhavns flyvende Post no. 81, 1827, column 2 [p. 333]. Johan Ludvig Heiberg Grundtræk til Philosophiens Philosophie eller den speculative Logik. Som Ledetraad ved Forelæsninger paa den kongelige militaire Høiskole, Copenhagen 1832, p. 3. (Reprinted as Ledetraad ved Forlæsninger over Philosophiens Philosophie eller den speculative Logik ved den kongelige militaire Høiskole in Heiberg’s Prosaiske Skrifter vols. 1-11, Copenhagen: C.A. Reitzel 1861-62; vol. 1, p. 113.) “Brevvexling imellem Abonnenterne og Redactionen” in Kjøbenhavns flyvende Post no 21, 1827, column 5 [p. 95]. Ibid.

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and analyzed what he believed was their significance for the daily lives and cultural development of all Danish burghers. The popularizing content and diction in Heiberg’s journal, therefore, offers us an opportunity to estimate the size of his ideal reading public. Heiberg’s ideal public included all Danes who had received the educational training necessary to comprehend Copenhagen’s Flying Post, whether or not they were satisfied with every issue, or were purchasing or non-purchasing readers. The core of his ideal public appears to have been studenter. Heiberg’s desire to develop support among non-academics did not preclude an allegiance to men and women in academic circles, his “true friends: well-informed and welleducated readers.”12 In addition to 4,000 or so studenter, plus their immediate families, Heiberg could have counted on a regular augmentation to this part of his ideal public from future studenter among approximately 1,300 young men and boys annually enrolled in twenty-five Latin Schools. Pupils in the Latin Schools received more than the minimal educational background Heiberg expected in his audience; they also represented the pool of candidates from which he sought supporters for his belief that “it is precisely the writer’s vocation to improve the public’s knowledge and taste.”13 In addition to the academic component of his ideal public, Heiberg considered the curricular expectations developed for the burgher schools, both public and private, sufficiently rigorous to produce a receptive audience for his work. During the mid-1830’s, an average of 23,000 pupils per year in the public burgher schools were provided instruction in the fundamentals of reading, writing, arithmetic, religion, singing, and gymnastics. In Copenhagen and the larger provincial towns, private burgher schools offered this core curriculum as well as scientific-pragmatic subjects (the real curriculum) to approximately 1,100 children of upwardly mobile and often commercially oriented middle-class families. There were, in addition, almost 350 private burgher schools by the mid-1830’s, enrolling more than 7,000 pupils in Copenhagen and the provinces. While a number of these schools offered a curriculum less extensive than that found in the real schools, most of the private schools were curricular duplicates of the public burgher schools, but catered to the wishes of artisan and other established middle-class families who wished to separate their own children from children of day laborers and common workers. It 12 13

“Til Subskribenterne” in Kjøbenhavns flyvende Post no. 51, 1827, column 8 [p. 216]. “Digter-Misundelse” in Kjøbenhavns flyvende Post no 12, 1834, column 3 [p. 54].


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seems reasonable to conclude, therefore, that “the most educated and cultivated public from all classes,”14 whom Heiberg considered his ideal public, consisted primarily of Danes who had completed the training offered in Latin and burgher schools. In the mid-1830’s, total annual enrollments in these schools exceeded 32,000 pupils. Since the overwhelming majority of the pupils attended burgher schools where seven years of schooling was typical, Heiberg could have counted on at least 4,000 graduating young men and women to augment his ideal public every year.15 One cannot assume, however, that the adult urban population as a whole was sufficiently literate to include them in Heiberg’s potential public. It is necessary to gauge the adult component of Heiberg’s potential public in terms of typical educational requirements for various occupational groups for two reasons: (1) Heiberg began his popularizing efforts during the initial stages of the implementation of universal compulsory education; and (2) little consolidated educational data exists for periods prior to the mid-1830’s. Of the fifteen occupations listed for urban residents in the 1834 census, employees of five were regularly recruited from male graduates of the Latin Schools and the burgher schools with an expanded curriculum.16 Fewer than half of the 9,875 individuals listed under these five rubrics could have been studenter; the remainder would have constituted the upper educational echelon of Heiberg’s non-academic public. An additional 9,380 heads of households and their immediate assistants were employed in various forms of commerce that required at least the functional literacy acquired by graduates of the burgher schools. 14

15

16

From the review “Recensenten og Dyret” in Kjøbenhavns flyvende Post no. 18, 1827, column 7 [p. 84]. For curricular requirements and the social composition of burgher schools, see Joakim Larsen Bidrag til den danske Folkeskoles Historie, 1818-1898, Copenhagen: Schubothe 1898, especially Chapters 2 and 4. Copenhagen’s schools are treated separately by Larsen in Bidrag til Kjøbenhavns offentlige Skolevæsens Historie, Copenhagen: Schubothe 1881. See also Carol Gold “Educational Reform in Denmark, 1784-1814” in Facets of Education in the Eighteenth Century (Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century, vol. 167), ed. by James A. Leith, Oxford: Voltaire Foundation at the Taylor Institution 1977, pp. 49-63. Carol Gold Educating Middle Class Daughters, Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanums Forlag 1996, and Statistisk Tabelværk vols. 1-21, Copenhagen: Bianco Luno 1835-52; Ældre Række, vol. 5 (1842), pp. xx-xxi. No national census was compiled between 1801 and 1834. The five occupational groups are (1) clergy, church officials, and teachers; (2) civil servants; (3) private scholars, litterati, artists, studenter, etc.; (4) officers and civil servants in the army and (5) the navy. Statistisk Tabelværk, op. cit., Ældre Række, vol. 1 (1835), pp. 60-61.

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Among the 6,101 individuals listed as retired, self-supporting heads of households or self-sufficient capitalists, those who had worked in one of the aforementioned six rubrics would also have had the basic educational qualifications for inclusion in Heiberg’s public. In the mid-1830’s, therefore, Heiberg’s public was probably much larger than historians of Denmark’s Golden Age or biographers of Heiberg have acknowledged. His ideal public may have included as much as 36% of the Danish urban male population above the age of 20 years; perhaps an equal number of adult females who had received a mixture of public schooling and private training before universal education became compulsory or during the early stages of its implementation; and approximately 4,000 young men and women who completed their training each year in the burgher and Latin schools. Whereas Heiberg only reached a small part of this ideal public through Copenhagen’s Flying Post and his other journals, the vaudevilles placed him directly before that large “mass” of Danes whose disinterest in elite Golden Age writers and dramatists was countered by a pre-occupation with French and German romances in translation. Vaudevilles also made it possible for Heiberg to expand his ideal public to include semi-literate Danes in the lower-middle classes who would not have qualified for his ideal reading public. Although literacy is not directly relevant to Heiberg’s theater-public, improvements in the implementation of compulsory education in the late 1820’s and 1830’s, in conjunction with the publication and sale of the vaudevilles, meant that Heiberg’s theater and reading publics probably overlapped considerably. Heiberg’s overtures to this expanded public began with the performance of his first vaudeville, King Salomon and Jørgen the Hatter, in the fall of 1825 and continued for more than one and one-half decades.17 Like their French and German precursors, Heiberg’s Danish vaudevilles were usually one-act farces with simple story lines and predictable endings; critical passages were sung, with the text adapted to currently popular tunes. The subject matter of Heiberg’s vaudevilles varied from purely entertaining situation pieces to scathing critiques of social problems, such as status consciousness among provincial burghers who sought to imitate their Copenhagen counterparts; the deplorable condition of private educational institutes; sycophantic deference to undeserving authority-figures; the narrow-minded and 17

Kong Salomon og Jørgen Hattemager, Copenhagen 1825. (Reprinted in Heiberg’s Poetiske Skrifter vols. 1-11, Copenhagen: C.A. Reitzel 1862; vol. 5, pp. 171-272.)


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precious viewpoints of academic literary critics; and the demeaning effects of restrictive courting customs.18 The majority of the characters in the vaudeville were drawn from the middle and lower-middle classes – the core of Heiberg’s ideal nonacademic public. In The April Fools,19 for example, the main cast was composed of the head-mistress of a girls’ institute and her cousin from the provinces, three marginally educated instructors, four artisans, two apprentices, a female domestic, a German soldier-of-fortune, and two disrespectful pupils whose common-sense response to the foibles of their elders brought the vaudeville to a hilarious conclusion. Several academics interacted with a scribbler, a printer, a bookbinder, an accordion player, a circus equestrian, and other common folk in The Critic and the Animal.20 The Inseparables satirized a seemingly interminable engagement between a minor customs official and a druggist’s daughter.21 The setting, like the characters, were often environs familiar to most Copenhagen burghers – Rosenborg Gardens, stereotypical street scenes, and locales within a short walk or carriage ride, such as the Deer Park and Charlottenlund. In addition to problems, characters, and settings familiar to a nonacademic public from all classes, Heiberg’s vaudevilles contained vocabulary in common use among Copenhagen burghers and many Danes living in provincial towns during the 1820’s and 1830’s. For example, in The April Fools, Madame Pleasant, a shopkeeper, drops by her daughter’s school. While chatting with the headmistress, Madam Pleasant asks how her daughter, Trine, is behaving. “Very well,” replies Fru Bitteralmond, “she is, without a doubt, the most industrious and well-behaved pupil in the Institute….Trine’s making excellent progress.” “Yes, an A+ pupil,” agrees Hr. Fop, the only fulltime instructor. Well, wonders Madam Pleasant, “perhaps I could save time by turning this visit into a conference about Trine’s progress in all her subjects?” “Your wish is our command, Madam,” declares 18

19

20

21

See Heiberg’s description (and defense) of the Danish vaudeville in Om Vaudevillen, some dramatisk Digtart, og dens Betydning paa den danske Skueplads, Copenhagen: Printzlau 1826. (Reprinted in Heiberg’s Prosaiske Skrifter vols. 1-11, Copenhagen: C.A. Reitzel 1861-62; vol. 6, pp. 1-111.) Aprilsnarrene, eller Intriguen i Skolen, Copenhagen 1826. (Reprinted in Heiberg’s Poetiske Skrifter, op. cit., vol. 6, pp. 3-129.) Recensenten og Dyret, Copenhagen 1826. (Reprinted in Heiberg’s Poetiske Skrifter, op. cit., vol. 6, pp. 131-239.) De Uadskillelige, Copenhagen 1827. (Reprinted in Heiberg’s Poetiske Skrifter, op. cit., vol. 6, pp. 347-478.)

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Hr. Fop. “Let’s begin with geography. Tell me, little Trine, where is Amsterdam located?” Trine: That’s the capital of England. Fop: Whoops! Madam Pleasant: Even I know that’s a wrong answer. I may be uneducated, but I know that Amsterdam is in Holland because that’s where delicious Dutch oysters come from. Fop: But Trine knows that, too. She merely misspoke. But you must admit she wasn’t that far off – isn’t Holland close to England? Don’t they both end in “land”? Just watch how she handles the next question. (To Trine): Since you mentioned the capital of England, what is it? (Pause) How about “Lon… Lon…Lond Trine: London. Fop: Absolutely correct! What’s the population of London? Trine: More than four thousand. Fop: Definitely. Madam Pleasant: I agree, since I’ve been told that there are more people in London than in Copenhagen and Christianshavn together. But is she learning her religion? Fop: Of course. Tell me, Trine: To whom are people responsible? Trine: First and foremost to themselves. Second…second Fop: Let’s stick with the first for a moment; what are our duties to ourselves? Trine: Eat, drink, dress ourselves, make lots of money, keep clean, and anything else necessary to take care of ourselves. Madam Pleasant: Wow! She nailed that one! How about her accomplishments in foreign languages?22

In addition to the entertainment value of this, and similar, passages in the vaudeville, Heiberg had an explicit didactic purpose in mind. Like his journals, the vaudevilles were intended to communicate with “the lesser educated” and to develop in them a “taste for things that they formerly could not appreciate.”23 Given the variety of educational backgrounds represented in his ideal public, it made more sense to present current social problems, such as teaching incompetence and curriculum fraud in city schools, by means of a vaudeville than through a scholarly treatise on the idea of learning. Just as the themes and diction in Heiberg’s vaudevilles indicate that Heiberg’s projected audience included representatives from all 22

23

Aprilsnarrene, eller Intriguen i Skolen, Scene 14 in Heiberg’s Poetiske Skrifter, op. cit., vol. 6, pp. 45-50. For an English translation of the entire vaudeville, including lyrics adapted to the original melodies, see The April Fools, Or Intrigue at School, tr. by Peter Vinten-Johansen and Anna Vinten-Burdak, Madison: Wisconsin Introductions to Scandinavia II, no. 9i, 1999. “Brevvexling imellem Abonnenterne og Redactionen” in Kjøbenhavns flyvende Post no. 21, 1827, columns 4-5 [p. 94f.].


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burgher ranks, a ground plan to the Royal Theater establishes the upper limits on the size and the typical composition of his theatergoing audience. Resident playwrights and wealthier patrons of the arts generally sat in the first and second parquets. Remaining seats on the ground floor, while available to a mixture of social ranks, were generally filled by academics who wished to avoid the public boxes in the balcony. Boxes in the three galleries composing the balcony could seat from six to ten people comfortably, depending on the size and location of the box. For the most popular performances, however, hucksters would purchase an entire box and then cram them far beyond normal capacity by selling tickets at prices considerably below those available at the box-office. Since most of Heiberg’s vaudevilles were quite popular, it was conceivable that as many as 1,500 people viewed a particular performance. Since the clearest sign of popularity during the era of the pre-naturalistic theater was the numbers of performances, an examination of Heiberg’s stage records provides evidence of his success in using the Royal Theater to appeal to an audience larger than that of any other Danish playwright in the nineteenth century. His 24 original works had been performed 1,659 times by the conclusion of the year 1889. This figure does not include performances of the 29 plays and 9 singspiele, many of them French and German vaudevilles, which Heiberg translated for the Danish stage.24 Heiberg’s nearest competitor was Henrik Hertz, a member of “the Heiberg school,” with 1,102 performances of 42 plays. Oehlenschläger, the dean of elite Golden Age writers, had 694 performances of 37 works. Heiberg’s thirteen original vaudevilles were performed a total of 738 times during his own lifetime; nearly one-third of these performances were concentrated during the first decade of his popularizing activity.25 Compared with the tepid response accorded most of Heiberg’s contemporaries, especially those Golden Age authors who wrote primarily for studenter, it is understandable why Heiberg believed that the success of his vaudevilles assured him a receptive public for Copenhagen’s Flying Post, as well as other journalistic, educational, and theatrical popu24

25

On Heiberg’s translations, see Arthur Aumont and Edgar Collin Det danske Nationalteater, 1748-1889 vols. 1-3, Copenhagen 1896-99. For dates of individual performances, see also Arthur Aumont, J.L. Heiberg og hans Slægt paa den danske Skueplads, Copenhagen: Jørgensen 1891. If one employs the maximum estimate of 1,500 viewers/performance, the total cumulative audience for Heiberg’s vaudevilles performed between 1825 and 1835 could have been as high as 345,000.

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larizing ventures he undertook to show Danes the advantages of intellectual enlightenment. During the late 1830’s, however, Heiberg realized that his journals, essays, and lectures were not making the impact he had anticipated on the multifaceted, unevenly educated and cultured audience garnered by the popular vaudevilles. Elimination of videnskabelig content from his writings was never an option in Heiberg’s mind, because he refused to accept that his “public could find enjoyment in matters that did not have philosophical content.”26 For some reason, he decided against encapsulating such content within more accessible forms (on the model of the vaudevilles). Instead, Heiberg curtailed popularizing activities and savaged the very audience he had courted and often cajoled in previous years. For example, in 1827 he had applauded an “obstinate [Copenhagen] public” for rejecting established Golden Age writers and queuing instead for tickets to his vaudevilles – a public representing “not just the lowest classes, but also the highest, not just uneducated rabble but also the most educated individuals, plus everyone in-between.”27 In 1842, however, Heiberg dismissed them as a “public that has walked on its own for so long that it must be guided back from the morass it inevitably finds itself in when left to its own devices.”28 However, Heiberg was unwilling to fill that role any longer. It seemed easier to narrow his ideal public to “the educated reading-world”29 of studenter and their families. After Heiberg’s death in the summer of 1860, his wife and a few of her academic friends chose material for twenty-two volumes of his Collected Works.30 For whatever reason, they decided to exclude most of the popularizing material from Copenhagen’s Flying Post. For example, Heiberg published 105 issues in 1827; the Collected Works reprinted five poems and 9 articles (primarily literary skirmishes). My point here is not to second-guess Fru Heiberg’s selections but to encourage my contemporaries to consult Heiberg’s original publications whenever possible, especially his early journals which reflect his 26

27

28 29

30

“Til Kjøbenhavnspostens Redation” in Kjøbenhavns flyvende Post no. 12, 1827, column 6 [p. 59]. From the review “Recensenten og Dyret” in Kjøbenhavns flyvende Post no. 18, 1827, column 6 [p. 83]. “Til Læseren” in Intelligensblade vol. 1, no. 1, Copenhagen: Reitzel 1842-44; p. 1f. “Forhandlinger med Redactionen af Maanedsskrift for Litteratur” in Kjøbenhavns flyvende Post no. 113, 1837, column 4 [p. 458]. Johan Ludvig Heiberg Samlede Skrifter, ed. by Johanne Luise Heiberg and Andreas Frederik Krieger, consisting of Poetiske Skrifter, op. cit., and Prosaiske Skrifter, op. cit.


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popularizing project, whether he was the author of a particular piece or had only vetted it. Among other unfortunate consequences, the relatively easy accessibility of Heiberg’s Collected Works has contributed to a misconception that Heiberg was always primarily interested in an academic public.31 Those who view Heiberg without his popularizing phase and the Hegelianism that defined the core of his efforts to enlighten both academic and non-academic Danes miss a central thrust of his authorship and his broader significance for Scandinavian intellectual history. Heiberg was Denmark’s – and Scandinavia’s – first aristocratic radical. He recognized that the passing of the Old Regime created the need for a new intelligentsia to guide the growing masses of educated but non-academic burghers through an orderly transition to full citizenship. Although Heiberg failed to organize a political party of aristocratic radicals, several of his younger followers established a Hegelian cadre at the University of Copenhagen. There they eventually influenced the intellectual development of the “generation of 1870” who initiated the modern breakthrough in Scandinavia. Georg Brandes and his fellow aristocratic radicals first learned of Hegel via Heiberg’s popularizations, although Brandes’ emphatic distaste for the Golden Age world-view in general and Heiberg’s dramatic principles in particular obscure his philosophical indebtedness to Heiberg. Nor is it generally recognized that the intellectual origins of the Radical Left Party and the Danish liberal-socialist tradition derived as much from Heiberg as from French and English positivism or German idealism. The wide-spread misconstruction of Heiberg’s role in Scandinavian history stems in part from insufficient attention to the purpose, subject matter, and diction in his popularized writings. It also stems from a tendency to evaluate Heiberg’s impact solely in terms of an “actual” audience of documented subscribers and purchasers. I have argued in this essay that non-purchasing readers and theater-goers (whether readers as well or not) should also be considered integral components of Heiberg’s public. Whatever his actual public actually was, Heiberg’s ideal public was much larger and more inclusive of a variety of educational and socioeconomic backgrounds than generally recognized.

31

A recent example of such over-reliance is the treatment of Heiberg, especially his political thought, is Bruce H. Kirmmse Kierkegaard in Golden Age Denmark, Bloomington: Indiana University Press 1990.

P.L. Møller and Romanticism in Danish Literature By Hans Hertel Literary feuds tend to cut both ways. Take the two most famous battles of books in Danish literature of the nineteenth century: when, in 1813, Jens Baggesen launched his campaign against Danish drama and particularly against that of his younger rival Adam Oehlenschläger, the overly personal implications of his criticism backfired. Few people today have any knowledge of his arguments, however well they were formulated, and yet Baggesen’s criticism introduced the massive devaluation of Oehlenschläger. And when Peder Ludvig Møller (1814-65), the Danish critic (not to be confused with Poul Martin Møller, the poet and philosopher), in 1845 attacked Søren Kierkegaard, he, too, paid for it, but the famous Corsair feud also made Kierkegaard the butt of laughter, giving posterity a rather unflattering impression of his polemical methods. Kierkegaard more than survived. But it might seem that Møller still suffers. In most of Kierkegaard’s criticism he still appears in the role of villain and scapegoat, the scribbler attacking the genius, a footnote in the history of Danish literature. He seldom appears on his own merits. And from Danish Kierkegaard research both facts and “facts” are conveyed by the international Kierkegaard literature which is often, of necessity, based on secondary sources, where Kierkegaard’s milieu is concerned. This may be one reason why Møller remains a neglected talent in the history of Scandinavian criticism. Another reason may be the want of a monograph on his work. In my opinion even an unfinished investigation into the existing material seems to imply that his criticism forms an important link between the school of Johan Ludvig Heiberg of the 1820’s and 1830’s and the modern breakthrough of the 1870’s, anticipating and, possibly, even paving the way for Georg Brandes.

