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.

앪
앝 Printed on acid-free paper which falls within the guidelines of the ANSI
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 mechan-
ical, 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 coop-
eration, 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 use-
ful 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: Dan-
ish 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 Thorvald-
sen’s Museum.
The following institutions have allowed the reproduction of the pic-
tures 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. Zeu-

thens 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 encourage-
ment 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 Kier-
kegaard Studies. Monograph Series.
 Abbreviations of Kierkegaard’s Primary Texts

B&A Breve og Aktstykker vedrørende Søren Kierkegaard vols. 1-2,

ed. by Niels Thulstrup, Copenhagen: Munksgaard 1953-54.
C 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.
CA The Concept of Anxiety, tr. by Reidar Thomte in collabora-
tion with Albert B. Anderson, Princeton: Princeton Univer-
sity Press 1980, KW VIII.
CD Christian Discourses, tr. by Howard V. Hong and Edna H.
Hong, Princeton: Princeton University Press 1997, KW
XVII.
CI The Concept of Irony, tr. by Howard V. Hong and Edna H.
Hong, Princeton: Princeton University Press 1989, KW II.
COR The Corsair Affair; Articles Related to the Writings, tr. by
Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong, Princeton: Princeton
University Press 1982, KW XIII.
CUP1 Concluding Unscientific Postscript 1, tr. by Howard V. Hong
and Edna H. Hong, Princeton: Princeton University Press
1992, KW XII.1.
CUP2 Concluding Unscientific Postscript 2, tr. by Howard V. Hong
and Edna H. Hong, Princeton: Princeton University Press
1992, KW XII.2.
EO1 Either/Or 1, tr. by Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong, Prin-
ceton: Princeton University Press 1987, KW III.
EO2 Either/Or 2, tr. by Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong, Prin-
ceton: Princeton University Press 1987, KW IV.
EPW Early Polemical Writings: From the Papers of One Still Liv-
ing; 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.
EUD 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 xi

FSE For Self-Examination; Judge for Yourself! tr. by Howard V.

Hong and Edna H. Hong, Princeton: Princeton University
Press 1990, KW XXI.
FT Fear and Trembling; Repetition, tr. by Howard V. Hong and
Edna H. Hong, Princeton: Princeton University Press 1983,
KW VI.
JP 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.
KW Kierkegaard’s Writings vols. 1-26, tr. by Howard V. Hong and
Edna H. Hong, Princeton: Princeton University Press 1978-
2000.
LD Kierkegaard: Letters and Documents, tr. by Henrik Rosen-
meier, Princeton: Princeton University Press 1978. (A trans-
lation of B&A above.) KW XXV.
LRP A Literary Review, tr. by Alastair Hannay, Harmondsworth:
Penguin 2001.
M The Moment and Late Writings, tr. by Howard V. Hong and
Edna H. Hong, Princeton: Princeton University Press 1998,
KW XXIII.
P Prefaces in Prefaces, Writing Sampler, tr. by Todd W. Nichol,
Princeton: Princeton University Press 1998, KW IX.
Pap. 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.
PF 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.
PJ Papers and Journals: A Selection, tr. by Alastair Hannay,
Harmondsworth: Penguin Books 1996.
PV The Point of View, tr. by Howard V. Hong and Edna H.
Hong, Princeton: Princeton University Press 1998, KW
XXII.
R Repetition, tr. by Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong, Prin-
ceton: Princeton University Press 1983, KW VI.
SBL Schelling Lecture Notes, tr. by Howard V. Hong and Edna H.
Hong, Princeton: Princeton University Press 1989, KW II.
xii Abbreviations of Kierkegaard’s Primary Texts

SKS Søren Kierkegaards Skrifter vols. 1-55, ed. by Niels Jørgen

Cappelørn, Joakim Garff, Jette Knudsen, Johnny Kondrup
and Alastair McKinnon, Copenhagen: Gad Publishers 1997-.
SL Stages on Life’s Way, tr. by Howard V. Hong and Edna H.
Hong, Princeton: Princeton University Press 1988, KW XI.
SUD The Sickness unto Death, tr. by Howard V. Hong and Edna H.
Hong, Princeton: Princeton University Press 1980, KW XIX.
SV1 Samlede Værker vols. 1-14, ed. by A.B. Drachmann, J.L. Hei-
berg, and H.O. Lange, Copenhagen: Gyldendal 1901-1906.
WA Without Authority, tr. by Howard V. Hong and Edna H.
Hong, Princeton: Princeton University Press 1997, KW vol.
XVIII.
WL Works of Love, tr. by Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong,
Princeton: Princeton University Press 1995, KW XVI.
WS 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 rela-
tions 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 biblio-
graphical 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 con-
texts in which these works were originally published made it necessary
to make some effort to standardize certain formalia regarding regula-
tive 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 indi-
vidual authors. When possible, quotations or allusions to Kierke-
gaard’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 prin-
ciple 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 Year-
book 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 Den-
mark.” 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 Kierkegaar-
diana, vol. 13), Copenhagen: C.A. Reitzels Forlag A/S 1984, pp. 169-
197. 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 Por-
trayal of Everyday Life.” This article appears for the first time in
this anthology.
Henning Fenger “Kierkegaard – A Literary Approach” in Scandi-
navica 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 irrel-
evant, uninteresting or, even worse, simply another dead, white, Euro-
pean 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 Kier-

kegaard was a feminist or a democrat or the like. This approach also
distorts the nature of his thought. The obvious problem is that by tak-
ing 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 atten-
tion away from other aspects of his thought which are of wider inter-
est 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, shortcom-
ings 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 Kierke-
gaard 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 anal-
ogies 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 rele-