P.L. Møller and Romanticism in Danish Literature

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I. Who was this flippant critic daring to attack no less a person than Kierkegaard? A brief biographical sketch may serve to remove some common misunderstandings and to place him in his contemporary literary situation. Born 1814 in Aalborg, Jutland, Møller arrived in Copenhagen as an undergraduate, for some years – typical of this age of transition – rambling between medicine, theology and aesthetics. He joined the student movement in support of a political union of the Scandinavian countries, and as early as 1837 he was attached to newspapers and journals in Copenhagen as a literary and dramatic critic. With enterprising Lieutenant Georg Carstensen – the founder of Tivoli in Copenhagen – he started a number of weekly reviews, imitating contemporary French weeklies in layout and contents, thereby complying with the demands of the reading bourgeoisie. But they had another purpose: to popularize the polemics against the enlightened despotism of the great arbiter of taste: Heiberg, poet, critic, dramatist and dramaturge of the Royal Theater in Copenhagen. The functions of Møller’s Nye Intelligensblade, polemically named after Heiberg’s Intelligensblade, were to serve as an “Organ for the ‘intelligence,’ which outside Christianshavn [sc. where Heiberg lived and kept state] may be found here in the country,” and “in part when occasion is given to say ‘no,’ where Prof. H[eiberg] says ‘yes,’ in part to say ‘yes,’ where he says ‘no.’”1 But Møller seems to have developed academic ambitions, too. Having won the gold medal of the University of Copenhagen for a prize essay on modern French poetry, and having gradually gained a considerable authority as a critic, he – according to the myth – dreamt of succeeding Oehlenschläger as professor of aesthetics. Perhaps in order to qualify for this job he published a number of critical editions of Wessel and Blicher, based on strictly modern editorial principles, and his so-called “Æsthetiske Aarbog” Gæa (1845-47) – again a title polemizing against Heiberg’s yearbook Urania (earth versus space). A considerable number of poems and stories, now classical, by, e.g. Blicher, Hauch, Bødtcher, Christian Winther, H.C. Andersen, Aare1

Unsigned introductory article in Nye Intelligensblade, supplement to the weekly Figaro, ed. by Georg Carstensen, nos. 1, 3, 4, 1842, pp. 1-2. Revised reprint in Møller’s Kritiske Skizzer vols. 1-2, Copenhagen 1847; vol. 1, pp. 143-144. 2nd edition, ed. by Hans Hertel, Copenhagen: Gyldendal 1971, pp. 98-99.

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Hans Hertel

strup, Hertz, Oehlenschläger, and Goldschmidt, were first published here, illustrated by leading young artists, and Møller himself contributed stories, poems, translations, and above all critical essays. One of them, in the volume appearing at Christmas 1845, was the notorious article discussing Kierkegaard’s “Guilty?/Not Guilty” from Stages on Life’s Way.2 The article does not deserve its bad reputation. Møller’s point of departure was a pronounced understanding of Kierkegaard as a poet, and with all its indiscretion it contained a germ of truth in its psychological criticism. Frater Taciturnus had, Møller claimed, both artistically and morally driven his egotism and misogyny to the extremes: he had come to regard “life as as dissection room” and to put “the feminine being… on the experimental torture bench” “to dissect it alive,”3 in order to continue his work, and to regard existence, including other people’s existence, as an intellectual experiment. Møller, probably building on biographical evidence of Kierkegaard’s treatment of Regine Olsen, was for good reasons prevented from seeing that “higher right” which Kierkegaard presently pleaded to Goldschmidt and which has been broadly acknowledged by posterity. But the real misunderstanding seems to be that Møller, in his fierce anti-Hegelianism, thought that he found “sterile dialectics” and “system building” in Kierkegaard’s work and overlooked its polemics against the dialectics of Hegel. The so-called “Corsair feud”4 that grew from this article gives no pleasant impression of the polemical climate of the 1840’s. The caricatures of Kierkegaard with trouser legs of unequal length and situated in the center of the universe are often witty, but coarse and offensive. However, Kierkegaard’s counterattack displays wounded vanity, vindictiveness and perfidy verging on brutality: in bad faith Kierkegaard denounced Møller as the real evil spirit behind “those loathsome Corsair attacks on peaceable, respectable men, each of whom in honest obscurity does his work in the service of the state”5 2

3 4

5

P.L. Møller “Et Besøg i Sorø” in Gæa, æsthetisk Aarbog 1846, ed. by P.L. Møller, Copenhagen 1845, pp. 144-187. Ibid., pp. 176-177. The most balanced account of the fight is Elias Bredsdorff’s Goldschmidts “Corsaren”. Med en udførlig redegørelse for striden mellem Søren Kierkegaard og “Corsaren”, Aarhus: Sirius 1962. 2nd edition: Corsaren, Goldschmidt og Kierkegaard, Copenhagen: Corsarens Forlag 1977. See also Helge Toldberg “Goldschmidt og Kierkegaard” in Festskrift til Paul V. Rubow, ed. by Henning Fenger et al., Copenhagen: Gyldendal 1956, pp. 211-235. COR, p. 46 / SV1 XIII, 431.


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– although Kierkegaard knew, like everybody else, that Møller was only one of many correspondents to the Corsair and had only officiated as an editor for some weeks in 1843 when Goldschmidt served a sentence on bread and water for lese-majesty. It might be interpreted as a deliberate attempt of associating “the vagrant aesthetician” P.L. Møller, a liberal critic, with the most disrespectfully radical – and most widely read – organ for democracy and republicanism, in that way barring his way to an academic career. And where Kierkegaard’s insinuations ended the scandal-mongering about Møller’s alleged sexual excesses and cynicism began (the most preposterous of these stories is the one which Andersen ridicules in a letter, that “his girlfriend, a seamstress, had died in the hospital, and Møller sold her skeleton”).6 But, contrary to the myth, it was not the Corsair-feud that made Møller leave Denmark. It was a government scholarship for further education abroad. Møller did not depart until two years after the incident, on New Year’s Eve 1847, when he had published his principal work, the two volumes of Critical Sketches.7 He had planned that they be followed by another five volumes of drama criticism, satirical poems and biographical sketches, and in May 1848 Goldschmidt ironically wrote to him: “[I have] predicted for you and Denmark good fortune and honor from your journey abroad….I ask you to come home in a year and a half’s time and take care of Danish literature, which now has only a single steward without me as watchman.”8 But what began as a study tour ended in a lifelong exile. During the Danish-German war 1848-50 Møller worked for the Danish Embassy in Berlin as a “travelling agent” (and perhaps spy), counteracting the Schleswig-Holstein propaganda with pamphlets and articles in German papers. In 1851 one of his suggestions – on how to gain influence on the Hamburg daily press – was referred to the Cabinet and debated in the State Council. At the same time he was writing about Danish literature in German papers, translating, among others, H.C. Ørsted and Christian Winther into German, and corresponding to a Copenhagen daily. 6

7 8

Cf. note by H.C. Andersen from December 11, 1865 in Collinske Samling no. 1838, printed in Julius Clausen (ed.), En kvindes Kærlighed, P.L. Møller-Mathilde Leiner, Copenhagen 1928, p. 6. Peter Ludvig Møller Kritiske Skizzer vols. 1-2, Copenhagen 1847. Meïr Goldschmidt to P.L. Møller, May 30, 1848 in Breve fra og til Meïr Goldschmidt vols. 1-3, ed. by Morten Borup, Copenhagen: Rosenkilde og Bagger 1963; vol. 1, p. 154.

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In 1851 Møller arrived in Paris, in the days when Napoleon III came to power, and there he stayed for his last 14 years, living miserably on his writings. He supplied information for the French on Danish political affairs and Danish literature, in newspapers, in encyclopedias (Biographie universelle and Nouvelle Biographie générale), and translated, among others, Blicher. Still more important, he kept in touch with developments in Denmark. In several hundred “Letters from Paris” in Danish papers he reported on the political, social and cultural life in France, and through correspondence and visits he maintained connections with old friends and came in contact with new ones, including Norwegians, such as Bjørnson, Paul Botten-Hansen, Camilla Collett and Jonas Lie. A new prize essay, rewarded with another University gold medal and published 1858 as The More Recent Comedy in France and Denmark,9 strengthened his prestige at home: he was offered a post as editor of a Copenhagen daily, but refused. Both Sibbern, Hauch and his friend Hans Egede Schack, the novelist (author of Phantasterne) and politician, now personal secretary to the Prime Minister, tried to get him a lectureship at the University of Copenhagen. But P.L. Møller seemed unable to break away from Paris and go back to what he regarded as the spiritual snailhouse of Copenhagen. His last years were marred by illness, undernourishment, and hard work. Increasingly bitter and resigned in his sarcasm, and for periods almost blind from a syphilis contracted in his youth, he carried on with his articles. His last notes, mixing aesthetic statements with sneering curses against the world, are written on margins of newspapers he was allowed to cut off when the cafés closed. In December 1865, on his way back to Paris from Dieppe, he died at the lunatic asylum in Rouen, 51 years old. The death certificate said, “general paresis.”

II. In a way it was, after all, the clash with Kierkegaard that made P.L. Møller “one of the invalids of Danish literature.”10 It is true in the indirect and ironical way that Møller, who was the first to criticize Kierke9 10

Peter Ludvig Møller Det nyere Lystspil i Frankrig og Danmark, Copenhagen 1858. Paul V. Rubow “Danske Forfattere i Paris i Tiden mellem Restaurationen og den tredje Republik” in Danske i Paris gennem Tiderne vols. 1-2.2, ed. by Franz von Jessen, Copenhagen: C.A. Reitzels Forlag 1936-38; vol. 2.1, p. 191.


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gaard’s ethics, has become the victim of the explicit as well as the implicit moralism of much Kierkegaard scholarship which has uncritically accepted Kierkegaard’s invectives of Møller (“Landstryger,” “Torvesjouer,” “Plattenslager”11) and Kierkegaard’s devaluation of the Corsair – “et lille, men meget udbredt og berygtet boulevardblad.”12 Another common judgment of Møller is that of Goldschmidt in his Life’s Memories and Results, where he mythologizes and reforms reality to have the “memories” agree with the “results,” thus forming the great pattern of Nemesis: in that way Møller’s fate is seen as a result of his attitude as the aesthete, while Goldschmidt himself, the ethicist, is “saved.”13 All the same, these memories and the three volumes of Letters to and from Meïr Goldschmidt14 give a vivid impression of their very literary friendship, their trying to outdo each other in Byron-Heine-like irony and cynicisms, and of Møller’s importance for Goldschmidt’s career and development. And Brandes, although he should have felt both his sympathies and his antipathies anticipated by Møller’s criticism, seems to have neglected him for personal reasons, perhaps as part of his own imitation of Kierkegaard, the martyr and genius in the small town. In my opinion even Paul V. Rubow, who has tried to unravel things in a more balanced way, underestimates Møller’s criticism in Dansk litterær Kritik i det 19. Aarhundrede.15 Part of the explanation is, as already suggested, that so far the treatment of Møller has been based only on the most easily accessible printed material. But fortunately we have both a vast amount of manuscripts, brought to Denmark after Møller’s death, and a largely unknown mass of printed material: articles and translations from peri11

12

13

14 15

Cf. Kierkegaard’s article “En omreisende Æsthetikers Virksomhed” in Pap. VII-1 B 1-8. See also the entry under “Møller, Peder Ludv.” in the index vol. XV of Pap., pp. 288-289. Frithiof Brandt Søren Kierkegaard, Stockholm: Natur och Kultur 1955, p. 70. The most grotesque, but not the only, example of this trend is Frithiof Brandt’s famous study Den unge Søren Kierkegaard (Copenhagen: Levin & Munksgaards Forlag 1929), which, based on circular argumentation, prejudices, and insinuations, “proves” Møller to be the model of the seducer in Either/Or and classifies him as “en alfonstype”! Meïr Goldschmidt Livs Erindringer og Resultater vols. 1-2, Copenhagen 1877; vol. 1, Chapter XI. New edition vols. 1-2, by Morten Borup, Copenhagen: Rosenkilde og Bagger 1965; vol. 1, pp. 260-276. Breve til og fra Meïr Goldschmidt vols. 1-3, op. cit. Paul V. Rubow Dansk litterær Kritik i det 19. Aarhundrede indtil 1870, Copenhagen: Levin & Munksgaard 1921, pp. 200-209. Cf. Rubow Kierkegaard og hans Samtidige, Copenhagen: Gyldendal 1950, pp. 34-46.

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odicals before 1848, but above all from his years in Germany and France from 1848-65. The roughly 800 of these articles that can, in my opinion, be attributed to him, together with his notes, permit a revised picture of his contribution to Danish criticism. This material demonstrates his importance to such contemporaries as Oehlenschläger, Hauch, Blicher, H.C. Andersen, Aarestrup, Winther, Goldschmidt and Schack, as a critic, editor, adviser, animateur, and friend. After a tour of Norway 1842, he worked for Wergeland in Denmark. But most interesting is his attitude to modern European literature and criticism.

III. Romanticism is romanticism in most European languages. Not so in Danish. Danish literature offers a special periodization problem. Since Brandes in 1868 made his famous distinction between German “Romantik” as “idealistisk” and French “romantisme” as “naturalistisk,” Danish criticism has made a succession of – in my opinion vain – attempts to constitute a special Danish “romantisme” from circa 1824, with the breakthrough of the new prose by Blicher, Fru Gyllembourg, Poul Møller, and Heiberg’s vaudevilles. This is now the “truth” in most textbooks, which does not make it any more true. Perhaps it would be more profitable to redefine “romantisme” in a comparative context, as “naturalistisk romantik,” constituted by Byron and Byronism, Heine and Das junge Deutschland, and the French school of 1830, and defined by its accentuation on (a) individualism (inwardly leading to subjectivism, pessimism, melancholism, cynicism; outwardly to emancipation, emotionally and socially), (b) passion (leading to worship of the disharmonic (Zerrissenheit), but also to the study of complicated characters), (c) coulear locale (leading to exotism and categories such as “the interesting,” but also to realism in the study of milieux and their connection with human psychology). “Romantisme” in this definition can be summarized in the term “rebellious individualism.”16 The distinction between “romantik” and “romantisme” in this sense is important: it leads directly into the heart of the conflicts and convulsions in Danish literature from 1825-70, arising from the reception and digestion of Byronism and romantisme. The conflicts of this 16

Johan Fjord Jensen Homo manipulatus. Essays omkring radikalismen, Copenhagen: Gyldendal 1966, pp. 13-15.


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period, very much discussed but only partly explored, can be analyzed through its definitions of the terms “poetry and actuality.”17 And the period may be illuminated by analyzing the reception in Danish letters of the important figures, works, theories and motives of “romantisme”: What is translated and how? How does critical opinion react? How deeply does foreign modernism influence Danish writers and when? etc. The reconnaissance up to now in this field seems to indicate that in the eyes of the Danish public, Byron, Heine, Hugo, and the “schools” around them, appear as a unity – also a unity of ideas and style.18 They appear as a movement whose “revolutionary individualism” and “liberalism in literature” mean revolt against all authorities – literary, philosophical, moral, religious and political. By the same token the Danish opposition to “romantisme” is surprisingly unanimous: it is also an ideological and artistic rejection, and a very compulsive one, too, especially in the attitude to the youngest “romantisme,” that of Hugo (whose work is seen as the incarnation of the “disharmonious” and the raw reality, “the ugly”). Individualism, vulgarized as subjectivism and pessimism, is supposed to lead to nihilism, atheism, materialism and general moral decay, thus presenting a danger to idealistic romanticism with its aesthetics of harmony and its “optimistic dualism”19 between the reality of the senses and the transcendental reality. When Henning Fenger says, in his dissertation Georg Brandes’ læreår, that “Romanticism in Denmark is a private problem for individual poets and not an event in intellectual history,”20 the first part of his statement should be modified so as to say that “romantisme” was a common intellectual problem. It represented conflicts which Danish national romanticism – to put it in Freudian terms – agreed to repress, with a few exceptions.

17

18

19

20

This has recently been done for Swedish literature by Kurt Aspelin in the first part of his work Poesi och verklighet. Några huvudlinjer i 1830-talets svenska kritikerdebatt, Lund: Akademiförlaget 1967. The problems have been discussed, interestingly, but unfortunately incompletely, by Jens Kistrup and Poul Zerlang in their (unpublished) prize essay in Scandinavian Philology: “En Drøftelse af Begrebet Romantismes Berettigelse inden for dansk Litteraturforskning,” 1947, Archive of the University of Copenhagen. See Erik M. Christensen “Guldalderen som idéhistorisk periode: H.C. Ørsteds optimistike dualisme” in Guldalderstudier. Festskrift til Gustav Albeck, ed. by Henning Høirup, et. al., Aarhus: Universitetsforlaget 1966, pp. 11-45. Henning Fenger Georg Brandes’ læreår. Læsning, ideer, smag, kritik 1857-1872, Copenhagen: Gyldendal 1955, p. 275.

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The translations of the period are generally characterized by selection, softening, and harmonization (which is often synonymous with idealization). This, too, speaks in favor of adopting, as proposed by Erik Lunding,21 the term “Biedermeier” as a means of defining the style and the common characteristics of the Danish period in question. The contemporary debate about the European “romantisme” seems primarily to be about Lebensanschauung and ideas, and the rejection of the Young Europe seems to gradually grow more ideological – and still more emotionally charged – on behalf of the idealism in its defence positions. While in 1830 Heiberg and Fru Gyllembourg can translate and recommend the prose of Mérimée, Brandes in 1871 is attacked passionately by the national press for doing roughly the same thing with roughly the same texts: the issue of French Romanticism has become political, especially after the Commune. A number of the major works of the European “romantisme” are ignored in Denmark, and when they are considered, it is mainly as isolated – and consequently extrinsic – piquant elements of a fashionable style. That is why the term “romantisme,” used in Danish criticism, makes sense only if defined in the European context and counterbalanced by the term “Biedermeier.” Biedermeier can be seen as a self-contained style, and also in the broader meaning of “way of life,” defined by its degree of stylization. But since Biedermeier is not the only style inherent in the period circa 1825-70, it might also be seen as a style placed between the extremes of the period: idealism / Biedermeier / romantisme, idealism / Biedermeier / realism, and in certain cases as a hybrid form mediating between these extremes. Since much art of the period – e.g. Aarestrup’s poetry and Winther’s Four Novellas22 – show traits of more than one of these contrasting styles, any work or body of work might be classified by its affiliation to these styles, and/or by its degree of mediation between the extremes. (And if a “brand name” is still needed for the period as a whole, the formula of “poetic realism” proposed by Vilhelm Andersen23 might profitably be replaced by that of “idealistic realism” or “idea-realism.”) But there are exceptions to this simplified picture. Most of them lead, directly or indirectly, to P.L. Møller. 21 22 23

Erik Lunding “Biedermeier og Romantismen” in Kritik no. 7, 1968, pp. 32-67. Christian Winther Fire Noveller, Copenhagen 1843. Illustreret dansk Litteraturhistorie vols. 1-4, ed. by Vilhelm Andersen and Carl S. Petersen, Copenhagen: Gyldendal 1924-34; vol. 3, Det nittende Aarhundredes forste Halvdel by Vilhelm Andersen, 1924, p. 499.


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IV. Møller is, of course, influenced by the conflicts of ideas in his period. He was saturated by the Golden Age and its aesthetics of harmony. An early influence seems to be Hertz’s Ghost Letters24 with its conception of art as filtered, slightly embellished reality – and the foreign couleur locale subordinated to the juste milieu tendencies of Danish Biedermeier. Møller, in his search for something other than Hegel, tried to drop the theological aesthetics and the dialectical fashions of the day, but he himself spoke of poetry as an organ for “world-reason,” and his own arguments occasionally took the form of Hegelian triads. (He seems to have attended the theologian Martensen’s famous lectures on Hegel in 1838.) He fought against Heiberg’s formalism and aesthetic systematization, but his own attitude to the public was oddly reminiscent of Heiberg’s aristocratism. And his favorite correlate to the immateriality and intangibility of the Heibergian poetry was Oehlenschläger’s early works with their wholesomeness, simplicity and plastic objectivity. His personal debate on objectivity versus subjectivity (aesthetically: the subjectivity of individualism versus the objectivity of “realism”; morally: the rights of the individual vis-à-vis the community) points directly to the conflict of his criticism and of the age as a whole. He spoke ironically of the excesses of Byronism, its “materialism” and egotistic Weltschmerz and Zerrissenheit, and its “marauders” and dandies with shirt frills and blasé states of mind. But the disintegration and reflectiveness – and the demonic elements of his character – which we are always told of, are at the same time symptoms of his affiliation to the real “romantisme” and one of the reasons why he understood it from within. As Tom Kristensen, the Danish poet and critic, has said: “In order to be able to understand a good verse, one must oneself be able to write a bad one.”25 P.L. Møller did both. His own collections of poetry jingle and clank with the clichés of Byronism, but he made good translations of Byron, Heine, Musset and Pushkin, whom he profiled already in 1839. He defended Hebbel’s psychological drama and wrote about Lermontov, C.J.L. Almqvist and others. And, above all, he wrote about 24 25

Henrik Hertz Gjenganger-Breve, Copenhagen 1830. Tom Kristensen “Kritiker eller anmelder” in Politiken, September 30, 1940. Reprinted in Til dags dato, ed. by Carl Bergstrøm-Nielsen, Copenhagen: Gyldendal 1953, p. 309.

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Hugo, Musset, Vigny, Mérimée, George Sand and Balzac. His prize essay on French poetry, written in 1841 and later published in excerpts in literary reviews, is the most consistent and appreciative effort before Brandes at introducing the romantic school of 1830. Starting from Byron, Heine and the French moderns, Møller launches the concept “modern” poetry, standing for individualism as both an artistic and a social program. It is the poetical self-consciousness, the emancipated passion, daring to call a spade a spade, confronting philistinism and old-fashioned social conventions. As he says in an essay on “Lyrisk Poesi” (1847): “The characteristic mark of modern poetry is merely not to hide the shadowy sides of life. Therefore, poetry is not the culmination of a certain condition, but it is a transition, a struggle to break free from what is unfortunate in existence.”26 It is a rather studied modernism, and it is literary criticism close to social criticism. The program, it must be admitted, is still too slack to be what it sets out to be: the great attack on Danish Romanticism and Biedermeier. But it is not unimportant that, for a short time, and for the first time, these criteria are introduced in the evaluation of contemporary Danish literature – for instance when Carl Bagger is praised for his “keynote of deep melancholy, indeed despair…freshness, energy and passion in feeling,” even for his “genial cynicism.”27 By the same token Møller claims that Heiberg is “no modern poet,”28 because his poetry, unaffected by Byron, is not subjective, and he defends Blicher, H.C. Andersen, Winther, and Aarestrup. Re-reviewing the latter’s Poems,29 now famous but largely ignored when published, Møller concludes in Critical Sketches: A service which he also shares with Christian Winther is that he conceives of love as an independent aesthetic power vis-à-vis the bourgeois views, which are irrelevant for poetry. This service was all the greater since A. actually was the first poet here in this country, who came forth polemically in this direction. Until now almost no one has dared to oppose this with the good old forms of social life. Since the most zealous political opponents here made common cause with the bourgeois, one was somewhat reluctant to touch on the social conflicts, specifically with the traditions in the chapter on love, which constitute a fundamental theme in Byron’s, Heine’s and all of modern poetry. These poets certainly also had numerous readers, indeed admirers, but only in silence. The virtuous father read them secretly, but kept them under lock and key away from his wife and his daughters. To strike these chords, one thought, would only be to introduce a harmful parasite into our domestic literature, as if life itself here among us 26 27 28 29

Peter Ludvig Møller Kritiske Skizzer, op. cit., vol. 2, p. 209. 2nd edition, p. 211. Ibid., vol. 2, p. 282. Ibid., vol. 1, p. 132. 2nd edition, p. 92. Carl Ludvig Emil Aarestrup Digte, Copenhagen 1838.


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in Denmark did not bring forth such conflicts, whose solution is precipitated by making them the subject matter for literature.30

And the program does not exclude poets from other movements and other times: inspired by the French Romanticists’ interest in the Middle Ages, Møller translates Dante and Petrarch; he praises, for example, Shakespeare, Goethe and Hauch for their “psychological analysis”; and his views result in interesting reinterpretations of eighteenthcentury poets, such as Holberg, Wessel and Bellman.

V. The prize essay on French poetry 1841 is also important because of its sources and its critical method: they converge in one important name, Sainte-Beuve. Møller, since his youth a regular reader of the Revue de Paris and the Revue des deux mondes, seems to have come across him already around 1840 and often quotes the “Critiques et portraits littéraires.” The new principles emerge in practice when Møller, refusing to judge the new Frenchmen on the basis of some predefined conception of taste, regards the single work as an individual quantity. Accordingly, it is placed genetically in the history of its genre, and the changing forms of French literature – from the Middle Ages to the July Revolution – are seen as phenomena determined by historical conditions. Any artistic form, any literary school, including new ones, must be understood and evaluated on its own premises and from its own conception of taste. It is a clear departure from the Hegel-Heiberg absolutism. Historization has led to relativization, and normative aesthetics has been replaced by descriptive criticism. It is a mobile criticism, open-minded and non-dogmatic, trying flexibly to approach the single work from, as Møller puts it, “the point of view which its special character itself provides”:31 it cannot be the task of the critic to go to his work with an apparatus of finished theories, but with this work in all its abstract nakedness to throw himself into one or another corpus delicti….For each of these phenomena (“a new, genuine poetic production”) the critic must either create a new theory or with the application of an old one discover therein the necessary modification….He must, unchanged in his most inner being, take on a new form, every time he wants to bring us ore from a newly discovered mine.32

30 31 32

Ibid., vol. 2, p. 232. 2nd edition, p. 227. Ibid., vol. 1, p. 179. 2nd edition, p. 121. Ibid., vol. 1, pp. 2-4. 2nd edition, pp. 10-11.

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It is the new so-called “critical liberalism,” on the face of it unprincipled, but with a clear methodological effort: to detect the processes of causation behind literature. Another consequence of the inspiration from Sainte-Beuve is Møller’s interest in a new field, the study of man, and in a new genre, the literary portrait. Preparing his portrait collections of famous writers, artists, scientists, etc. – one of the series with the typical title Dansk Pantheon – he collects information on their childhood, milieu, and important personal experiences, in short, facts, in order to throw light on the relation between personality and work. This psychological empathy is supported by considerations on the influence of climate, surroundings and state of society on art, and owes something to Mme. de Staël. By developing categories from the psychology of enlightenment, Møller arrives at terms rather near to those of Taine a decade later. All these views and principles converge in the two volumes of Critical Sketches (1847). Here one finds a motto from Sainte-Beuve, and there the launching of the term “the psychological-biographical criticism.”33 And now again the critic regarded as “the aesthetic pathologist”34 and the clinical metaphors of “to dissect” and “to anatomize” works of art with a scalpel. A theoretical introduction defines the duties of the critic as being, to find what is peculiar and valuable in the individual writer and to be able to “hear the grass growing.”35 And these new views are expressed in a tone near to the spoken language, ranging from sarcasm to warmth. All of this takes place twenty-one years before the first collection of essays by Georg Brandes.

VI. But this is not the end of Møller’s development. The correspondences from Germany and France after 1848 once more contradict the myth of him as the pure aesthete. They show fierce pacifist views and unusual understanding of women in society. They attack religion, church and the stupidity of the press, express solidarity with the poor (including artists). Above all, they expose the bourgeoisie with its callousness and boisterous, self-sufficient materialism. It is, as in Brandes’ criticism, the old romantic contempt for the philistines, colored by idio33 34 35

Ibid., vol. 2, p. 4. 2nd edition, p. 129. Ibid., vol. 2, p. 219. 2nd edition, p. 219. Ibid., vol. 1, p. 1. 2nd edition, p. 9.


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syncratic aggressiveness, and converted into a sort of political involvement. And at the same time these articles are exercises in literary styles and genres: when Møller sketches the women of Paris, the fashionable somnambulisme, the stockjobbing and the new rich, it is in incitation of Balzac and Gavarni, and the sardonic tone seems influenced by those who turned Letters from Paris into a genre: Heine and Börne. It is often excellent journalism. Add to this new interests. A collection of French legends (published posthumously),36 an unfinished history of French culture in the Middle Ages, translations of and articles on medieval epic and troubadour poetry37 indicate knowledge of new German and French research in these fields. The use of Sainte-Beuve’s method seems amplified in pieces on, for example, Heiberg and Kierkegaard, and in an extensive portrait of Oehlenschläger (1861), perhaps his most beautiful book.38 Møller has read Taine, too, whose method seems reflected in his use of zoological analogies, scientific expressions, and categories as “race” and “master faculty,” and above all in the “sociological” attitude of his second prize paper, The More Recent Comedy in France and Denmark (1858).39 Most of this study is a passionate warning against Scribe, who in no other country, France included, has played a role comparable to that on the Danish stage – mostly because of Heiberg’s theater policy. The point is that Møller, having sketched the genre history of the comedy, analyzes Scribe’s technique as an expression of inherent values in the public to whom he knows what to give – and as a reflection of the whole social system in the France of Louis Philippe and Napoleon III, with the apparatus of intrigue determined by the public’s “salon horizon”40 and “madness for industry and money.”41 There is quite a distance from Møller’s sarcasm to the objectivity of a Taine wanting to

36 37

38

39

40 41

Peter Ludvig Møller Franske Folkesagn, ed. by V. Møller, Copenhagen 1871. Peter Ludvig Møller Det oldtyske Heltedigt Gudrun, efterladt Arbeide af P.L. Møller, Copenhagen 1872. Translation of the epic poem Aucassin et Nicolette, an article on Bernadin de Verntadour and more items published in reviews around 1870. Møller’s extensive portrait of Oehlenschläger was published in Berlingske Tidende in six parts from November 21-27, 1861. It was republished in book form as Adam Oehlenschläger. Et Erindringsblad, ed. by F.L. Liebenberg, Copenhagen 1876. New edition with introduction by Hans Hertel, Copenhagen: Hasselbalch 1964. Peter Ludvig Møller Det nyere Lystspil i Frankrig og Danmark. Et med Universitetets Guldmedaille lønnet Prisskrift, Copenhagen 1858. Ibid. p. 156. Ibid. p. 176.

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verify and explain, not to pardon or proscribe. It is the positivist aesthetics utilized for polemics against the bourgeoisie, against the worship of Scribe, and against the whole anachronistic repertoire of the Royal Theater in Copenhagen. And it is a vehicle for information on contemporary French drama, and a request for the writing and playing of new comedy in Scandinavia. Among its readers were Bjørnson and Ibsen. According to Francis Bull, it started Ibsen on a modern prose comedy, Svanhilde (1860).42 In other articles Møller explores the connections between politics and the arts and analyzes the thoughts of George Sand, Lamennais and Louis Blanc on social reform. He reports on the contemporary theater of manners (Mme. Girardin, Sardou, Barrière, Ponsard, even Augier and Dumas fils), translates Feuillet for the Folketheater in Copenhagen, introduces Stendhal, and via Baudelaire he discovers that the United States, behind “the worship of the material fact,”43 possesses such poets as Edgar Allan Poe. Summarized like this, Møller’s views may appear consistent and organized. That is only part of the truth. Stuck in romantic conceptions of harmony and the moral functions of art, relapsing into Hegelian university philosophy (e.g. in Comedy), he struggled to come to terms with the current trends in literature, drama and art. Idealism made him attack Théophile Gautier and l’art pour l’art, but his published articles from the fifties and sixties indicate – and his manuscripts confirm in detail – a gradual adjustment to realism and positivism. His fears, corresponding to the general fears in the age of the daguerreotype, are that art will become mere photographic copies of reality, in one word: materialism. He reads Champfleury, Flaubert and Baudelaire, seeing them as “democratic-physiological litterats,” and understands the fatalism of Madame Bovary. But he still finds the naturalists brutal: their curiosity is a positive feature, but their attitude strikes him as too cold, the observation as too exact, drowning poetry in details. His reservation is, expressed in nearly the same words, that of Georg Brandes in the 1870’s, until Edvard Brandes had tutored him in naturalism. Distinguishing, like Brandes, between “idealistic” and “naturalistic” romanticism, Møller’s ideal is the latter: the French one. 42

43

Francis Bull, Frederik Paasche, A.H. Winsnes, Philip Houm Norsk litteraturhistorie vols. 1-5, Oslo: Aschehoug 1957-63 (2nd edition); vol. 4, Francis Bull Norges Litteratur fra februarrevolutionen til verdenskrigen, p. 324. Peter Ludvig Møller Adam Oehlenschläger, op. cit., pp. 73-74. 2nd edition 1964, pp. 64-65.


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Yet step by step Møller attains greater understanding of the more radical realists, fighting clichés, illusions and bigotry by depicting reality without “beautifying make-up.” Reading French Romanticists and realists in their surroundings, and writing about them, has in other words taken him a long way from his attitude of 1847. But his ideal of realism, in psychology and in description of manners, remains Balzac – “that genial writer” – and the “Balzacian literary movement,” also in his comments on new Danish literature. He even plans a Danish edition of Balzac’s Comédie humaine in several volumes.

VII. From the point of view of critical history the important thing is, of course, not Møller’s personal opinions, but whether these opinions were published. They were – in Comedy, in his Letters from Paris in Copenhagen newspapers several times each month (and occasionally in Oslo and Stockholm papers), and in articles in encyclopedias. Though these articles were mostly pseudonymous, it seems that people knew who the author was. One of the encyclopedia articles, from 1860, contains what must be the first Danish mention of Flaubert and describes at length, and very positively, French romantisme, defined as “liberalism in literature,” with special emphasis on Balzac, who is seen as nothing less than “the most profound thinker and the richest creative power to have ever appeared in the form of a novel…it must be admitted that no one can be under the illusion any longer, and his works give the most complete picture of contemporary morals in Paris and France.”44 My conclusion is that P.L. Møller was the first Danish critic to understand European “romantisme” as a movement and to understand it not uncritically but largely on its own merits, as individualism and realism. He was the first to introduce it as a critical program and the first to treat his contemporaries with the psychological-historicalsociological methods of new French criticism. Of course, his contribution cannot be compared to that of Brandes, although their taste and critical practice coincide, often in amazing detail, on several crucial points. Møller lacked what Brandes found: a 44

For example, in Det nyere Lystspil, op. cit., pp. 176-177, p. 259 and in Møller’s article “Fransk Litteratur” in Nordisk Conversations-Lexicon, vol. 3, 1860, p. 161.

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Stuart Mill and a Taine to cut the last strings to Hegel and idealism and to collect the disparate sympathies of the eclectic into one, effective program. The influence of a critic also depends on the situation in which he appears and on his talent for using it. And even if Møller had lived in Denmark, his talent would probably have been too desultory and unconcentrated to grip a situation and make the “romantisme” what Brandes made it: “an event in intellectual history.”45 But still, I think, Møller may well be claimed to have been more important than commonly assumed, as an underminer of the national romanticism with its harmony and of Biedermeier with its harmonization, and as a precursor of the modern breakthrough, by his writings and by his influence on Scandinavian writers and critics, perhaps including the young Brandes himself. This position seems confirmed by the interest that people like Drachmann and J.P. Jacobsen took in his work (the latter reading his manuscripts before sketching him as the critic in Niels Lyhne),46 and by the admiration shown him by “breakthrough” figures as Robert Watt and Vilhelm Møller, who, during the years 1866-75, printed some of his posthumous articles in books and in their reviews, Figaro, Nyt dansk Maanedsskrift and Flyvende Blade, which were also the reviews of the new movement. P.L. Møller, too, to speak in Taine’s terms, had his “master faculty”: his sense of justice. This constituted his prevalent ethics, and this made him, psychologically speaking, a controversialist. He was critical in order to counterbalance the verdicts of his time, by contradicting the overrated and dominant voices, and by defending what he found neglected, and yet being unafraid of revising his own opinions. Perhaps it is time that he should benefit from the same justice – not only for the sake of his reputation, but for the sake of a more varied picture of the transitional process up to the famous 1870’s.

45 46

Henning Fenger Georg Brandes’ læreår, op. cit., p. 275. J.P. Jacobsen Niels Lyhne, Copenhagen 1880. On the critics as drawn from Møller, see the correspondence between Georg Brandes and Jacobsen in December of 1880, in Georg og Edvard Brandes. Brevveksling med nordiske Forfattere og Videnskabsmænd, ed. by Morten Borup, Copenhagen: Gyldendal, vol. 3, pp. 155-157.

V. Art

Thorvaldsen: An Introduction to his Work By Else Kai Sass Bertel Thorvaldsen was born in Copenhagen in the year 1770 as the son of Gotskalk Thorvaldsen, an Icelandic woodcarver and his Danish wife of Jutland origin. The boy was trained by his father in the latter’s craft, and when quite young he is said to have already been proficient enough to have helped his father in his work of carving figureheads in the naval shipyards, where Gotskalk Thorvaldsen was employed. We still have several of Thorvaldsen’s woodcarvings from his early youth, and throughout his long life he preserved his youthful respect for the wood-carver’s craft. Thus, when he stopped on his journey from Rome to Copenhagen at Sleswig in the autumn of 1819 to see Sleswig Cathedral, he expressed his admiration of Hans Brüggemann’s altarpiece to those who accompanied him, adding that they could trust his judgment for he had been a woodcarver himself. Thorvaldsen was accepted as a pupil by the Academy of Fine Arts at Copenhagen at the early age of eleven, and, during the years following, he was moved from class to class and gained all the medals of the Academy. His two principal teachers at the Academy were the sculptor Johannes Wiedewelt and the painter N.A. Abildgaard, both fervent admirers of classical art. Wiedewelt had been a close friend of Winckelmann and had shared a flat with him in Rome in the 1750’s, while Abildgaard had been friends with Sergel and Füssli during his student years in Rome in the 1770’s. It was especially Abildgaard who early discovered Thorvaldsen’s unusual gifts, and who became his firm friend. In 1796 Thorvaldsen was awarded the largest travelling grant of the Academy, and in August of the same year he went on board the naval frigate Thetis which was to take him to Italy. On March 8, 1797, Thorvaldsen arrived in Rome, a day he later always celebrated as his “Roman Birthday.” Thanks to Abildgaard’s teaching as well as to his personal influence Thorvaldsen arrived in

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Rome convinced that he had first of all to study the works of antiquity. However, a bitter disappointment awaited him, for on his arrival in Rome he was met by the news that the most famous of the classical statues in the Vatican, statues such as the Apollo and the Belvedere torso, were packed, ready to be sent to Paris, being among the hundred works of art which had been ceded to France by the peace-treaty of Tolentino, 1797. Although Thorvaldsen thus had to forego for a time the study of the main treasures of antiquity, there was still a wealth left for him to study both of statues, busts, and reliefs in public and private collections as well as on the Roman Forum and in the squares and streets of Rome. Moreover, Thorvaldsen was fortunate enough to gain the goodwill of Georg Zoëga, the Danish archaeologist, who with his deep love for and knowledge of antiquity proved an inspiring guide for the young sculptor in the Rome of antiquity which surrounded him on all sides. How great an impression ancient Rome made on Thorvaldsen may be gauged from the hundreds of drawings he made, and which are preserved in the Thorvaldsen Museum in Copenhagen. These drawings consist partly of copies of ancient statues and reliefs, of which several are made from engravings, partly of drawings of classical works of art on the Capitol, in the Vatican, and in the Villa Albani, while others again are free drawings with classical subjects. In this way Thorvaldsen succeeded in making the allegorical apparatus of antiquity his own, in gaining complete familiarity with the iconography of Roman mythology, and in mastering classical formal expression and methods of composition. His drawings from life also show how he came to look at life around him with the eyes of antiquity, be it drawings made of models in his studio, or of young people on the Spanish Steps, who quite naturally and unself-consciously fell into truly statuesque poses. It is, however, not only from his own work that we can tell, by inference, what the great art of antiquity meant for Thorvaldsen. An even more direct testimony is given by his own large collection of classical art, now in the Thorvaldsen Museum. This collection comprises really several different collections, such as plaster casts of sculptures from classical antiquity, a collection which he began already when young, and which he regarded as part of his tools, and Egyptian, Greek, and Roman antiquities, which he began to buy as soon as he had the means to do so, also containing objects which came from the excavations which he and the painter Vincenzo Camuccini jointly sponsored at Palestrina. Besides, he had also a large library with many valuable, richly illustrated books on the monuments of antiquity. He continued

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to add to his classical collection, thus showing that his love of ancient art persisted throughout his life. It was during his first years in Rome that he learnt how to make clay take shape under his hand. Two small groups of figures show admirably each in its own way their maker’s attitude to classical art and his earliest attempts to work with sculpture. The first group dates from 1798 and is a presentation of Bacchus and Ariadne. In its composition one can trace the influence of an artistically rather indifferent Roman group of figures, the Asclepeios and Hygieia in the Vatican, which are coarsely and angularly executed. In spite of this, however, Thorvaldsen’s group contains an idyllic element, characteristic not only of one side of classical Roman sculpture but also of something essential in Thorvaldsen’s own artistic temperament. The second group, Achilles and Penthesilea of 1801, shows an equally strong affinity with classical antiquity, but this group exhibits, in contradistinction to the first group, something of that genuine pathos which only the very greatest art possesses. It is also for this group that Thorvaldsen made a series of magnificent sketches, now in the Thorvaldsen Museum (figure 1). By its inspired modelling and its dramatic intensity it cannot but remind us of Sergel’s small terra-cotta groups, which, however, Thorvaldsen probably never saw. As shown by the above two groups, Thorvaldsen was fascinated equally by the idyllic and by the great pathos in classical art. It was the idyllic which came to predominate in his own art, but sometimes the pathos breaks through his always controlled form, and then one discovers how far richer and far more composite he was in his artistic personality than the familiar conception of him allows one to guess. Throughout his life Thorvaldsen took his time about creating a work of art. His ideas demanded a long period of growth. He made one drawing after another, all embodying similar ideas, but it might take years before he created the work foreshadowed in the drawings. Thus, he was not very productive during his first years in Rome. Back in Copenhagen the professors of the Academy of Fine Arts were becoming restive, as they had seen no other results of the large grant which they had awarded him than a few small works, and they had to let him know that his grant would not be renewed any longer, and he would have to return to Denmark. Thorvaldsen knew that if this happened, it would be the end of his development as a sculptor, and he concentrated therefore all his energy on creating one great work, which at last would justify the faith his professors had had in him. The work was finished during the early months of 1803; it was Jason, a statue of colossal size.

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Figure 1. Sketches for Achilles and Pethesilea (ca. 1801). Thorvaldsen’s Museum.

Thorvaldsen’s Jason (figure 2) is a heroic figure, caught in the moment of quietude between rest and measured tread. The statue is to be seen directly from the front, so that one can take in the whole of the body, which has no distracting horizontal sections, in one glance. The head shows the same strong turning to the left as is shown in the Dioskuroi and in the Apollo Belvedere, giving the effective contrast which Thorvaldsen was later to use so frequently. It lends the figure expressiveness, and at the same time it contributes to a tightening of all lines in a vertical direction. When old, Thorvaldsen told of how he wanted the Jason statue to show what he had it in him to do before he left Rome, “Every day I ran to the Vatican and devoured with my eyes as much as I knew how to of the classical statues; on the way home I took good care not to look round. Then I started in, working away, taking snuff the whole day to keep the nerves in excitation. There was


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Figure 2. Jason with the Golden Fleece (1802-03). Thorvaldsen’s Museum.

no part of myself in the statue at all, and as it had to be great, I put far more energy into it than I could stand and became ill.”1 There is something touching in the modesty revealed in those words of the old sculptor, showing as they do the concentration demanded for the creation of so great a work of art. For it is a great work of art, as already his contemporaries recognized. The truth hidden in Thorvaldsen’s words is that the statue of Jason is the result of a struggle with classical art, but the outcome of that struggle is a new great style, which is his alone, and which he had created without being influenced by any other artist. Thorvaldsen, too, had been under the spell of the Apollo Belvedere, which had given the preceding age its ideal of beauty, just as his older 1

Jørgen Balthasar Dalhoff Et Liv i Arbejde vols. 1-2, Copenhagen 1915-16; vol. 2, p. 223.

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and famous fellow artist, Canova, had been, when in 1801 he had created his statue of Perseus for the Vatican as a substitute for the Apollo which it had lost when it was taken to Paris. But Thorvaldsen had reacted against both the statue of Apollo Belvedere and that of Perseus. Instead of the open form of these statues with arms extended, Thorvaldsen had used the closed form in his statue, with the frontal aspect emphasized, apart from the head, which is turned away, so that the tall, narrow figure can be inscribed in a rectangle. It was this statue in which a whole age saw its ideal of male beauty personified: the hero who is at the same time man and divine. It is characteristic of Thorvaldsen that he himself felt that he had really exceeded his own powers with the Jason statue. It was a tour de force. With this statue he had carried neoclassicism to its culmination as a European style. The Jason statue will always remain the programmatic statement of neoclassicism. The small group of statues made during the years following on Jason is so essentially different from that heroic figure that they have to be taken as created almost in a conscious reaction against it. All of the statues of this small group, comprising Ganymede (1804), Bacchus (1804), Apollo (1805), Psyche with the Jar of Beauty (1806), Hebe (1806), the group Cupid and Psyche (1807), present quite young people, “the nectar of youth” (in the words of Julius Lange2), and all of them are less than life-size. Thorvaldsen’s drawings include numerous studies for the statue of Bacchus and for the group of Cupid and Psyche (figure 3), ranging from direct copies of classical statues to free variations on the same themes. These drawings enable us to follow Thorvaldsen’s fascinated pre-occupation with antiquity, and at the same time his struggle to liberate himself from the paradigms of antiquity and his attempt to create a new classical art. This is especially true of the group Cupid and Psyche. In the classical group in Museo Capitolino in Rome, the youthful lovers are presented in a close embrace, united in a kiss. This makes the group rounded and closed above. Thorvaldsen has opened up the group (figure 4); the two young people stand side by side, he with his arm round her waist, and their glances meet only in the mirror of the nectar beaker. The round group has become flat. Thorvaldsen has taken into consideration that the wall behind the statue would

2

Julius Lange Sergel og Thorvaldsen: Studier i den nordiske Klassicismes Fremstilling af Mennesket, Copenhagen: Andr. Fred. Høst & Søns Forlag 1886, p. 134.


Figure 3. Sketches for Cupid and Psyche (ca. 1807). Thorvaldsen’s Museum.

Figure 4. Cupid and Psyche Reunited in Heaven (1807). Thorvaldsen’s Museum.

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act as background; this, however, does not prevent the group from also being beautiful when seen from the back. The interest in the relief effect of the statue is connected with that admiration for line which was then prevalent, and it is pertinent to ask if that is not to be set in relation to the widespread shadowless contour print, generally used in the reproductions of sculptures, classical as well as modern ones. Through these the eye became trained first and foremost to see the outline of a human figure or of a statue, while the sense for the plastic form was less pronounced. In saying that, however, we do not intend to imply that Thorvaldsen did not have a sense for the beauty of plastic form. He had a fine feeling for the plastic. That is particularly well demonstrated by these statues of youth, which must be regarded as typical of Thorvaldsen’s mature style. They show how Thorvaldsen built up his statues round the middle axis, and left them to make only quite simple and uncomplicated movements, which, moreover, balance each other. One foot is placed slightly sideways, or perhaps only the heel is raised a little. But this slight movement is in return felt throughout the figure in a play of subtle displacements, which finally ebb out, naturally and lightly, in a hand holding a bowl or something similar. The worship of antiquity, like the worship of nature, of Norse antiquity, of the Middle Ages, and later of the Orient, is part of the romantic movement, which had its beginning in the eighteenth century and continued far into the first half of the nineteenth century. Thorvaldsen too, completely a child of his age, was gripped by this significant movement. We see, too, how medieval subjects fascinated him from the scenes he drew from Dante’s Divine Comedy, as also did John Flaxman and J.A. Koch. But, above all, it was the dream of Arcadia that hovered before his inward eye. Romanticism is not an artistic style; it is a spiritual movement. A sculptor who loved antiquity would naturally choose the classical form and shape. It is possible to analyze Thorvaldsen’s statues and to define their dependence on antiquity exactly; but something indefinable remains, which cannot be fixed, but which yet constitute an essential element in the total effect of the work of art. This “something,” call it poetry or Stimmung, is Thorvaldsen’s way of expressing the romantic movement of his time. The Danish art historian, Julius Lange, has understood intuitively the interplay of romanticism and classicism in Thorvaldsen’s art, and in his book Sergel og Thorvaldsen (1886) he has given the following sensitive characterization of it with special reference to statues of the type considered above: “Behind many of Thorvaldsen’s figures it is


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as if there were an invisible landscape, a darker or lighter mood of the time of day or night with which there is an immediate consonance of the mood of the figure.”3 Thorvaldsen himself felt the same thing, as we can tell from a series of large, carefully gone over drawings, in which he has drawn in several of the figures which he modelled during the years 18041807, thus, for example, Cupid, Bacchus, and the youthful Psyche with the Jar of Beauty, all placed in an Arcadian landscape. It cannot be a coincidence that these drawings with their mingling of the idyllic and the classic originated at a time when Thorvaldsen frequently had an opportunity to enjoy life in the country, staying with his Danish patrons, Baron and Baroness Schubart, at their lovely place on the Montenero near Leghorn, or at the spa in Lucca, or during his visits to Naples. Thorvaldsen was certainly very responsive to the beauty of nature. In his collection of paintings, now in the Thorvaldsen Museum in Copenhagen, landscape painting is also richly represented by paintings ranging from those of J.A. Koch and J.C. Reinhart to those of Jens Juel, Johan Christian Dahl, Johan Thomas Lundbye, and Dankvart Dreyer. As a plastic artist, he surely enjoyed seeing the beautifully built Italians, the descendants of those who posed for the classical works of art which he so much admired, on the background of the luxuriant southern landscape. When the Italians and the Scandinavians argued with each other which was the greater sculptor, Thorvaldsen or Canova, the Italians usually went so far as to concede that Thorvaldsen was the greater as far as reliefs were concerned, but they counted their own countryman absolutely the greater when it was a question of the art of making statues. There certainly cannot be any doubt that Thorvaldsen ranks high in his composition of reliefs. Here the best qualities of his artistic personality came into their own, his musicality, his sense of line and rhythm. His drawings allow us frequently to trace his inspiration from its inception to the final composition, as for instance in that exquisite drawing of 1809, Cupid Stung by a Bee Complains to Venus (figure 5). The form is barely hinted at, as is usual with Thorvaldsen’s drawings. The stress is on movement and rhythm, on the unity of composition. The two figures are joined to form a whole in the most wonderful way. Thorvaldsen made here a beautiful, mature woman in a style which is both great, warm, and alive. In fact, Thorvaldsen’s strength shows itself particularly in the creation of such two-figure groups, which he had made specially his own. One may mention from among many, Hercules

3

Julius Lange Sergel og Thorvaldsen, op. cit., p. 149.

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Figure 5. Cupid Stung by a Bee Complains to Venus (1809). Thorvaldsen’s Museum.

and Omphade, Cupid and Bacchus, Cupid Received by Anacreon, Hercules and Hebe, a small sketch of the last mentioned group may be seen in an upper corner of the drawing of Venus and Cupid. It cannot be denied that some of the freshness and warmth was lost in the reliefs, but to compensate for this they possess purity and classical style, and the noble line and the rhythm are preserved in them. One may refer to Art and the Light-Bringing Genius (1808), as an example of the reliefs with two figures. It was to become Thorvaldsen’s membership work of the San Luca Academy of Rome. Many years later Thorvaldsen said that he had modelled the a genio lumen, as this relief is also called, sitting on the floor in the cottage of a charcoal burner in order to catch the top light, working to the music of the roast being turned. The graceful, sitting pose of the meditative young woman and the slim youth who pours the oil of genius into the lamp are magnificently modelled. It was this lightness of touch and his unerring rhythmical sensibility which made it possible for Thorvaldsen to model the thirty-five meter long Alexander frieze in only three months in 1812. Some separate sketches of its main groups helped him to keep his attention fixed on the wholeness of the frieze. As he had only two plates of slate at his disposal, he had to send the individual parts to be cast as soon as they were made. The casting was done at night in order that the plates might be ready next morning. The frieze was intended for decorating a room in the Quirinal Palace in honor of Napoleon’s expected visit to Rome in 1812,


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Figure 6. Priam Pleading with Achilles for the Body of Hector (1815). Thorvaldsen’s Museum.

and it celebrates Alexander’s triumphal entry into Babylon. The whole work is a successful blending of impressions from antiquity and the artist’s own original conceptions. Classical reliefs of chariot races have offered the basis for Alexander on his war-chariot, and the two men leading the horse Bucephalos cannot but remind the onlooker of the Dioskuroi; the Parthenon frieze certainly inspired the attendant troop of horse. The beautiful groups in the procession of the Babylonians stem directly from Thorvaldsen’s own creative imagination. The fisherman on the riverbank and the dancing girls breathe an air of the purely idyllic. The frieze shows throughout a fine, flowing rhythm. As Napoleon never arrived in Rome, there was no occasion to execute the frieze in marble for the Quirinal, but a plaster cast may still be seen there. Work on the marble copy had been started, however, and it was later completed for the villa of Count Sommariva on Lake Como. A second copy was executed for Christiansborg Palace in Copenhagen, and was heavily damaged in the fire which laid the Palace to waste in 1884. His contemporaries felt that the completion of the Alexander frieze marked the peak of Thorvaldsen’s artistic career. For him it signified an exertion and a happy manifestation of all his powers after that period of grief, illness, and lassitude which had overtaken him after the death of his small son in 1811. If one were to single out one particular work from all of Thorvaldsen’s many reliefs, it would be Priam Pleading with Achilles for the Body of Hector (figure 6), rather than the Alexander frieze. Thorvaldsen modelled the Priam relief in 1815 to the order of the Duke of Bedford, and executed it in marble for Woburn Abbey. The Danish archae-

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ologist, K. Friis Johansen, has shown convincingly Thorvaldsen’s dependence of A.J. Carstens’ composition of the same subject, and for the common source of both compositions he has pointed to a classical gem in Thorvaldsen’s collections.4 To these should be added the presentation of the same scene on the classical marble chronicle, the tabula iliaca, of which Thorvaldsen owned a cast. Besides the two main figures, Priam and Achilles, the tabula iliaca shows also a man standing, who, in Thorvaldsen’s relief, has been moved to a position behind Achilles; the half-kneeling and slightly forward bending Mercury behind Priam of the tabula iliaca has a very clear parallel in the slave who, in Thorvaldsen’s relief, carries a large jar as a gift to the victor. Although the inspiration for the composition came from Carstens and antiquity, it is in the development of this composition that Thorvaldsen revealed his genius. The motif of the forward bending man is utilized rhythmically in that the movement proceeding from the slave advancing on the extreme left is continued in a smoothly running curve to the man with the jar, and from him to the kneeling Priam to be captured by the sitting Achilles, and finally coming to rest in his friend who is standing leaning against the table, which thus rounds off the composition. It is presumably this final, beautifully formed figure that Thorvaldsen had in mind when once he explained to a fellow countryman, the author and poet Carsten Hauch, how he sometimes arrived at fresh motifs for postures, “The ancients have already used most of the natural postures,” said Thorvaldsen, “and when one refuses to take refuge in distortions and exaggerations of the type used by Bernini, who sometimes turned the heads of his statues so that they appear to be looking at their own back, then it is quite difficult to hit on something new. But once I was standing leaning against a table, when it struck me that I had never seen that pose, and in that way I got the motif for one of my best works.”5 Others, probably having heard it from the artist himself, have told how Thorvaldsen once on his way from his studio to the trattoria where he had his dinner saw a Roman youth half-standing, half-sitting in a casual, resting pose, which caught his admiration by its plastic character. He sketched it quickly in a couple of lines on a bit of paper (figure 7), and later it became the starting-point for his statue of Mercury about to Kill Argus (figure 8), modelled in 1818. The marble copy

4

5

K. Friis Johansen “Om Thorvaldsens ‘Priamos og Achilleus’” in Kunst og Kultur vol. 11, no. 4, 1923, p. 244. Carsten Hauch Minder fra min første Udenlandsreise, Copenhagen 1871, p. 238.


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Figure 7. Studies of a Seated Youth. Thorvaldsen’s Museum.

was bought by Alexander Baring, later Lord Ashburton, and it is now in the Thorvaldsen Museum. Thorvaldsen’s Mercury is one of his few statues intended to be seen from all sides. The chiastic pose in itself with its subtle displacement of arms and feet incites the onlooker to walk all round the statue. The English painter, Joseph Farington, gives in his diary a conversation which he had in 1821 with the famous portrait painter, Thomas Lawrence. Their conversation turned on whether Thorvaldsen or Canova was the greatest sculptor of their time. Lawrence, who was one of Canova’s friends, maintained that Canova was the greatest sculptor since the Greeks. His words about Thorvaldsen were that he “had executed with ability a frieze, The Entrance of Alexander to Babylon, but had failed in other things – female characters.”6 It is easy to see how 6

Joseph Farington The Farington Diary vols. 1-8, ed. by James Greig. London 1923-28; vol. 8, p. 286.

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Figure 8. Mercury about to Kill Argus (1818). Thorvaldsen’s Museum.

Lawrence, who excelled in the portraiture of beautiful women of the English aristocracy, came to prefer Canova’s figures of women with their stress on the sensuous element to Thorvaldsen’s virginal goddesses. The statue of Venus which Thorvaldsen modelled in 1813-16 (figure 9) is as a type as far from the famous Medici classical as it is from Canova’s paraphrases of it. If one were to liken Thorvaldsen’s statue to one classical statue, it would be to the Venus of Cyrene in the Terme Museum in Rome, but Thorvaldsen’s Venus with her finer forms gives a younger and shyer impression. The round plinth and the many subtle displacements in the figure lead the eye to circle the statue, and allow its plasticity to emerge. There is not only a play of line, but a fully plastic form that radiates from the interior in soft curves. Thorvaldsen regarded the nude female figure first and foremost as the starting-point for plastic creation. In his group Cupid and the


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Figure 9. Venus with the Apple Awarded by Paris (1813-16). Thorvaldsen’s Museum.

Graces (1817-19) Thorvaldsen worked with the female figure in the abstract (figure 10). It is actually one and the same female form seen from three sides. Thorvaldsen united in this group the effect of spatial composition with three figures enclosed in the imaginary elliptic space suggested by the plinth with a relief in which the subtle rhythmical play of line is displayed against the wall behind the figures. The original marble copy of the fully finished work is now in the Thorvaldsen Museum, and in it one can see how the small Amor playing his lyre together with the tall slim vase with its upward aspiring form echoing the fine curves of the young woman’s body fill the large empty spaces in the lower part of the group, and thus help to underline the frontality of the middle one of the graces. No other work by Thorvaldsen is to such an extent representative of the Empire style.

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Figure 10. Cupid and the Graces (1817-19). Thorvaldsen’s Museum.

The dance is a motif which keenly interested Thorvaldsen. In his statue of A Dancer of 1817 (figure 11), executed for Prince Esterházy, and in another version of it (figure 12), Thorvaldsen figured convincingly the light footwork of dancers and thus refuted the idea that he was unable to express what was spirited and in movement. With their classical features and whirling robes the dancers are the daughters of the rich and warm antiquity, as Thorvaldsen knew this from the wall-paintings of Pompeii and from reliefs showing dancing Bacchantes. But they are also related to the Italian peasant girls of whom Baron Schubart testified in a letter to Thorvaldsen that “they are so lovely and dance so well that it is really a genuine pleasure to dance with them.” They are also sisters of the Italian tarantella dancers whom Thorvaldsen never tired of watching. It may be one of those tarantella dancers that came into Thorvaldsen’s mind when he


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Figure 11. Dancing Girl (1817). Thorvaldsen’s Museum.

modelled that charming little sketch of a tamborine-playing dancer, now at Nysø. Thorvaldsen’s joy in the dance may lead us to understand his sense of rhythm as we see it in his statues and reliefs. He told us himself of how when young he never wearied of dancing. If he tired for a moment and sat down, then as soon as the music started playing again to another dance, he would jump up to throw himself again wholeheartedly into the dance. Still when old he would jump up at a dance to partner even the youngest girls present, and during his last years in Copenhagen he would sit in his place in the Royal Theater and watch the ballets of his friend Bournonville as well as the Spanish dancers when they visited Copenhagen. Their visit in 1840 influenced a series of drawings and reliefs which he made at the time.

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Figure 12. Dancing Girl (between 1817-22). Thorvaldsen’s Museum.

The desire of the romantic age to overstep the barriers separating antiquity and its own age resulted in Thorvaldsen’s portrait statues of young women dressed in beautifully flowing garments in which he expressed most exquisitely the graceful feminine of his time. The transition from life to art was made in the salons, in which talented women of the upper classes like Emma Hamilton and Ida Brun appeared dressed in classical style to sing, recite, or just to figure attitudes copied from the drama or pictorial art. Hence no one would find it surprising to see Princess Maria Fjódorovna Barjátinskaja portrayed as a Roman woman of the classical period or the Princess Caroline Amalie in a graceful pose as Artemis Brauronia. Already Canova had taken the seated statue, known as the Resting Agrippina on the Capitol, as the model for his majestic statue of Napoleon’s mother, Madame Létizia Bonaparte; she is shown sitting in


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approximately the same pose as the Resting Agrippina and in a chair of the classical period (modelled 1804; marble copy at Chatsworth). It was of this statue that Quatremère du Quincy said, “On dirait que ce n’était plus une statue; elle semblait parler et préte à se lever.”7 Thorvaldsen has varied the motif of this pose and the type of seated woman in his statue of Countess Osterman-Tolstój whom he shows sitting on a stool with a meander border, as well as in a couple of vividly modelled sketches of graceful women casually leaning back in a chair (figure 13) and with hair style à l’antique.

Figure 13. Seated Lady (between 1815-19). Thorvaldsen’s Museum.

7

Quoted from Vittorio Malamani Canova, Milan: U. Hoepli 1911, p. 118. Malamani quotes from Quatremère de Quincy Canova et ses ouvrages, ou Mémoires historiques sur la vie et les travaux de ce célèbre artiste, Paris 1834.

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With the Alexander frieze Thorvaldsen was well on his way to becoming famous throughout Europe, but he reached the apex of his fame with the great monuments which he made during the years between his first visit to Denmark, in 1819-20, and his final return to the country of his birth in 1838. The task which reflected the greatest honor on Thorvaldsen came when he was asked by Cardinal Consalvi, a close friend of Pope Pius VII, to make the monument for the latter’s tomb in St. Peter’s Cathedral in Rome. Thorvaldsen made it during the years 1824-31, and it was executed in marble and erected in St. Peter’s. It was possible to ask Thorvaldsen, a sculptor from distant northern Europe and a heretic as well, to make the monument to commemorate the Holy Father, and destined for his tomb in the greatest church in the Roman Catholic world, solely because Canova had died in 1822, and there was no other Italian sculptor who might even attempt to compare himself with Thorvaldsen as the foremost sculptor of his age. A beautiful sketch for the seated statue of the Pope promises more than what the finished monument fulfils. Too many considerations of a conventional type made themselves felt, and misunderstandings with regard to measurements and placing also interfered with the actual work on the monument. It was said that Thorvaldsen himself was dissatisfied with his papal monument, and felt that he did not command the grandiose gesture required to measure up to the large dimensions of the most splendid ecclesiastical interior of all time, that of St. Peter’s in Rome. Thorvaldsen was more fortunate with the monuments which he made for his Polish patrons, such as the statue of Włodzimierz Potocki (1821), in marble in the Cathedral on the Wawel in Cracow, Copernicus (1822), in bronze in Warsaw, and, above all, the splendid equestrian monument of Prince Józef Poniatowski, the hero of the Napoleonic wars, modelled in 1826-27 and cast in bronze; it was not until a hundred years later that it was erected on the Saxon Square in Warsaw. Its glorious framing, the Square with the Saxon Palace and the park in the background, does not exist any longer. Both the Palace and the statue, probably the last classical, equestrian statue in existence, were destroyed during World War II. In 1952, another copy of the statue, cast in bronze from the model in the Thorvaldsen Museum, was presented to the City of Warsaw by the Danish State and the Municipality of Copenhagen and erected in Warsaw. A workshop as active as Thorvaldsen’s near the Piazza Barberini could be kept going only by many hands. Consequently, it is not surprising to learn that in 1819 Thorvaldsen had nearly forty helpers in


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his employment, as we know from the account books which he had then to acquire owing to his visit to Denmark, his home country, the first visit which he paid to it since leaving it in 1796. Thorvaldsen’s staff comprised all types of helpers who could assist him artistically and technically. There were men who were artists in their own right, like the Danish sculptor H.E. Freund, who acted as head of the workshop for some time, but who never gave up his independence as an artist to accommodate himself to Thorvaldsen’s style. There were Pietro Tenerani and Luigi Bienaimé who worked in the closest possible association with Thorvaldsen, and both of whom for years acted as heads of the workshops, and there were young sculptors from the whole of Europe, who spent years of their apprenticeship in this stimulating artistic environment, and, finally there were the stone masons, good artisans, usually fetched from Carrara, and who knew how to rough-hew the stone or to take care of such specialized features as the carving of the hair and details of clothing. It is not rare to find references in contemporary memoirs to Thorvaldsen as not himself taking part in the execution in marble, indeed, a few writers go so far as to try to maintain that Thorvaldsen was not even able to work in marble. That, however, is founded on a misunderstanding of the actual conditions. Already during his first years in Rome Thorvaldsen had acquired the difficult technique of carving in marble, probably under the supervision of the sculptor Domenico Cardelli, to whom he had been introduced by Zoëga, but who, unfortunately, died in the year that Thorvaldsen arrived in Rome. Already in the autumn of 1797 Thorvaldsen was able to write to his teacher and old friend Abildgaard, “In my attempt [to work in marble] I have found that the difficulty of working in marble is not so great as I had imagined.”8 Some marble copies of classical statues made in the years 1799-1800, as well as his first works executed in marble, were certainly made by him personally, and they leave us in no doubt that Thorvaldsen had mastered the difficult technique of carving in marble. But already by 1805 his workshop had grown so busy that he had to employ several assistants; the names of these assistants and collaborators occur in letters, and from 1805 onwards Thorvaldsen’s staff grew steadily larger, as orders began to pour in. It is not rare to find that contracts made with him contain a paragraph stipulating that Thorvaldsen himself should undertake the execution in marble. 8

The Letter Archive at the Thorvaldsen’s Museum, letter draft from Thorvaldsen in Rome to Nicolai Abildgaard in Copenhagen (no date) 1797.

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Thorvaldsen’s incredibly many, and many-sided, works of marble sculptures show a homogeneity and maintain also on the whole a high standard in spite of the many helpers he had. That is due to the fact that he, with his strong personality, could make all these diverse artists and artisans accept his intentions. His capacity for work was so great that never did an important work leave his workshop if he had not himself retouched it. An excellent example of this is afforded by the statue of Christ at Carrara, for the carving of which Pietro Bienaimé was responsible. It is clear from a letter from Bienaimé to Thorvaldsen that the master himself went to Carrara to make the final corrections of the statue.9 Thorvaldsen’s biographer, J.M. Thiele, who had a personal knowledge of the regime in Thorvaldsen’s workshops, speaks of his “grandiose censures.” The Danish archaeologist, Peter Oluf Brøndsted, wrote in a letter from Rome in 1822 that Thorvaldsen had now so many studios for his numerous works that if these workshops and their inhabitants were gathered together in one place, then they would constitute a small town of artists all by themselves. Brøndsted then goes on to quote something Thorvaldsen had said to him a couple of days previously about his morning visits to his workshops, “I make my rounds every morning like any other doctor, and visit my patients, my main occupation though is surgical operations.”10 The situation sketched in those words was well-known to visitors to Thorvaldsen’s workshops, and the English painter, E.M.Ward, has preserved it for us in a couple of most amusing caricatures. Thorvaldsen’s great gift of making everyone accept his artistic will and his own care in revising and in adding the final character to a work explain why all the works emanating from his studio are through and through impregnated with his style, in spite of the fact that he left it quite frequently to the most trusted members of his staff to model the statues to full size after his sketches. Only once did the collaboration break down. When Terenani became too high and mighty, and insisted on his style being adopted for the allegorical figures for the monument for the Duke of Leuchtenberg, Thorvaldsen intervened, and it came to a break between them, which caused great bitterness on both sides. 9

10

The Letter Archive at the Thorvaldsen’s Museum, letter from Pietro Bienaimé from Carrara to Thorvaldsen in Rome, August 23, 1828. Quoted from a letter to P.O. Brøndsted, published in Breve fra P.O. Brøndsted 180133 (Memoirer og Breve, vol. 47), ed. by Julius Clausen and Peter Frederik Rist, Copenhagen 1926, p. 145.


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Many people felt that Thorvaldsen accepted far too many orders. Indeed, the sculptor Martin Wagner in 1825 wrote to the King Ludwig of Bavaria that even supposing that Thorvaldsen would live for another fifty years, he would still be quite incapable of making all the works which he had undertaken to do. However, he did finish most of them, although his patrons occasionally had to wait for them for a long time, as many reminders in his collection of letters tell us. The worst case was that with the statue of Jason, which Thomas Hope had ordered executed in marble in 1803. It was not until 1828 that Hope received the longed-for marble statue, but then in return he received two reliefs and a bust of his eldest son in addition. When Thorvaldsen left Rome in 1838 to return to the country of his birth after forty years of work in Rome, he had by and large cleared decks. In one respect, and in one respect only, did Thorvaldsen prove careless, and that was with regard to the many marble copies of different workmanship which his helpers undertook to make, pressed to do so partly by the many eager buyers who wanted to possess replicas of Thorvaldsen’s best known statues, and partly by their own desire for an added income. Nothing, however, has harmed Thorvaldsen’s reputation more than these mechanically executed marble copies, all the more so as they often make their appearance in the salesroom or with artdealers, masquerading as genuine works by Thorvaldsen himself. It is extraordinary that Thorvaldsen himself never saw the danger of this mass production of his work. But so little did he do so that he himself contributed to the ensuing devaluation of his work by leaving in his will a large part of his estate to be used for making marble copies of the plaster-casts which he had bequeathed his hometown, the city of Copenhagen, together with his collections. His intention was to make sure that his Museum in Copenhagen should possess marble copies of those of his statues which he had executed in marble, and which existed, scattered throughout the world, in the possession of those who had ordered them made or in the possession of their heirs. The result of this provision in Thorvaldsen’s will was that marble copies were executed by Danish sculptors whose style became less and less like Thorvaldsen’s as classicism gave way to naturalism. It was not until 1916 when Mario Krohn was appointed into the then established Directorship of the Thorvaldsen Museum that the copying activity ceased. But by then it had damaged Thorvaldsen’s reputation as a creative artist severely, and had been the one single factor which more than any other had led to that devaluation of Thorvaldsen’s work among sculptors and art historians which became prevalent in the 1870’s and has lasted until today.

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Mario Krohn succeeded in having the fund for the copying of Thorvaldsen’s marble statues converted into a fund for acquiring the originals as these came on the market. He himself made a splendid beginning by appearing personally at the sale of the Hope heirlooms in England in 1917 to buy the statue of Jason for the Museum. From that time on there followed in a steady succession the acquisition of excellent original marble copies, most of them coming from Britain, such as Venus, Ganymede Offering the Cup, the Hebe of 1806 and the Hebe of 1816 (figure 14), Mercury about to Kill Argus, and, in 1952, the Museum acquired the group Cupid and the Graces as well as The Shepherd Boy from the Donner family in Holsten, in whose possession they had been since they were first bought by C.H. Donner directly from Thorvaldsen himself. To these acquisitions came a whole series of original marble reliefs.

Figure 14. Hebe (1816). Thorvaldsen’s Museum.


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All of these original marble copies show Thorvaldsen’s style in marble as it really was, and from its best side. Now when these marble copies have taken the place of the interior copies in the Thorvaldsen Museum, the first, most necessary step has been taken for a revaluation of Thorvaldsen as a sculptor. This, together with that growing interest in neoclassicism which is now coming to the fore as well among artists as among art historians throughout the world, will presumably result in a more just appreciation of Thorvaldsen’s works and in their gaining the position which is rightfully theirs in the world of art. During his last years in Denmark, i.e. from 1838 until his death in 1844, Thorvaldsen continued working, partly in his workshop on the Charlottenborg in Copenhagen and partly in his studio in the park of lovely Nysø near Præstø. Baron and Baroness Stampe, the owners of Nysø, not only built a studio for Thorvaldsen in their park, but they gave him also a home, the first he had had since he had left the home of his childhood in 1796. It was also at Nysø, in 1839, that Thorvaldsen made his own portrait statue. The old master has portrayed himself as a still vigorous man, standing, dressed in his simple artist’s smock, hammer and chisel in hand, and with one arm resting on his small statue of the Goddess of Hope, the only statue he ever made in a type of archaic style (1817). It had been ordered to be executed in marble by Baroness Caroline Humboldt, and another marble copy was erected as a memorial to her on her grave at Tegel near Berlin. Thorvaldsen’s choice of just this statue as a supporting statue for that of himself was presumably dictated by a desire for having this statue with its more formal style to point up the vitality of the male figure. Another interesting contrast has been achieved at the same time in that the group has acquired two fronts; it is, in fact, a cubistic way of composing in two planes, cutting each other under an angle of 90º. The idea of it comes from a Hellenistic statue of Venus, leaning on a female idol, in the Museo Archeologico in Venice, but which in Thorvaldsen’s day was in the Doge Palace. When one considers Thorvaldsen’s work as whole, it is impossible quite to rid oneself of an impression of one-sidedness. For Thorvaldsen the finest qualities of a work of art were beauty, calmness, harmony. It is only in his drawings that he shows that he was a man with passions and of deep human experience. In his quickly made sketches for compositions he did not avoid figures in violent movement, but when it came to his plastic works, all dramatic effect and all violent motion were stilled. Perhaps it would be more correct to think not in

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terms of one-sidedness, but rather in terms of the monotony of genius which Thorvaldsen then shares with so many other truly great artists. His contemporaries regarded Thorvaldsen as a second Pheidias, but he himself had no such exaggerated conception of his own work. A certain inborn dignity made his presence felt whether he appeared in a circle of artists or among lay people. His approach to ancient art was marked by humility. August Kestner in his Römische Studien has a story about Thorvaldsen which is characteristic of his reaction to classical art: When Thorvaldsen had already opened the door to leave me, his eye was caught by a classical head on the chimneypiece. It was the upward-looking head of a youth, known as The Athlete. The sight of this head made Thorvaldsen stop, deep in thought. He stood there for a couple of minutes, looking up at it, not thinking of me at all. He had already taken leave of me. Thus he stood a moment, alone, a couple of minutes, I should say; then he turned towards the open door, took himself almost violently to the head with his right hand, and said, strongly moved, to himself, “That is beyond us to do,” and left.11

One cannot help wondering how this son of a poor woodcarver from a far-away northern country succeeded when only a mere youth in gaining a prominent place in the international circle of artists in Rome, and during the forty years he lived and worked there achieving a world-wide fame and a popularity as have not fallen to the lot of any other sculptor in modern times. Honors were showered on him, and he associated with kings and princes and the elite of the intellectual world as an equal. Genius alone cannot have secured that position for him. One might expect to find in addition a concentrated will and energy in a man who succeeded in making his workshop still greater than that of his rival Canova, the Italian, the sculptor thirteen years his elder, already famous when Thorvaldsen arrived in Rome, regarded by his age almost with idolatry. But there are many testimonies to the fact that Thorvaldsen had something calm and slow in his nature which was regarded especially in his youth, as a sign of laziness. He must have had quite special personal characteristics which together with a goodly portion of luck brought him his unique position. It was, however, the statue of Jason which first made him famous, and that was his alone. He owed nothing to any other sculptor of his time for that, neither to Canova nor to the strange Sleswig sculptor, A.J. Carstens, whom Thorvaldsen met on his arrival in Rome, and who was then already suffering from the disease of which he died the 11

August Kestner Römische Studien, Berlin 1850, p. 77.


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following year. It is greatly to Canova’s credit that he was among the first to acknowledge the talent of his younger contemporary. He is said to have praised both the statue of Jason and that of the Adonis of 1808. Thorvaldsen was more critical of his famous fellow sculptor, but he expressed, however, openly his admiration for Canova’s models of the statue of Napoleon’s mother and of the monument in memory of Alfieri when he saw them exhibited in Rome in 1804. However, he did not care for Canova’s reclining statue of Paolina Borghese, and he is reported to have said of Canova’s daring group of Cupid and Psyche that it was composed as if it had been a windmill, and one evening when he and one of his compatriots stood looking at the young Canova’s gigantic Hercules and Lichas in the Palazzo Torlorna, he remarked, “It is a work of great genius, but no human being could ever stand in that attitude.”12 For the rest their relationship was marked by mutual respect and a certain rivalry, which found expression in an essentially different treatment of the same themes, such as Psyche, Hebe, Venus, the Graces, and the statues of women dancers. As far as Thorvaldsen’s personal development was concerned, it was of the greatest importance for him that his two cosmopolitan fellow-countrymen, Zoëga, the archaeologist, and Friederike Brun, the poetess, introduced him in the socially and intellectually ruling circle in Rome which had as its center the Prussian Ambassador to the See of St. Peter, Baron Wilhelm von Humboldt and his wife Caroline, who was intensely interested in art. Baron and Baroness Schubart also belonged to this circle and became the special patrons of Thorvaldsen, and through their aristocratic connections in both Rome and Denmark they were able to smooth his way in Rome. It did not take long for Thorvaldsen to gain international patronage. The Russian Countess, Irína Vorontsóva and Prince Malthe Putbus of Rügen were among the first to order a series of statues from him. When the Napoleonic Wars were over, and travelling took on enormous proportions, with Rome as the goal of artistically-minded tourists from the whole world, Thorvaldsen’s workshop as well as that of Canova became one of the sights of Rome which any tourist with some self-respect had to visit. The British formed the largest single contingent among Thorvaldsen’s admirers and patrons, and one rec12

Quoted from Just Matthias Thiele Thorvaldsens Biographi. Efter den afdøde Kunstners Brevvexlinger, egenhændige Optegnelser og andre efterladte Papirer vols. 1-4, Copenhagen 1851-56; vol. 1, Thorvaldsens Ungdomshistorie. 1770-1804, p. 181.

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ommended him to one another. Thorvaldsen’s letter archive spills over with letters of introduction to him and dinner invitations from enthusiastic Englishmen, Scots, and Irishmen, though also rich Poles and Russians, Germans and Austrians arrived in their numbers. Crownprince Ludwig, the later King of Bavaria, the Austrian Emperor, and Pope Leo XII must be regarded as being among the most prominent visitors Thorvaldsen had in his studio. Cavaliere Alberto, as Thorvaldsen was called in Rome, with his heroic stature, his big mane, and his blue eyes became one of the best known and best beloved figures in the artistic and social life of the city. We meet him in countless travellers’ memoirs, courteously showing his collections to his guests, or showing them the antiquities on the Capitol or in the Vatican by the light of torches, or present at the balls given by the financial magnate Prince Torlonia, where he admired especially the red and white complexion of the beautiful young English girls, or again at an uproarious party with sculptors and painters. Thorvaldsen liked to accept invitations to dinner parties and evening parties after his working day was over, but he himself gave no parties. He lived modestly in a couple of rooms in Casa Buti, a boarding-house in Palazzo Tomato in Strada Felice, now 46, Via Sistina. His compatriots said that these rooms served both as his living rooms and his private workshop, where he often made the sketches for the works which were to be carried out in his bigger workshops. It was also in this couple of rooms that late one night in 1815 he modelled his two famous reliefs Day (figure 15) and Night (figure 16). It was in his rooms in Strada Felice that he had his huge collections of books, paintings, ancient coins, vases, and smaller sculptures, all heaped up together. Later, when they were transferred to the Thorvaldsen Museum, they proved to fill many rooms. The secret of Thorvaldsen’s amazing working capacity must probably be sought in the working rhythm which he had made for himself, and with which he did not allow anything to interfere. He had, from time to time, ardent passions, and for many years had an Italian mistress by name Anna Maria Magnani, with whom he had two children, a boy, who died in 1811 at the age of five, and a daughter, Elisa, who was born in 1813, and whom he adopted and made his residuary legatee; her descendants are still alive today. But Thorvaldsen never attempted to make a home for Anna Maria Magnani, and he never married. He once gave his reason for it to Baroness Stampe in the following words, “I who always have my head full of


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Figure 15. Day (1815). Thorvaldsen’s Museum.

ideas for the marble groups which I want to make, how could I make a wife happy?”13 Many of his contemporaries have described how Thorvaldsen always had a pencil in his fingers, even when he was together with others. He made drawings on any piece of paper within reach. Several of these drawings, now in the Thorvaldsen Museum, are made on letters, invitations, or on bills. Others have described how he used to roll clay pellets between his fingers on his daily walk from Via Sistina to his workshops near Piazza Barberini. He was thus always in contact with his tools. Thorvaldsen was also a fine worker in clay, as may be seen from the sensitive sketches for some of his statues. Thorvaldsen was very musical. When he was quite young, he played the flute and the violin. But he left his violin in Copenhagen, and 13

Quoted from Louis Bobé Thorvaldsen i Kærlighedens Aldre, Copenhagen: Berlingske Forlag 1938, p. 131.

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Figure 16. Night (1815). Thorvaldsen’s Museum.

when in Rome he soon exchanged his flute for the guitar, and often reached out for it and played it beautifully. He is said to have played for some time with Ingres, who played the violin. Still in his old age at Nysø he would play the guitar for hours when he had finished his daily work. It is surely his musicality which is behind the fine rhythmic line of his reliefs. Thorvaldsen’s prevailing mood was serious. He is reported once to have said that he could not understand how any grown-up person could laugh. Nevertheless, he was not without a certain wry humor himself. He did not speak much, and when he did speak, he expressed himself shortly and to the point. Carsten Hauch was of the opinion that that was an inheritance from his Icelandic forbearers, those who told the sagas. There are also some blemishes in the picture of Thorvaldsen’s character as handed down to posterity. Several people drew attention to


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his stinginess and his suspiciousness. But he could be generous too, and many are the poor artists whom he helped either by loans or by buying their paintings. Even those who like Freund, Martin Wagner, and Wilhelm Marstrand criticized him most severely could not resist his charm and his natural dignity which made him the center of any gathering in which he found himself. Thorvaldsen’s return to the country of his birth in September 1838 became an event in which the whole nation participated. He was given a tumultuous reception by high and low, and was made an honorary citizen of Copenhagen. During the following years the architect, M.G. Bindesbøll, built the unique polychrome museum on Slotsholmen, in Copenhagen, to house all of Thorvaldsen’s works and his collections, his gift to his native town. He visited Rome only once more, in 1841-42. His journey through Germany was one of a hero receiving the homage due to him. Everywhere he was hailed as the greatest sculptor of his age. He had hoped once more to visit Rome to dismantle his workshops, but that hope was not fulfilled. On March 24, 1844, he died in his seat in The Royal Theater in Copenhagen, as the orchestra was playing the overture. He was laid to rest in the inner courtyard of the Thorvaldsen Museum, which thus became not only his museum but also his mausoleum.

Golden Tears: Johan Thomas Lundbye and Søren Kierkegaard By Ragni Linnet Translated by Jon Stewart

You must not look at the mirror, observe the mirror (its frame, border, etc.), but must see yourself in the mirror…. But is this not what we are doing. Søren Kierkegaard1

“I try to portray what is least in myself, but does not Heiberg say that the poet sings most beautifully about what he is lacking.”2 Johan Thomas Lundbye (1818-48) wrote this in 1845 about his bright painting A Bleaching Ground (1844-45). The poetic existence of Kierkegaard haunts this remark. In 1843 he opened his Either/Or with the words, “What is a poet? An unhappy person who conceals profound anguish in his heart but whose lips are so formed that, as sighs and cries pass over them, they sound like beautiful music.”3 In his carefully prepared paintings (fortunately A Bleaching Ground was imme1

1 2 3

Lundbye used the expression “golden tears” in connection with a description of the tears, which old and humiliated Denmark shed over itself. They were to lead to a resurrection of Denmark. I claim in the following that Lundbye also cried golden tears for Kierkegaard. Cf. the entry from March 17, 1845 in Johan Thomas Lundbyes Dagbog 16. December 1844 til 15. April 1848. The transcript is found in Karl Madsens Papirer, The Royal Library, Copenhagen. Ny Kongelige Samling (hereafter NKS) 3579 VI.4. FSE, Supplement, p. 229 / Pap. X 6 B 2, p. 9. Johan Thomas Lundbyes Dagbog, op. cit., entry from February 27, 1845. EO1, p. 19 / SKS 2, 27.

Golden Tears: Johan Thomas Lundbye and Søren Kierkegaard

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diately bought by Orla Lehmann4), Lundbye tries to live up to the models of visualization that the Academy and the ideologues of the national movement were promoting. But at the same time he gives expression for the fact that he cannot express his innermost thoughts within the artistic matrices of the time. Rather he feels that he can “express himself well in writing” and that his sketches “give a faithful picture”5 of him. These few words imply for me one of the reasons why the painter Lundbye became so fascinated by Søren Kierkegaard, namely the authorship’s constant circling around the problem of communication: what is it possible to describe or present in texts and visual images and how? In what form can I give expression to precisely what I want to say in a given case?

I. The Fascination with Kierkegaard But there are many other reasons for why Lundbye, who followed the great wave of political, literary and religious movements of the 1840’s at such closer quarters, in particular felt that he was on intimate terms with Kierkegaard, although he had so many other intellectual fathers. His relations to the poet and priest N.F.S. Grundtvig (figure 1), the art historian N.L. Høyen and the archaeologist Christian Jürgensen Thomsen were sustained by paternal respect and admiration, and his natural patricide added a good deal of humility. The connection to Grundtvig became even closer through Lundbye’s friendship with Grundtvig’s son Svend. But in his diaries and letters he was on a first name basis with Kierkegaard, who was his same age. We do not know whether Lundbye ever spoke with Kierkegaard,6 but he could hardly have avoided meeting the eternal walker in the streets of Copenhagen. What is more important, however, is that he read him. Lundbye held Kierkegaard up for himself like a mirror and found again his own thoughts in Kierkegaard’s castigation of his contemporary age: his sarcasm about the superficiality of the age, “easy reli4

5 6

See Karl Madsen Johan Thomas Lundbye 1818-1848, Copenhagen: Kunstforeningen 1895, p. 258. Johan Thomas Lundbyes Dagbog, op. cit., entry from March 2, 1845. There is no evidence for this either in Lundbye or in Kierkegaard. However, Kierkegaard is not a witness to the truth in this regard (cf. index to Pap.). His Papirer are full of self-staging and attempts to erase his own tracks.

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Ragni Linnet

Figure 1. Sketch of N.F.S. Grundtvig (1843). The Royal Library.

gion,” levelling, the herd mentality and disdain for old values. He was able to recognize himself in Kierkegaard’s description of the unhappy poet existence, in his realization that he was out of harmony with his time, in his existential considerations, and in his formulation of the experience of anxiety, melancholy, physical desire, “self-centeredness” (in contrast to Christian self-denial) and resignation. Doubt on all levels never left Lundbye, but in the last few years of his life, he transferred much of his doubt and his conflictridden relation to the other sex into religious brooding about the degree of inwardness in his own relation to God. Here he could seek consolation from Kierkegaard, whose authorship treats not so much what Christianity is but rather how Christianity becomes the truth for the individual. Lundbye was a passionate reader of Kierkegaard, but he did not read him passionately from the beginning. Either/Or, which was published on February 20, 1843 under the pseudonym Victor Eremita (the victorious hermit), received as early as March 31 the following words on its way out into the world: “In the literature a work has drawn alot of attention to itself these days; it is called Either/Or, and people believe that the author is the young Kierkegaard. A despairing, mocking, tone is dominant in it….I have only glanced briefly through the


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book and must confess that it is quite brilliant.”7 Later Lundbye says, I was “always enriched by him and enjoyed reading him even if as a curiosity until I, on the one hand, became aware of more and, on the other, was compelled to greater attentiveness both by his castigation of superficial readers and by the experience that Søren is irritating; Søren has become the watchword for bitter fights.”8 In 1847 Kierkegaard then takes on a new, more intimate role for Lundbye. He “steals in…through every nook in a human disposition, even to the most hidden, and he tells one with pure and clear words what one has hardly dared to tell oneself.”9 In some of Lundbye’s letters from the second half of 1847,10 it is evident from the word choice and the metaphors he uses how a Kierkegaardian sadness is mixed into his writing to such a degree that Lundbye himself almost loses control over his own voice as a writer. But this does not mean that he did not have an unpretentious eye for the irony and the self-ironic potential in the Kierkegaardian universe (and a disrespectful relation to the literal wording of the text). The painter Lorenz Frølich received the following “Kierkegaard quotation” in the mail in 1847: “‘To become completely human is the goal that we are striving for – now I have corns, this is always some help.’ – Søren, always Søren.”11 According to Kierkegaard, thoughts should be lived. Lundbye read him precisely as he would have wanted to be read, as a challenge, and Lundbye followed his challenge to conceive the appropriation of the

7

8

9 10

11

Lundbye to Lorenz Frølich, March 31, 1843. The Royal Library. NKS 3387.4. The elder Kierkegaard of course refers to Søren’s brother, the theologian P.C. Kierkegaard, who belonged to the Grundtvigian circle. But Kierkegaard became better known in the “wider” literary public with Either/Or. Presumably, Lundbye did not follow Søren Kierkegaard’s authorship from its beginning. At that point in time the authorship also contained From the Papers of One Still Living (1838) and his master’s thesis The Concept of Irony with Constant Reference to Socrates (1841). This has been claimed by Ib Ostenfeld in Johan Thomas Lundbye. Et Stemningslivs Historie, Copenhagen: G.E.C. Gads Forlag 1937, p. 85. But he could of course have read the works later (especially The Concept of Irony, which was so important). Lundbye to Svend Grundtvig, July 31, 1847. The Royal Library. NKS 3388.4. The reference is to the so-called Corsair affair in 1846. Lundbye to Svend Grundtvig, June 23, 1847. The Royal Library. NKS 3388.4. See, for example, Lundbye to Frederik Krebs, July 5, 1847. The Hirschsprungske Collection. Letter Archive, Box 4. Lundbye to Lorenz Frølich, October 9, 1843. Quoted from Lorenz Frølich. Egne Optegnelser og Breve til og fra hans Slægt og Venner vols. 1-2, ed. by F. Hendriksen, Copenhagen: F. Hendriksens Reproduktions-Ateliers Forlag 1920-21; vol. 1, p. 190.

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writings as “a receiving, a discovering, but also a bringing forth.”12 Kierkegaard, like Socrates, leaves the answers to his discussion partners, and Lundbye writes, “How delightful is his [sc. Kierkegaard’s] enthusiasm for Socrates.”13 But Lundbye does not attempt to create an intellectual, self-protective distance toward Kierkegaard. On the contrary, he reads him both as an artist and as a deeply subjective human being, and he throws himself thirsting into the maelstrom of the text. Of course, like many of us, he had problems with understanding Kierkegaard. “How deeply I regret my lack of book education, which does not allow me to enjoy him to the fullest.”14 He wanted to learn Greek immediately in order to understand the Greek words and sentences in Kierkegaard’s texts. In the summer of 1847 he told the physician Frederik Krebs about his reaction to “Søren’s love story” in Stages on Life’s Way (1845): “Although it was often obscure to me, indeed wholly dark, nevertheless I have perhaps understood him completely, in addition to the great joy which I have had in the details.”15 He must have had in mind the novel “Guilty?/Not Guilty?” which is the last of the work’s three concluding sections. He borrowed Stages from Johan Grundtvig, Svend’s elder brother, and he thanks Svend for having played the middleman in the loan: “Søren is my friend; even if I only understand every other word, I can understand the meaning in the whole in his love story, and he gives me one after another so many well-deserved boxes of the ear that I really am very thankful to him.”16 But the difficulties in reading come out clearly when he speaks about how he “managed to get through Søren.” It is of course important to try to form a picture not only of how Lundbye read Kierkegaard but also what he read – in order to take into consideration the authorship’s various directions. Lundbye’s reading has three strands, and not surprisingly he is interested above all in the poet and the edifying Kierkegaard, while he saves himself the subtleties by avoiding Kierkegaard’s philosophy to some degree. He concentrates on the works which, in any case at an immediate level, are concerned with man’s relation to women and on books which castigate the contemporary age and its religiosity. We know

12 13 14 15

16

EUD, p. 59 / SKS 5, 69. Lundbye to Svend Grundtvig, June 23, 1847. The Royal Library. NKS 3388.4. Lundbye to Svend Grundtvig, June 23, 1847. The Royal Library. NKS 3388.4. Lundbye to Frederik Krebs, June 22, 1847. The transcript is found in Karl Madsens Papirer. The Royal Library, NKS 3579 II, 4. Lundbye to Svend Grundtvig, June 23, 1847. The Royal Library. NKS 3388.4.


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with certainty from his diaries and letters that he in any case looked through Either/Or (1843) very thoroughly, read Stages on Life’s Way (1845) and A Literary Review (1846)17 and studied intensively Works of Love (September 1847) in 1847. Beyond this, we can only guess, remembering that one does not have to look far to find Kierkegaard’s style, Kierkegaardian concepts and motifs in Lundbye’s text, also where in actuality what we hear is perhaps only the (for us) pathetic keynote in self-staging romantic discourse, typical of the time.18

II. The Fall If we are to believe Lundbye’s diaries (the picture in his letters is more nuanced), he did not want to become an adult. The “rough sketch” of the 22-year-old Lundbye to Dietrich Brandis (figure 2) resembles that of a big boy with its mixture of very adult and very childlike symbols of fertility. He went reluctantly and full of ambivalent feelings into manhood, as he describes it in a sketch framed by a labyrinth from 1846. The text says: “He never grows out from under his mother’s wing.” The fractured surfaces in Lundbye’s representations of women are, while typical of the age, striking, stretched out as they are between the picture of the distant stylite and the concrete object of desire. The sketches of women from his own class portray them as ethereal and dreamlike types, a sphinx of nothing but clothes and hair. In his private sketchbook Magic and Cave-Thoughts from 1846-48 some of his women (the fantastical mermaids are thought-provoking) are, by contrast, enchanting flesh and blood alone (figure 3). Lundbye longed for the mutual security in pleasure and need together with a woman who would love him as he was. But he already felt “marked”19 by the sin: “The peace of childhood is gone” and “the consuming fire of the passions” smoulders in him, but “should it receive power with me and should I sink into nothingness – then it will go worse for me than for so many others for whom a beloved mother has also prayed, but who nonetheless were destroyed!”20 He accuses

17 18 19

20

Lundbye to Svend Grundtvig, June 23, 1847. The Royal Library. NKS 3388.4. As Ib Ostenfeld does, op. cit. p. 86. For Kierkegaard’s use of this concept in connection with Johannes the Seducer, see CUP1, p. 298 / SKS 7, 272. Johan Thomas Lundbye Et Aar af mit Liv, Copenhagen: Foreningen for Boghaandværk 1967, p. 54, entry from April 4, 1842. Original in the Royal Library. NKS 4201 I, 4.

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Figure 2. Draft of a Letter to Dietrich Brandis (1840). The Royal Library.

himself of taking the word “love” “in an ignoble, earthly sense”21 and writes about his “tears of repentance,” his “guilt,” “sin” and “blame.”22 Nevertheless full of a distaste for everything dirty,23 he holds on to his childlike, innocent condition both as reality and as ideal. Indeed, it seems as if he is afraid of the possibility of evil, seeing that later, 21 22

23

Ibid., p. 147, entry from February 12, 1843. See Ostenfeld, op. cit. Ostenfeld quotes a letter to Lorenz Frølich dated March 13, 1842. The passage is not included in Hendriksen, op. cit. Hans Vammen has, with a synthetic description, precisely defined anxiety and shame as an important component in the mental profile of the Golden Age period. Hans Vammen, “Guldalderens danske samfund” in Meddelelser fra Thorvaldsens Museum, 1994, pp. 9-19.


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Figure 3. At the Beach (from Magic and Cave-Thoughts) (1846). The Hirschsprung Collection.

enriched by three years of experience, he toys with the idea of writing a list of the people he was fond of, and entrusts to his diary, “that most of the feminae only come on the list because I enjoyed looking at them; I never won a deeper acquaintance to this mysterious kind of being.”24 He fell passionately in love with Marie Louise Neergaard, which rendered him completely incapable of action. He later proposed to Margrethe Bauditz and was rejected by her parents. After these experiences he writes in his diary: “The child should be pushed back, and the defiled one, who knows how to sneak forth slyly, should obtain his wish. Away, therefore, with these longings; they could not be satisfied as I wish it.”25 Lundbye found in Kierkegaard an author who, with his multifaceted description of man’s relation to woman, could tell him “what he hardly had dared to tell himself,” as he puts it. On one plane the relatively accessible Either/Or and Stages on Life’s Way, which are pieced together from a series of less internally connected treatises, treat marriage seen both “from the hidden side” (that is, from the point of view of the seducer and the Kierkegaardian aesthete) and 24 25

Johan Thomas Lundbyes Dagbog, op. cit., entry from March 2, 1845. Ibid., entry from February 26, 1845.

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“from the visible side” (that is, of course, the point of view of the married man). Seen in its immediacy,26 this side of Kierkegaard’s work is not unique in Denmark in the 1840’s, where in literature and theater27 there was an intense interest in “the side withdrawn from the eye,”28 (in the period’s terminology “the interesting”) as well as in the chaotic physical elements in the individual, which resist domestication and control and thereafter must live a life underground because they cannot be accepted from a bourgeois perspective. What is special in Kierkegaard is that in his description of the taboo layer of the bourgeois forms of existence he dares to overstep “the demands of decency.”29 In the first part of Either/Or, i.e. A.’s papers, “the aesthetic life view” is described as a passive, epicurean form of existence, a life in “inauthenticity,” a neither/nor. The novel “Diary of a Seducer,” which concludes this part, treats a quite obsessed, but very reflective, seducer’s experimental love relation. It is the story of a mature man’s slow and meticulous seduction of a very young woman Cordelia. What he enjoys and is fascinated by is not that the girl falls in love with him, but rather the perception of how the girl, by his mediation, becomes attentive to her own being in love and to the physical elements which are to be found in her. Johannes, the protagonist of the novel, is actually not interested in possessing Cordelia. His attitude is that of the aesthete, who finds – as it is written elsewhere – “possibility more 26

27

28

29

I ignore here Kierkegaard’s own (much discussed) intentions. The literary critic P.L. Møller, who read the “Diary of a Seducer” “at face value” (i.e. aesthetically) provoked Kierkegaard to the following greeting: “A book is a mirror; when a monkey looks into it, an apostle cannot look out.” Quoted from Jørgen Dehs “Cordelia c’est moi. En kommentar til Jean Baudrillards Kierkegaardslæsning” in Den Blå Post no. 7, 1987, p. 49. In literature one can, for example, name De farlige Bekendtskaber fremstillede i en samling af Breve. Efter Chauderlos-Laclos’s franske Original, which appeared in 1832 and was somewhat similar to the “Diary of a Seducer.” In theater one could refer to Henrik Hertz’s piece Den Yngste, where the main male character falls in love with a man dressed as a young girl. Johan Ludvig Heiberg “Dina” in Intelligensblade vol. 2, nos. 16-17, November 15, 1842, pp. 73-106. See p. 81. (Reprinted in Heiberg’s Prosaiske Skrifter vols. 1-11, Copenhagen 1861-62; vol. 3, pp. 365-394. See p. 372.) On “the interesting” see Carl Henrik Koch Kierkegaard og Det Interessante. En studie i en æstetisk kategori, Copenhagen: C.A. Reitzels Forlag 1992. Aage Henriksen Kierkegaards Romaner, Copenhagen: Nordisk Forlag 1969 (1954), pp. 32ff. See the review of Either/Or by Heiberg, who criticizes the first volume and praises the second. Johan Ludvig Heiberg “Litterær Vintersæd” in Intelligensblade vol. 2, no. 24, March 1, 1843, pp. 285-292.


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intensive than actuality.”30 The novel is a double perception of the very process of seduction. This is interesting due both to what the seducer perceives in the one being seduced and to what he perceives in himself in connection with the seduction. The second part of Either/Or by the ethicist Judge Wilhelm is, by contrast, a long defense of bourgeois marriage.31 The seducer/aesthete has only killed time in his eternal hunt for pleasure and excitement, while the faithful married man/ethicist, as “a true victor,” has not “killed time, but has rescued and preserved it in eternity. The married man who does this is truly living poetically; he solves the great riddle, to live in eternity and yet hear the cabinet clock strike.”32 In its discussion of “erotic love or the relation between man and woman,”33 Stages on Life’s Way comes close to a dominant theme in Either/Or. Among the work’s actors we meet again Johannes the Seducer, for whom “woman is only the moment,”34 and Judge Wilhelm, who “begins” “where Johannes the Seducer ends,” in that “woman’s beauty increases with the years.”35 And also here very different conceptions of women are exchanged: the hateful, the disdainful and the consuming; the view that, proceeding from the slogan, “in a negative relation woman makes man productive in ideality,”36 claims that woman awakens “the ideality in man,” but note well only if he fails to get her!; and the limitless admiring view which nevertheless remains within the framework of the bourgeois: “As a bride, woman is more beautiful than as a maiden; as a mother she is more beautiful than as a bride, as a wife and mother she is a good word in season, and with the years she becomes more beautiful.”37 With these two works Kierkegaard offers for Lundbye a fictive space where he, as in a room with a mirror, can reflect on the concept of love and his erotic longings and form a more firm conception of woman, “the mysterious being.”

30 31

32 33 34 35 36 37

JP 3, 3340 / SKS 18, 156, JJ:46. The oppositions of the work, which to some degree deconstruct the apology from within lie so deep that in this context they must be left out of the discussion. See, for example, Joakim Garff “Victor Eremita – og Kierkegaard. ‘Det Æsthetiske er overhovedet mit Element’” in Kierkegaards pseudonymitet, ed. by Birgit Bertung, Paul Müller and Fritz Norlan, Copenhagen: C.A. Reitzels Forlag, pp. 55-75, especially, pp. 68ff. EO2, p. 138 / SKS 3, 136. SL, p. 30f. / SKS 6, 35. CUP1, p. 298 / SKS 7, 272. CUP1, p. 299 / SKS 7, 272. SL, p. 59 / SKS 6, 60. SL, p. 140 / SKS 6, 132.

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III. The Christian Hope But Lundbye’s searching also goes deeper or higher if one will. It shows his enthusiastic emphasis on “Guilty?/Not Guilty?” the novel which occupies the entire second half of Stages. In the course of 1847 Lundbye becomes more and more occupied with his relation to God, and in the fall his diary often takes on the form of a prayer. He falls in love again (with Georgia Schouw) and seems to search for an explanation, which can give meaning to his unhappy love relation and his uncertainty in relation to an actualization of the new love. Apparently, he finds this in Kierkegaard. Kierkegaard calls the novel itself “A Story of Suffering,” and by this he means “something different from the Goethe’s title, Leiden des jungen Werther, or Hoffmann’s Leiden eines armen Theaterdirectors.”38 Here the suffering is placed in the context of religion. The word “suffering” (lidelse) today has an unpleasant sound and is associated with something passive, as in the grammatical term “the passive voice” (lideform). But in Kierkegaard (and in Lundbye, albeit with different words) the concept of suffering is tightly bound to the concept of inwardness and thus takes on an active dimension. To become a Christian means, within this framework of understanding, to become the one existing in inwardness, who is related to the Absolute. This is what Kierkegaard summarizes in the two theses which span his theological message: “Because you are a sufferer, therefore God loves you,” and “Because God loves you, therefore you must suffer.”39 This is what Lundbye has understood when he exclaims: “God in heaven! Give me strength to endure, to resign – that I might win myself.”40 And this is what Kierkegaard means when in his own remarks on “Guilty?/Not Guilty” he writes “Suffering is posited as crucial for religious existence and specifically as characteristic of inwardness: the more that is suffered, the more religious existence, and suffering continues.”41 “Guilty?/Not Guilty” treats a religiously searching person, Quidam (a certain man), who is already introduced at the end of the first half of the work. Much simplified, the plot is as follows: Quidam, who is passionately occupied with his spiritual nature, i.e. his eternal nature 38 39 40 41

CUP1, p. 288 / SKS 7, 262. JP 4, 4688 / Pap. X 4 A 593. Translation slightly modified. Johan Thomas Lundbyes Dagbog, op. cit., entry from October 27, 1848. CUP1, p. 288 / SKS 7, 246.


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and determination, loves Quaedam (a certain woman), who lacks “religious presuppositions,” but, moreover, is “kept altogether ordinary,”42 i.e. friendly and not artificial. And she loves him. But because of his religious seriousness and his melancholy he breaks the engagement with her. In order to save his beloved from an impossible marriage with him, absorbed as he is with his God, he thus ruins her life (perhaps). But does he have what it takes to be a Christian? In order to belong to God alone, he withdraws himself from the situation of actuality, “marriage,” which is “unconditionally of religious origin,”43 and now he does not know whether his break with her was a sin against some order from God. He will never know it since it will only be revealed “out there.”44 Since he does not know whether he is guilty, he cannot repent. “He lacks the condition of sin, which will lead him to repentance. Therefore, Quidam’s deepest problem is whether God, ‘governance,’ has brought him into this painful situation in order that he thereby should experience repentance and become free in the Christian sense.”45 In 1845 Lundbye imagined the future as a process which runs through art to the girl: “Art ought to be my only lover, with whom I must first have children, who raises them well and bears witness that they come from a father who is worthy of the love of a girl.”46 Later in 1847 the movement goes to the woman through God. On October 31 he writes, Today I stood close behind her in the church, and I could not pray that this distance must be increased to a gaping depth, I did not have the ability to do so – and if I could do so, in truth, in truth give up my longing and thereby deserve her – was it then not sin again to turn my mind back to the mundane after having won a victory so great that it would strike me as a miracle. No, no! If love of God in truth has been victorious, then he would not be angry if I followed the purest, most delightful attraction which he has put in the depth of my heart. But suppose this could happen before, then my conscience would not be clean, then I would have loved a human being more than God.47

The direction in his reflections, like many of those in his thinking, seems at that point in time to be inspired by Kierkegaard’s theological 42 43 44 45

46 47

SL, p. 399 / SKS 6, 370.3. SL, p. 178 / SKS 6, 166.3-4. SL, p. 181 / SKS 6, 168.26. F.J. Billeskov Jansen Kierkegaard. Introduktion til Søren Kierkegaards liv og tanker, Copenhagen: Rhodos 1993 (1992), p. 43 (my italics). The account of Stages on Life’s Ways is also indebted to Billeskov Jansen. Johan Thomas Lundbyes Dagbog, op. cit., entry April 12, 1845. Ibid., entry October 31, 1847 (my italics).

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work, Works of Love,48 which had just appeared. According to the same entry in his diary, Lundbye “finds…a consolation” in Works of Love, “when the mind is depressed,” and he “almost trembles before what the immediate future will bring.”49 Works of Love shows the light and optimistic side of Kierkegaard’s ultimatum-like understanding of Christianity.50 He begins the book, which treats both the beloved (Christ) whose love endures everything, believes everything and bears everything, and the meaning of neighbor love, by determining that we must believe in love. The point of departure is that a person’s love is grounded mysteriously in God’s love. “Every person is God’s bond servant; therefore, he dares not belong to anyone in love unless in the same love he belongs to God and dares not possess in love unless the other and he himself belong to God in this love….If there was between two…a relationship of love so happy…that the poet was bound to exult in it…this is by no means the end of the matter.”51 In the days before the entry, where Lundbye wrote about the girl in the church and mentioned Works of Love, he had worked on a sketch in Magic and Cave-Thoughts, which represented his alter ego: a hill troll thoughtfully sunk in a book (figure 4). At the side of the sketch he wrote: “Grounded on ‘the resignation which offers the best in life, but knows how to do the next best just as well as the best’ – dear Søren! That looks so beautiful in your book, but – ” and then a date, the 29th-30th of October 1847. Everything points to the fact that “the book” is Works of Love, but the quotation is not in Kierkegaard (at all),52 in any case not in this form. In fact we can find “the quotation” 48

49 50

51 52

But there is here, as in other places in the entries from winter 1847, a clear overlapping of thoughts with the Edifying Discourses in Various Spirits (March 1847), which we cannot with certainty say that he has read. The suspicion that he knew this work is supported by the fact that he paraphrases it in both his diary and letters. Johan Thomas Lundbyes Dagbog, op. cit., entry from October 31, 1847. My view of Works of Love is especially indebted to Johannes Møllehave. Cf. his “Himmelspejlet og de falske spejle” in Kierkegaard spejlinger, ed. by Birgit Bertung, Paul Müller, Fritz Norlan and Julia Watkin. Copenhagen: C.A. Reiztels Forlag 1989, pp. 9-15. For Kierkegaard’s optimistic theology, see Michael Plekton “Kierkegaard the Theologian: The Roots of His Theology in Works of Love” in Foundations of Kierkegaard’s Vision of Community, ed. by George B. Connell and C. Stephen Evans, New Jersey and London: Humanities Press 1992, pp. 2-17. WL, p. 107f. / SV1 IX, 105. I thank Arne Grøn at the Institute for Systematic Theology at the University of Copenhagen for his kind help and Bruce H. Kirmmse, Department of Søren Kierkegaard Research, who helped to search for this quotation.


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Figure 4. A Hill Troll Reads Kierkegaard (from Magic and Cave-Thoughts) (1847). The Hirschsprung Collection.

in various forms in both his diary entries and his letters to friends. But there is nothing strange in this; when Lundbye “quotes” Kierkegaard, it is from memory and often, according to the purpose, in very free paraphrase. The important words in the inscription are “resignation,” “the best,” and “the next best,” and finally the meaningful “but!” A variation of the quotation gives the key to understanding what he means by “the best” and “the next best.” On October 9, 1847 he writes to Lorenz Frølich that he cannot help but love his work and his class, “which gave me the most beautiful replacement for what life otherwise denied,” namely a wife. And he continues, “‘It is resignation,’ says Søren, ‘to give up the best in life but to make the next best almost just as good as the best.’”53 Here the best is a beloved and loving girl, the next best is his work. Lundbye’s concept of resignation encompasses his complex life view. There is mixed in it a romantic disposition towards life typical of the age, which nourishes a longing that cannot be satisfied in this 53

Lundbye to Lorenz Frølich, October 9, 1847, in Lorenz Frølich. Egne Optegnelser, op. cit., p. 189.

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world, a Grundtvigian advent mood and its (earthly) sense of optimism (Kierkegaard never drove Grundtvig from Lundbye’s universe) and then the Kierkegaardian Christian self-denial. Said with Kierkegaard’s words: “give up your self-loving desires, cravings, give up your self-seeking plans and purposes so that you truly work unselfishly for the good – and then, for that very reason…put up with being executed as a criminal or, more accurately, do not put up with it, since one can scarcely be forced into this but chooses it freely.”54 In journal entries from the 27th to the 30th of November we can follow how, under the impression of Works of Love, Lundbye again and again prays to God to give him strength to “sacrifice even my innermost longing for domestic happiness for the eternal in myself.”55 But again and again he must affirm that he “fixes himself to a resignation which surpasses my weak strength.”56 Lundbye expresses in the text of the sketch his attempt to unite heavenly and earthly love. The result of the attempt was to the advantage of the earthly, and herewith he shows the independence which he also developed in his love relation to Kierkegaard.

IV. The Problem of Communication Kierkegaard’s authorship culminates at the foot of the altar, but that was also its source. For him the essence of the authorship is to articulate the project of becoming a Christian, understood as the choice of an unconditioned relation of obedience to God. In relation to this project, the aesthetic is defined negatively. In his critical attack on the contemporary flight from responsibility and lack of will to choose, he uses the aesthetic to delimit the present “crisis” which he thinks comes to expression, among other things, in a cultivation of form lacking in content. The aesthete is for Kierkegaard a crisis phenomenon and is made into an epitaph for the idea of the artist’s positive role as mediator of true humanity.57 The artist is an unhappy person who creates instead of lives. In an otherwise benevolent and moderate manner, Lundbye is certainly in agreement with Kierkegaard in his mocking ridicule of the 54 55 56 57

WL, p. 194f. / SV1 IX, 185. Johan Thomas Lundbyes Dagbog, op. cit., entry October 27, 1847. Ibid., entry October 30, 1847. Cf. Jørgen Dehs “‘Ikke Phantasiens kunstrige Væven, men Tankens Gysen.’ Kierkegaard og bruddet med idealismens æstetik” in Slagmark no. 4, 1985, pp. 46-59.


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aesthetic form of existence, such as it is unfolded in the 1840’s uniform, banal and leveling biedermeier idyl. His interest in the book A Literary Review shows this. But it is far more striking how he is reflected in Kierkegaard’s (both fictional and actual) tragic poet existence when, sunk in the “melancholy which is the certain, dear property of most artists,”58 he praises Kierkegaard’s description of “the unhappiest man.”59 Lundbye’s Winter Landscape in the Character of North Zealand (figure 5), which “it would occur to no one except him

Figure 5. Winter Landscape in the Character of North Zealand (1841). Nivaagaards Malerisamling.

to paint” – “these cold shades, this desolation, this withering” where the reviewer hears the cry of the crow mixed with the creaking of the wagon60 – can be conceived as a programmatic declaration to the advantage of this conception of the artist, where suffering is seen as 58

59 60

Lundbye to Svend Grundtvig, September 20, 1845 (my italics). The Royal Library. NKS 3388.4. Cf. his letter to Svend Grundtvig, July 31, 1847. The Royal Library. NKS 3388.4. K.F. Wiborg Konstudstillingen i 1841, Copenhagen: C.A. Reitzel 1841, p. 38.

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both interesting and essential for creativity.61 Finally, to be sure, he had not had the same ambiguous relation to his role as artist as Kierkegaard had. Lundbye is perhaps uncertain of his own artistic ability, but he has in principle no doubts about the value of art for himself personally and for the people and national movements of the age, and he does not perceive any conflict between the Christian and the artist. Kierkegaard’s work is imbued with a deep conflict between aesthetic theory and his own aesthetic practice, which, due to religious reasons, he felt obliged to hate. I will claim that he had a deep understanding for pictorial art which goes deeper than his pictorial speech. His interest in pictures was expressed among other things in the attempt to delimit the artistic medium’s own character and led to a series of considerations about the role and essence of pictorial art in the present age. In fact his works teem with ambivalent, sometimes iconoclastic, sometimes iconodulic attempts to reconcile himself with the enjoyment of pictures which cannot be united with his ideas as a religious thinker. One should, however, be careful not to exaggerate the significance that Kierkegaard’s scattered reflections on aesthetics generally and on pictorial art specifically had for Lundbye, who read Kierkegaard more and more as a religious thinker. But when we look at his pictures, which witness a constant experimentation with the visual expression, and when we read his own statements, it is obvious that he stands in a tension between the old and the new, and the echo from Kierkegaard becomes both audible and visible. The remark that “In the world of art grapes can…grow on thorns and figs on bristles,”62 points back toward the earlier Golden Age’s conception of art as a making visible of the harmonic absolute or, if one will, the divine idea. But it also points to the later Golden Age’s backwards looking J.L. Heiberg, for whom art becomes a means of concealment, a harmonizing deception. In contrast to this is the experience that Lundbye’s painting can no longer “cover” his own inward actuality, a very modern experience, which first Hegel and later Kierkegaard (in, for example, Either/Or) each in his own systematic or antisystematic fashion puts into “the system.” While the outer and the inner in the earlier Golden Age’s aesthetics collapse, Kierkegaard’s aesthetics – precisely because “the 61

62

This conception was flourishing in German cultural circles – the English thought just the opposite. Cf. Philip Sandblom Skapande och sjukdom, Södertälje: Fingraf 1993, p. 26. Johan Thomas Lundbye Et Aar af mit Liv, op. cit., entry January 27, 1843, p. 140.


423

outer is not the inner”63 – is a demonstration of the necessity of an incomplete communication: All art is essentially involved in a dialectical self-contradiction. The truly eternal cannot be painted or drawn or carved in stone, for it is spirit. But neither can the temporal…for when it is presented in these ways, it is presented eternally; every picture expresses a fixation of that particular moment. If I paint a man who is lifting a spoon to his mouth or blowing his nose, it is immediately eternalized – the man continues to blow his nose this one time as long as the painting endures.64

For Kierkegaard is inwardly against the medium of painting as the making outward and perceptible of everything inward.65 In A Literary Review Kierkegaard writes, “For the essence of poetry is not to achieve reconciliation with the actual, but to achieve reconciliation with the imaginative idea through imagination. But in the actual individual this reconciliation is precisely the new split with reality.”66 In other words, art cannot heal the wounds of either the time or the artist. And according to Kierkegaard, this is not the goal either, on the contrary: “Keeping a wound open can also be very beneficial: a healthy and open wound; sometimes it is worst when it skins over.”67 Lundbye’s Kierkegaardian experience of not being able to make perceptible that which touched what was innermost in him, of course, meets opposition in a deep desire to see it made visible. One of the results of this need is the very modern and expressive Kolås Forest near Vejrhøj from 1846 (figure 6), where Lundbye turns the formation of meaning inward. The picture, with its exposure of the substance of the painting and the apparent presence of the subject in the tracing of the paintbrush, communicates more a glance into the soul than out into nature. Paradoxically enough, it is also Kierkegaard (claims Lundbye in any case) who gave him the idea for how he could approach the problem. Kierkegaard teaches him the interest for the process of coming into existence, which characterizes the pictures of modernity, in that the subject finds an expression in the proc63 64 65

66 67

EO1, p. 4 / SKS 2, 12. JP 1, 161 / SKS 20, 118, NB:198. A rewriting of Joakim Garff’s “Det æstetiske hos Kierkegaard: dets flertydighed og dets rolle i hans teologiske tænkning” in Dansk Teologisk Tidsskrift vol. 55, 1992, pp. 36-55, especially p. 46 and p. 49. The model for communication theory which lies at the foundation of these views is captured in the concept “the incommensurability of inwardness” and “is softened” in the late authorship, which Lundbye, who dies in spring of 1848 never knew. LR, p. 12 / SV1 VIII, 14. JP 4, 4587 / SKS 18, 236, JJ:304.

424

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Figure 6. Kolås Forest near Vejrhøj (1846). Statens Museum for Kunst.

ess, indeed even in the brush strokes’ dramatic movements. At the beginning of 1847 Lundbye described how he had begun to enjoy “rolling in the greasy, dirty oil colors” and tries to develop a more intuitive process of work where he lets things “grow forth from a chaos” in order to achieve “something constantly stimulating, surprising, creative” in the treatment. He uses “an old piece of canvas, which after three scraped pictures has a number of lumps and masses.” He does so not in order to save money or because he cannot do otherwise, but because “it forces one to a very violent treatment.”68 And in a letter from the end of 1847 he gives Kierkegaard the honor of his new manner of working in that he criticizes himself: “the all too great impatience with which I until now anticipated the result, forgetting that the path, that every stroke of the paintbrush is just as important as the goal; Søren has taught me this, that magnificent person!”69

68 69

Johan Thomas Lundbyes Dagbog, op. cit., entry January 16, 1847. Lundbye to Frederik Krebs, November 25, 1847. The transcription is found in Karl Madsens Papirer, op. cit.


425

V. Reworking Two figures cast long shadows over the understanding of Lundbye’s relation to Kierkegaard. The one is the art historian Karl Madsen, who, probably typical for his time, saw Kierkegaard as a depressing character who spread melancholy. In his monograph on Lundbye in 1895 Madsen was very close to claiming a connection between Lundbye’s fascination with Kierkegaard and “the staleness” in his later pictures.70 According to Madsen, Lundbye stood in “his demented enthusiasm” for Kierkegaard toward the end of his life, “ready to bear the heaviest cross of self-denial.”71 The other is the psychiatrist Ib Ostenfeld, who in 1937 wrote a treatise on Lundbye’s mildly manic-depressive condition. According to him, Lundbye was attracted by Kierkegaard because he recognized certain harmonizing conditions (for example, melancholy and the sense of isolation) and a coincidence of fate (the unsuccessful love relations). Ostenfeld’s basic view is that Lundbye’s “sickness,” although patho-physiologically conditioned, is nevertheless in harmony with his playing down of Kierkegaard’s significance. What Lundbye finds in Kierkegaard is already there. There is also for Ostenfeld no talk of “an increasing, direct effect of Kierkegaard on L., as Karl Madsen claims,” much less an “effect in the sense that he formed his opinions according to K.”72 The “sickness” merely runs its course.73 Beyond this I would claim 1) that Madsen’s conclusion builds on an unnuanced picture of Kierkegaard74 and of the writings that Lundbye in fact read, 2) that Kierkegaard had an increasing importance for Lundbye – and this influence even reached the hand which guided the brush, and finally 3) that Kierkegaard rather had a beneficial effect on Lundbye’s mind. As noted, the third point is not Ostenfeld’s view. But the picture that he gives of Lundbye on the basis of the diaries and letters fits badly with my reading of the same texts, with what concerns Lund70 71 72 73

74

Karl Madsen Johan Thomas Lundbye 1818-1848, op. cit., p. 212ff. Ibid., p. 45. Ostenfeld Johan Thomas Lundbye, op. cit., p. 89. Madsen’s and Ostenfeld’s interpretations have been able to stand virtually uncontested and are simply repeated with slight variations when, for example, Mogens Lebech in his epilogue to J. Th. Lundbye, op. cit., p. 123, writes that Lundbye “had fallen into the claws – of Kierkegaard.” Where the “aesthetic” Kierkegaard whom we – but not Lundbye – meet in the 1850’s and in connection with the attack on the church in 1855, has taken the upperhand.

426

Ragni Linnet

bye’s relation to Kierkegaard. Lundbye’s reflective and action-oriented reading of Kierkegaard shows that he did not accept his melancholy or his “sick fate”75 as “an oppressive fact,”76 as Ostenfeld claims. A feature that runs through the diaries (especially “after” Kierkegaard) is precisely his crystal-clear awareness that his life is in his own hands and that he must learn to act for himself. The final word I leave to Lundbye: “I do not know whether Søren could perform a miracle: to lead one through reflection to faith – but I believe that even the childlike believer can read him without harm.”77

75

76 77

Ib Ostenfeld Johan Thomas Lundbye. En kunstners kamp med sin skæbne. En epilog, Copenhagen: Rhodos 1977, p. 62. Ibid., p. 61. Lundbye to Svend Grundtvig, July 31, 1847. The Royal Library. NKS 3388.4.

Index of Persons Aarestrup, Emil (1800-56), Danish poet, 312, 357f., 363, 364, 366. Abildgaard, Nicolai Abraham (17431809), Danish painter, 375, 395. Abrahamson, Boline, see Kragh, Boline Abrahamsen. Abrahamson, Joseph (1789-1847), Danish officier, 251, 252, 253, 258. Addison, Joseph (1672-1719), English essayist and stateman, 205. Adler, Adolph Peter (1812-69), Danish theologian, 10, 129-131. Almquist, Carl Jonas Love (1793-1866), Swedish author, 365. Ampère, André Marie (1775-1836), French scientist, 77. Andersen, Hans Christian (1805-75), Danish poet, novelist and writer of fairy tales, 3, 15, 16, 110f., 262-271, 301, 303f., 307, 312, 316, 343, 357, 359, 362, 366. Arago, François (1786-1853), French scientist, 77. Augier, Guillaume Victor Émile (182089), French dramatist, 370. Baader, Benedict Franz Xaver von (17651841), German philosopher, 117, 166, 182, 186, 199. Bagger, Carl Christian (1807-46), Danish poet, 313, 366. Baggesen, Jens (1764-1826), Danish poet, 15, 212, 217, 218, 219, 220, 221, 238, 356. Balzac, Honoré de (1799-1850), French novelist, 366, 369, 371. Bang, Frederik Ludvig (1747-1820), Danish physician, 150, 161. Baring, Alexander, later Lord Ashburton (1774-1848), English politician, 387. Barjátinskaja, Princess Maria Fjódorvina, née Maria Wilhelmine Luise Keller

(1862-1922), Russian noble, patron of the arts, 392. Barrière, Théodore (1823-77), French dramatist, 370. Baudelaire, Charles Pierre (1821-67), French poet, 370. Beaumarchais, Pierre Augustin Caron de (1732-99), French playwright, 320. Beck, Andreas Frederik (1816-61), Danish theologian and author, 131. Bellman Carl Mikael (1740-95), Swedish poet, 346, 367. Bendavid, Lazarus (1762-1832), German philosopher, 71. Bendz, Vilhelm (1804-32), Danish painter, 20. Berg, Betty (1804-34), the first wife of Poul Martin Møller, 46. Berger, Johan Erik von (1772-1833), German philosopher and astronomer, 107. Bernini, Giovanni Lorenzo (1598-1680), Italian sculptor, 386. Bienaimé, Luigi (1795-1878), Italian sculptor, 395, 396. Bindesbøll, Michael Gottlieb Birckner (1800-56), Danish architect, 405. Biot, Jean Baptiste (1774-1862), French physicist, 77. Bissen, Herman Vilhelm (1798-1868), Danish sculptor, 20. Bjørnson, Bjørnstjerne (1832-1910), Norwegian writer, 304, 360, 370. Blanc, Jean Joseph Charles Louis (181182), French socialist, 370. Blicher, Steen Steensen (1782-1848), Danish poet, 15, 316, 343, 357, 360, 363, 366. Bødtcher, Ludvig Adolph (1793-1874), Danish poet, 357.

428

Index of Persons

Boesen, Emil (1812-79), Danish priest and archdeacon, 309, 314. Boisen, Peter Dutzen (1762-1831), Danish Bishop, 153. Bonaparte or Buonaparte, Marie Létizia (1750-1836), the mother of Napoleon, 392f. Börne, Ludwig (1786-1837), German author, 369. Bornemann, Frederik Christian (181061), Danish jurist, 131. Bornemann, Johan Alfred (1813-90), Danish theologian, 131, 141, 143. Botten-Hansen, Paul (1824-69), Norwegian librarian and publicist, 360. Bourneville, Antoine Auguste (1805-79), Danish dancer, choreographer, and ballet master, 391. Boye, Johannes (1756-1830), Danish philosopher, 5, 39. Brandes, Carl Edvard Cohen (1847-1931), Danish author and politician, 370. Brandes, Georg (1842-1927), Danish critic and literary scholar, 19, 219, 268, 303, 307, 319, 355, 356, 361, 362, 364, 366, 368, 370, 371, 372. Brandis, Joachim Dietrich (1821-49), Danish jurist, 411. Bremer, Frederika (1801-65), Swedish author, 265. Brøchner, Hans (1820-75), Danish philosopher, 128, 131. Brøndsted, Peter Oluf (1780-1842), Danish archeologist, 396. Brorson, Hans Adolf (1694-1764), Danish bishop and author of psalms, 224, 227. Brüggemann, Hans (1480-1540), German woodcarver, 375. Brun, Constantin (1746-1836), Danish businessman, 154. Brun, Ida (1792-1857), Danish dancer, the wife of the Austrian diplomat, Louis Philippe de Bombelles (1780-1843), 392. Brun, Sophie Christiane Friederike née Münter (1765-1835), German-Danish author, 401. Bruun, Thomas Christopher (1750-1834), Danish author and language teacher, 203.

Bülow, Eiline Svendine Hansine von (1804-76), the second wife of Poul Martin Møller, 46. Byron, George Gordon Noel (1788-1824), English poet, 267, 312, 313, 361, 362, 363, 365, 366. Camuccini, Vincenzo (1771-1844), Italian painter, 376. Canova, Antonio (1757-1822), Italian sculptor, 380, 383, 387, 388, 392, 394, 400, 401. Cardelli, Domenico (1767-97), Italian sculptor, 395. Caroline Amalie (1796-1881), the wife of King Christian VIII, 392. Carstens, Asmus Jacob (1754-98), Danish painter, 386, 401. Carstensen, Georg Johan Bernhard (1812-57), Danish editor, 357. Cetti, Giovanni Battista (1794-1858), Danish opera singer and actor, 334. Champfleury, Jules Fleury Husson (182189), French author, 370. Christens, Christian Fenger (1819-55), Danish theologian and educational theorist, 131. Christian VIII, (1786-1848), King of Denmark from 1839-48, 312. Clausen, Henrik Georg (1759-1840), Danish priest, 153. Clausen, Henrik Nikolaj (1793-1877), Danish theologian and politician, 11, 149, 154, 155, 156, 161, 196. Collett, Jacobine Camilla (1813-95), Norwegian author, 360. Consalvi, Ercole (1757-1824), Italian cardinal, 394. Dahl, Johan Christian Clausen (17881857), Norwegian painter, 383. Dahlmann, Friedrich Christoph (17851860), German historian, 154. Daub, Carl (1765-1836), German theologian, 117, 166, 186. Davy, Humphry (1778-1829), English chemist, 265f. Delavigne, Casimir (1793-1843), French poet, 303. Diderot, Denis (1713-84), French encyclopaedist, dramatist, 341.

Index of Persons Dorner, Isaak August (1809-84), German theologian, 186. Drachmann, Holder Henrik Herholdt (1846-1908), Danish poet, 372. Dreyer, Dankvart Christian Magnus (1816-52), Danish painter, 20, 383. Dumas, Alexandre also known as Dumas fils (1824-95) French writer, 370. Eckersberg, Christoffer Wilhelm (17831853), Danish painter, 20, 265. Eiriksson, Magnus (1806-81), Islandic theologian and author, 13, 194, 195, 200, 202. Esterházy, Prince Miklós (1765-1833), Hungarian nobleman and patron of the arts, 390. Ewald, Johannes (1743-81), Danish poet, 215, 224, 230. Farington, Joseph (1747-1821), English painter, 387. Feuerbach, Ludwig (1804-72), German philosopher, 120, 138, 179. Fibiger, Johannes Henrik Tauber (182197), Danish poet and priest, 124. Fibiger, Mathilde (1830-72), Danish writer, 284. Fichte, Immanuel Hermann, “the younger,” (1797-1879), German philosopher, 138, 142, 199. Fichte, Johann Gottlieb (1762-1814), German philosopher, 6, 8, 15, 43fn., 81, 92, 124, 132, 205, 206, 217. Flaubert, Gustav (1821-80), French novelist, 370, 371. Flaxman, John (1755-1826), English sculptor, 382. Fogtmann, Nikolai (1788-1851), Danish bishop, 112f., 122. Fonseca, Ida da (1806-58), Danish singer, 333. Frederik VI of Denmark (1768-1839), King of Denmark from 1808-39, 154, 158, 211, 312. Freund, Herman Ernst (1786-1840), Danish sculptor, 20, 395, 405. Frølich, Lorenz (1820-1908), Danish painter, 409, 419. Füssli, Johan Heinrich (1741-1825), AngloSwiss painter and author, 375.

429

Gautier, Théophile (1811-72), French poet, 370. Gavarni, Guillamme Sulpice Chevalier (1804-66), French artist, 369. Girardin, Mme Delphine de, née Gay (1804-55), French poet, 370. Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von (17491832), German poet, author, scientist and diplomat, 8, 88, 100, 204, 207, 217, 225, 285, 305, 311, 316, 367, 416. Goldschmidt, Meir Aaron (1819-87), Danish author, 358, 359, 361, 362. Göschel, Karl Friedrich (1784-1861), German civil servant and philosopher, 138. Grundtvig, Johan Diderik Nicolai Blicher (1822-1907), Danish archivist, the son of N.F.S. Grundtvig, 410. Grundtvig, Nicolai Frederik Severin (1783-1872), Danish poet and theologian, 7, 11, 14f., 16, 149, 154, 155, 156, 161, 166, 167, 185, 186, 194, 203-230, 269, 296, 301, 343, 407, 420. Grundtvig, Svend Hersleb (1824-83), Danish folklorist, the son of N.F.S. Grundtvig, 407, 410. Günther, Anton (1783-1863), GermanAustrian theologian and philosopher, 199. Gyllembourg-Ehrensvärd, Carl Frederik (1767-1815), Swedish baron and politician, 274, 302. Gyllembourg-Ehrensvärd, Thomasine Christine (1773-1856), Danish author, 15, 17, 116, 272-297, 302, 307, 308, 310, 311, 316, 317, 343, 362, 364. Hamilton, Lady Emma (1761-1815), wife of the British envoy at Naples, Sir William Hamilton (1730-1803), 392. Hansen, Carl Christian Constantin (180480), Danish painter, 20. Hansen, Jørgen Christian (1812-80), Danish opera singer, 325, 334, 335, 336. Hase, Karl August von (1800-90), German Church historian, 187, 196. Hauch, Johannes Carsten (1790-1872), Danish poet, 219, 265, 357, 360, 362, 367, 386, 404. Hebbel, Friedrich (1813-63), German dramatist, 365.

430

Index of Persons

Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich (17701831), German philosopher, 6, 7, 8f., 10, 13, 18, 21, 27fn, 46, 49, 50, 51, 52, 53, 57, 58, 59, 78, 79, 84, 86, 87, 92, 106-145 passim, 168, 169, 174, 175, 178, 194, 198, 199, 303, 304, 305, 311, 321, 328, 355, 358, 365, 367, 370, 372, 422. Heiberg, Johan Ludvig (1791-1860), Danish poet, playwright and philosopher, 7, 10, 15, 16, 18f., 28fn., 79, 83-87, 88, 91, 95, 96, 97f., 100, 104, 105, 107-116, 117, 118f., 122, 123, 125, 127, 130, 131, 132, 133, 134, 135, 137, 138, 141, 142, 143, 144, 145, 274, 275, 276, 285, 301, 302, 303, 304, 305, 306, 307, 308, 309, 310, 311, 312, 316, 319-329, 336, 343-355, 356, 357, 362, 364, 365, 366, 367, 369, 406, 422. Heiberg, Johanne Luise (1812-90), Danish actress, 19, 116, 274, 276, 303, 304, 310, 311, 326, 336, 337, 339, 340, 341, 343, 354. Heiberg, Peter Andreas (1758-1841), Danish author, 153, 203, 274, 302, 343. Heine, Heinrich (1797-1856), German poet and author, 312, 361, 362, 363, 365, 366, 369. Helweg, Hans Friedrich (1816-1901), Danish priest and theologian, 144. Helweg, Ludvig (1818-83), Danish priest and church historian, 194. Herbart, Johann Friedrich (1776-1841), German philosopher, 142. Herder, Johann Gottfried von (17441803), German philosopher and critic, 204, 222, 229, 235. Hertz, Henrik (1797-1870), Danish poet, 303, 353, 358, 365. Hoffmann, Ernst Theodor Amadeus (1776-1822), German artist, musician and writer, 312, 416. Holberg, Ludvig (1684-1754), DanishNorwegian dramatist and historian, 52, 203, 204, 207, 217, 367. Hölderlin, Johann Christian Friedrich (1770-1843), German poet, 206. Hope, Thomas (1774-1832), English writer and patron of the arts, 397.

Hornemann, Christian (1759-93), Danish philosopher, 5. Howitz, Frantz Gotthard (1789-1826), Danish professor of medicine, 5, 108. Høyen, Niels Laurits Andreas (17981870), Danish art historian, 407. Hugo, Victor Marie (1802-85), French writer, 312, 313, 363, 366. Humboldt, Caroline von (1766-1829), German Baroness, 399, 401. Humboldt, Karl Wilhelm von (17671835), German Baron, diplomat and linguist, 401. Ibsen, Henrik (1828-1906), Norwegian dramatist, 301, 303, 304, 370. Iffland, August Wilhelm (1759-1814), German author, 303. Ingemann, Bernhard Severin (1789-1862), Danish poet, 15, 227, 343. Ingres, Jean August Dominique (17801867), French painter, 404. Jacobi, Friedrich Heinrich (1743-1819), German philosopher, 140, 152. Jacobsen, Jens Peter (1847-85), Danish poet, 372. Jean Paul, i.e. Johann Paul Friedrich Richter (1763-1825), German author, 225, 316. Juel, Jens (1745-1802), Danish painter, 383. Kant, Immanuel (1724-1804), German philosopher, 5f., 8, 30fn., 32, 38fn., 45, 63ff., 124, 140, 151, 169, 174, 175, 177, 199. Kierkegaard, Peter Christian (1805-88), Danish theologian, the elder brother of Søren Kierkegaard, 13, 15, 153, 159, 192, 202. Kingo, Thomas Hansen (1634-1703), Danish bishop and psalm writer, 224, 227. Klopstock, Friedrich Gottlieb (17241803), German poet, 206. Købke, Christen Schellerup (1810-48), Danish painter, 20. Koch, Joseph Anton (1768-1839), German painter, 382, 383. Kotzebue, August von (1761-1819), German author, 303.

Index of Persons Kragh, Boline Abrahamsen (1810-39), Danish actress, 334, 335. Krebs, Frederik Christian (1814-81), Danish physician and author, 410. Laclos, Choderlos de (1741-1803), French author, 316. Lamennais, Hugues Félicité Robert de (1782-1854), French theologian and author, 370. Laub, Hardenack Otto Conrad (1805-83), Danish bishop, 155. Lawrence, Thomas (1769-1830), English painter, 387, 388. Lehmann, Peter Martin Orla (1810-70), Danish politician, 407. Leibniz, Baron Gottfried Wilhelm von (1646-1716), German philosopher and mathematician, 72. Lenau, Nicolaus, see Strehlenau, Niembsch von. Lermontov, Michail Jurjeritsch (1814-41), Russian poet, 365. Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim (1729-81), German writer and philosopher, 154. Lie, Jonas Lauritz Idemil (1833-1908), Norwegian author, 360. Lindberg, Jacob Christian (1797-1857), Danish theologian and orientalist, 194. Ludwig, Karl August, (1786-1868), King of Bavaria, 397. Lundbye, Johan Thomas (1818-48), Danish painter, 20, 21f., 383, 406-426. Luthardt, Christoph Ernst (1823-1902), German theologian, 196. Mach, Ernst (1838-1916), Austrian physicist and philosopher, 62. Madsen, Carl Johan Wilhelm (1855-1938), Danish art historian, 425. Marheineke, Philipp (1780-1846), German theologian, 117, 120, 123, 178, 186. Mars, Mlle. Anne Françoise Hippolite Salvetat (1779-1847), French actress, 341. Marstrand, Wilhelm Nikolai (1810-73), Danish painter, 20, 405. Martensen, Hans Lassen (1808-84), Danish theologian, and bishop, 6f., 10, 11ff., 79, 80, 87, 95-98, 99, 100, 101, 103, 104, 105, 116-126, 127, 129, 130, 132, 141,

431

142, 144, 145, 149, 159, 160, 164-180, 181-202, 306, 310, 311, 321, 365. Marx, Karl (1818-83), German philosopher and economist, 180. Meier, Emma (1829-90), Danish actress, 339. Mérimée, Prosper (1803-70), French author, 313, 364, 366. Mill, John Stuart (1806-73), English philosopher, 372. Molbech, Christian (1783-1857), Danish historian, 7, 220. Møller, Frederik Vilhelm (1846-1904), Danish writer, 372. Møller, Jens (1779-1833), Danish theologian and historian, 208f. Møller, Peter Ludvig (1814-65), Danish critic, 15, 19, 289, 310, 313, 356-372. Møller, Poul Martin (1794-1838), Danish poet and philosopher, 8f., 15, 28f., 42, 45-61, 79, 80, 88, 90-95, 96, 97, 98, 101, 102, 103, 104, 105, 127, 136-139, 144, 145, 219, 296, 304, 306, 356. Moltke, Joachim Godske (1746-1818), Danish diplomat, 151, 153, 154. Monrad, Ditlev Gothard (1811-87), Danish statesman and bishop, 131, 154. Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus (1756-91), Austrian composer, 314, 320, 321, 322, 330, 332, 333, 334, 336. Müller, Peter Erasmus (1776-1834), Danish philologist and theologian, 155. Münter, Frederica Franzisca (Fanny) (17961871), the wife of J.P. Mynster, 154. Münter, Friedrich Christian Carl Henrich (1761-1830), Danish bishop, 154, 155. Musset, Alfred (1810-57), French poet, 365, 366. Mynster, Jakob Peter (1775-1854), Danish theologian and bishop, 5, 11ff., 111, 113, 114, 119, 121, 122f., 126, 140-143, 144, 145, 149-163, 166, 167, 168, 198, 306, 310, 311. Mynster, Ole Hieronymus (1772-1818), Danish doctor, 150, 151. Neergaard, Marie Louise (1816-95), romantic interest of Lundbye, 413. Nielsen, Anna (1803-56), Danish actress, 19, 311, 336, 337, 338, 339, 340, 341.

432

Index of Persons

Nielsen, Nicolai Peter (1795-1860), Danish actor, 311, 336. Nielsen, Rasmus (1809-84), Danish philosopher, 13, 126-129, 130, 187-192, 193, 195, 197, 198, 200, 201, 202. Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm (1844-1900), German philosopher and philologist, 47, 50, 180. Novalis, Baron Friedrich von Hardenberg (1772-1801), German lyric poet, 206, 217, 218, 219, 225, 246, 316. Oehlenschläger, Adam (1779-1850), Danish poet, 15f., 83, 84, 85, 86, 107, 112, 149, 161, 208, 212, 213, 217, 218, 219, 220, 226, 233-247, 248-261, 343, 353, 356, 357, 358, 362, 365, 369. Olsen, Regine, see Regine Schlegel. Olufsen, Christian (1763-1827), the Danish agronomist, 39. Ørsted, Anders Sandøe (1778-1860), Danish jurist and statesman, 5, 6, 25, 159. Ørsted, Hans Christian (1777-1851), Danish scientist, 5, 6, 7, 9f., 16f., 41fn., 62-77, 107, 217, 262-271, 359. Ørsted, Sophie Wilhelmin Bertha (17821818), the wife of A.S. Ørsted, the sister of Adam Oehlenschläger, 25. Ostenfeld, Ib (1902-95), Danish psychiatrist, 425, 426. Paludan-Müller, Frederik (1809-76), Danish poet, 313, 343. Paludan-Müller, Jens (1813-94), Danish priest and theologian, 13, 193, 200, 202. Paulli, Just Henrik Voltelen (1809-65), Danish priest and the son-in-law of J.P. Mynster, 159. Pestalozzi, Johann Heinrich (1746-1827), Swiss educator, 285. Phister, Joachim Ludvig (1807-96), Danish actor, 327, 331, 336. Poe, Edgar Allan (1809-49), American poet and author, 370. Poniatowski, Prince Józef (1763-1813), Polish general in the Napoleonic wars, 394. Ponsard, François (1814-67), French dramatic poet, 370.

Pope Pius VII (1740-1823), Luigi Chiaromonte, Pope from 1800-23, 394. Pram, Christen Henriksen (1756-1821), Danish poet, 238. Printzlau, Ferdinand (1794-1865), Danish publisher, 346. Pushkin, Alexander Sergejeritsch (17991837), Russian poet, 365. Rachel, Elisabeth Rachel Félix (1821-58), French actress, 303. Rahbek, Kamma, i.e. Karen Margrete Heger (1775-1829), the wife of Knud Rahbek, 153, 161. Rahbek, Knud Lyhne (1760-1830), Danish author and editor, 15, 153. Rein, Jonas (1760-1821), Norwegian author, 215. Reinhart, Johan Christian (1761-1847), German painter, 383. Reinhold, Karl Leonard (1758-1823), German philosopher, 5. Richter, Friedrich (1807-56), German theologian, 138. Ritter, Johann Wilhelm (1776-1810), German physicist, 72. Rosenkilde, Adolph Marius (1816-82), Danish actor and author, 331. Rothe, Tyge Jesper (1731-95), Danish philosopher, 5. Rothe, Wilhelm (1800-78), Danish priest, 13, 196. Rousseau, Jean Jacques (1712-78), French author and philosopher, 45, 236, 239, 285. Sainte-Beuve, Charles Augustin (180469), French author, 367, 368, 369. Sand, George, pseudonym of Amandine Aurore Lucie Dupin (1804-76), French writer, 366, 370. Sardou, Victorien (1831-1908), French dramatic author, 370. Savart, Félix (1791-1841), French physicist, 77. Schack, Hans Egede (1820-59), Danish author, 360, 362. Scharling, Carl Emil (1803-77), Danish professor of theology, 13, 131, 193f., 202. Schelling, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von (1775-1854), German philosopher, 7, 8,

Index of Persons 15, 30fn., 71, 72, 73, 75, 117, 124, 132, 140, 151, 166, 186, 199, 205, 206, 210, 228, 269. Schiller, Johann Christoph Friedrich von (1759-1805), German poet, 15, 88, 207, 217, 225, 248, 285. Schlegel, August Wilhelm von (17671845), German critic, 86, 217. Schlegel, Friedrich von (1772-1829), German romantic writer, 59, 92, 93, 94, 95, 103, 104, 217, 316. Schlegel, Johan Frederik (1817-96), Danish government offical, the husband of Regine Olsen, 198, 315. Schlegel, Regine née Olsen (1822-1904), one time fiancée of Søren Kierkegaard, 136, 197f., 307, 313, 315. 318, 358. Schleiermacher, Friedrich (1768-1834), German theologian, 8, 11, 117, 174, 183, 184, 186, 199. Schopenhauer, Arthur (1788-1860), German philosopher, 45. Schubart, Hermann (1756-1832), Danish baron and diplomat, 383, 390, 401. Schubothe, Johan Henrich (1761-1828), Danish publisher and bookseller, 344, 345, 346. Schwartz, Athalia (1821-71), Danish writer, 284. Scott, Walter (1771-1832), Scottish poet and author, 313. Scribe, Augustin Eugène (1791-1861), French dramatic author, 303, 307, 321, 331, 336, 337, 369, 370. Sergel, Johan Tobias (1740-1814), Swedish sculptor, 375, 377. Shaftesbury, Anthony Ashley Cooper, Third Earl of (1671-1713), English philosopher, 225. Sheridan, Richard Brinsley (1751-1816), English poet and statesman, 336. Sibbern, Frederik Christian (17851872), Danish philosopher, 6, 8, 9, 2544, 49, 52, 80, 87, 88, 89, 90, 91, 95, 98, 101fn., 105, 122, 127f., 130, 132-136, 137, 138, 144, 145, 185f., 213, 296, 304, 316, 360. Siboni, Guiseppe (1780-1839), Italian singer, 333, 334.

433

Skougaard, Peter Nikolaj (1783-1838), Danish author and translator, 210. Solger, Karl Wilhelm Ferdinand (17801819), German philosopher and aesthetic theorist, 86, 101fn. Sonne, Jørgen Valentin (1801-90), Danish painter, 20. Staël, Mme de, i.e. Anne Louise Germaine Necker (1766-1817), French author, 368. Staffeldt, Adam Wilhelm Schack (17691826), Danish poet, 15, 206, 209. Stage, Ulriche Augusta (1816-94), Danish actress, 334, 335, 336, 339. Stampe, Henrik (1794-1876), Danish Baron, 399. Stanislavskij, Konstantin Sergevitsch (1863-1938) Russian actor and theater director, 341. Steensen-Leth, Constance Henriette (1777-1827), Grundtvig's patron, 205, 206, 208, 210. Steffens, Henrik (1773-1845), Norwegian philosopher, 6, 7, 39, 204, 205, 209, 210, 221, 222, 225, 229, 234, 235, 240, 269. Stendhal, pseudonym of Marie Henri Beyle (1783-1842), French novelist, 370. Sthen, Hans Christensen (1540-1610), Danish psalm writer and priest, 224. Stilling, Peter Michael (1812-69), Danish theologian and philosopher, 13, 131, 192, 193, 195, 200, 202. Strauss, David Friedrich (1808-74), German theologian, historian and philosopher, 117, 120, 185, 199. Strehlenau, Niembsch von, i.e. Nicolaus Lenau (1802-50), Austro-Hungarian poet, 125. Taine, Hippolyte Adolphe (1828-93), French philosopher, 368, 369, 372. Talleyrand, Charles Maurice (1754-1838), French diplomat, 302. Tenerani, Pietro (1789-1869), Italian sculptor, 395, 396. Thaarup, Thomas (1749-1821), Danish poet, 212. Thomsen, Christian Jürgensen (17881865), Danish archeologist, 407.

434

Index of Persons

Thorvaldsen, Bertel (1768-1844), Danish sculptor, 20, 21, 228, 375-405. Thorvaldsen, Gotskalk (1743-1806), Danish-Icelandic woodcarver, 375. Tieck, Johann Ludwig (1773-1853), German poet, 217, 218, 245, 246, 316. Torlonia, Prince Giovanni (1754-1829), Italian nobleman and businessman, 402. Treschow, Niels (1751-1833), Norwegian philosopher, 5, 39, 49, 52. Tryde, Eggert Christopher (1781-1860), Danish theologian and priest, 80, 88, 89, 90, 92, 96, 98, 101, 105. Varberg, Rudolf (1828-69), Danish author and politician, 131. Vigny, Alfred de (1797-1863), French poet, 366. Vischer, Fredrich Theodor (1807-87), German philosopher, 305. Wagner, Johan Martin von (1777-1858), German sculptor and painter, 397, 405. Ward, Edward Matthew (1816-79), English painter, 396. Watt, Robert (1837-94), Danish author and theater director, 372. Weis, Carl Mettus (1809-72), Danish jurist and political philosopher, 131. Wergeland, Henrik Arnold (1808-45), Norwegian poet, 362.

Werner, Friedrich Ludwig Zacharias (1768-1823), German poet, 217. Wessel, Johan Herman (1742-85), DanishNorwegian poet, 357, 367. Wiedewelt, Johannes (1731-1802), Danish sculptor, 375. Wieland, Christoph Martin (1733-1813), German poet, 206. Willemoes, Peter (1783-1808), Danish navel officer, 211, 212. Winckelmann, Johann Joachim (1717-68), German art historian and archaeologist, 375. Winterl, Jacob Joseph (1739-1809), AustroHungarian chemist and botanist, 71. Winther, Christian, i.e. Rasmus Villads Christian Ferdinand Winther (17961876), Danish poet, 312, 357, 359, 362, 364, 366. Wolff, Christian (1679-1745), German philosopher, 225. Worm, Pauline (1825-83), Danish writer, 284. Young, Edward (1681-1765), English poet, 225. Zeller, Eduard (1814-1908), German philosopher and theologian, 120, 123. Zoëga, Georg (1755-1809), Danish archaeologist, 376, 395, 401.

Contributors Poul Lübke KUA Institut for Filosofi Pædagogik og Retorik Njalsgade 80 2300 København S Denmark [email protected] Peter Thielst Ingemannsvej 22, 4th. 1964 Frederiksberg C Denmark Brian Söderquist Søren Kierkegaard Research Centre Store Kannikestræde 15 1169 Copenhagen K Denmark [email protected] Jon Stewart Søren Kierkegaard Research Centre Store Kannikestræde 15 1169 Copenhagen K Denmark [email protected] The Rt. Revd Dr. John Saxbee Bishop’s House Eastgate Lincoln LN2 1QQ England [email protected]

436

Contributors

Curtis Thompson Thiel College 75 College Avenue Greenville, PA 16125-2181 USA [email protected] Flemming Lundgreen-Nielsen Institut for Nordisk Filologi KU, Njalsgade 80 2300 København S Denmark [email protected] Kathryn Shailer-Hanson Dean, Continuing Education University of Winnipeg 346 Portage Ave. Winnipeg, MB R3C 0C3 Canada [email protected] Niels Ingwersen Dept. of Scandinavian Studies University of Wisconsin, Madison 600 North Park St. Madison, WI 53706-1475 USA [email protected] John L. Greenway Honors Program 1153 Patterson Office Tower University of Kentucky Lexington, KY 40506-0027 USA Katalin Nun Falkoner Allé 110, 3 tv. 2000 Frederiksberg Denmark [email protected]

Contributors

George Pattison Det teologiske Fakultet Institut for Kirkekundskab Aarhus Universitet 8000 Aarhus C Denmark [email protected] Janne Risum Institut for Dramaturgi Aarhus Universitet Langelandsgade 139 8000 Århus C Denmark [email protected] Peter Vinten-Johansen Department of History Michigan State University 301 Morrill Hall East Lansing, MI 48824-1036 USA [email protected] Hans Hertel Institut for Nordisk Filologi KU, Njalsgade 80 2300 København S Denmark [email protected] Ragni Linnet Institut for Kunsthistorie og Teatervidenskab Njalsgade 80 2300 København S Denmark [email protected]

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