vant 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 cul-
tural 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 Kierke-
gaard 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 English-
speaking 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 cen-
tury and continued for some fifty or sixty years. There has long been a
tendency to place Kierkegaard on center-stage and to read his con-
temporaries, 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 con-
tinue to do so. As is the case with Kirmmse’s book, much of this inter-
est had its beginning in Kierkegaard studies and then later was
expanded to include other figures of the period of Golden Age Den-
mark. 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 Indiana-

polis: 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 gen-
eral interest in Denmark’s history and culture. Thus, their goal is not
to introduce the various figures of Golden Age Denmark in a schol-
arly 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 cul-
ture 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 anglo-
phone scholarship. The main goal of the present anthology is to famil-
iarize the English-speaking world with Kierkegaard’s diverse rela-
tions 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 analy-
ses 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 pas-
sionately in philosophy, theology, literature, history, literary and dra-
matic criticism, and even art history. This anthology has been divided
into several different sections which reflect the importance of Kierke-
gaard 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 philoso-
phers 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 dur-
ing the first half of the 19th century was largely derivative, being dom-
inated 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 influ-
ence 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 For a useful overview, see Harald Høffding Danske Filosofer, Copenhagen and Chris-
tiania: Gyldendalske Boghandel, Nordisk Forlag 1909.
4 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.
5 See, for example, Treschow’s Aphorismer til Forelæsninger over den Kantiske Philoso-
phie, Christiania 1797. Forelæsninger over den Kantiske Philosophie, Copenhagen
1798.
6 See Anders Sandøe Ørsted Over Sammenhængen mellem Dydelærens og Retslærens
Princip, Copenhagen 1798.
7 See Frantz Gotthard Howitz Determinismen eller Hume imod Kant, Copenhagen
1824.
8 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 fol-
lowed 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 aforemen-
tioned 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 (1785-
1872) and the Norwegian-Danish philosopher Henrich Steffens (1773-
1845). 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, litera-
ture, 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 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.
10 See W. v. Kloeden “Kierkegaard und J.G. Fichte” in Kierkegaard and Speculative Ide-
alism (Bibliotheca Kierkegaardiana, vol. 4), ed. by Niels Thulstrup and Marie Miku-
lová Thulstrup, Copenhagen: C.A. Reitzels Boghandel 1979, pp. 114-143.
11 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 Frie-
derich 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 Hei-
berg og hans skole i kritiken, Copenhagen: Gyldendal 1953, pp. 34-41. Jens Holger
Schjørring Teologi og filosofi. Nogle analyser og dokumenter vedrørende Hegelian-
ismen i dansk teologi, Copenhagen: G.E.C. Gads Forlag 1974. Niels Thulstrup Kier-
kegaard’s Relation to Hegel, tr. by George L. Stengren, Princeton: Princeton Univer-
sity Press 1980. Niels Thulstrup “The Situation in Denmark and Kierkegaard’s Reac-
tion” 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 sig-
nificant 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 (1783-
1872), 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, Philoso-
phie 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 philo-
sophical trends in Denmark are treated in the articles featured here.

12 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.
13 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.
14 Henrich Steffens Indledning til philosophiske Forelæsninger, Copenhagen 1803. See
also Henrich Steffens Indledning til philosophiske Forelæsninger, ed. by Johnny Kon-
drup, Copenhagen: C.A. Reitzels Forlag 1996.
15 See C.I. Scharling Grundtvig og Romantiken belyst ved Grundtvigs Forhold til Schel-
ling, Copenhagen: Gyldendal Boghandel, Nordisk Forlag 1947. See also Harald
Høffding “Grundtvig og H.C. Ørsted” in his Danske Filosofer, op. cit., pp. 57-65.
16 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.
17 See Kierkegaard und Schelling: Freiheit, Angst und Wirklichkeit, ed. by Jochem Hen-
nigfeld 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 Sib-
bern. Sibbern is perhaps best known as the advisor of Kierkegaard’s
dissertation, The Concept of Irony (1841); however, he was also a pro-
foundly prolific and influential writer in his own right. Of all the Dan-
ish philosophers, Sibbern probably had the best knowledge of contem-
porary 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 particu-
lar interest is the connection made between Sibbern’s theory of human
freedom and Kierkegaard’s philosophical anthropology. While Sib-
bern 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 per-
son 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 Sibbern Om Erkiendelse og Granskning. Til Indledning i det akademiske Studium,

Copenhagen 1822.
19 Sibbern Speculativ Kosmologie med Grundlag til en speculativ Theologie, Copenha-
gen 1846.
20 For Kierkegaard’s relation to Møller see the following: Poul Lübcke “Det ontolo-
giske 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, Co-
penhagen: C.A. Reitzels Forlag 1982, pp. 91-108. See also Frithiof Brandt Den unge
Søren Kierkegaard, Copenhagen: Levin & Munksgaards Forlag 1929, pp. 336-446.
21 Poul Martin Møller “Tanker over Mueligheden af Beviser for Menneskets Udøde-
lighed, 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 Christian-
ity. Also of interest is Møller’s course given in 1834-35, entitled Lec-
tures on the History of Ancient Philosophy. Møller’s notes to these lec-
tures were later published in his posthumous works.22 There one finds a
long section on Socrates and an account of Socratic irony which over-
laps significantly with Kierkegaard’s dissertation.23 The article pre-
sented here discusses Møller’s concept of “scattered thoughts,” a liter-
ary 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 electro-
magnetism. Like Sibbern, Ørsted was one of the members of Kierke-
gaard’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-scien-
tifically – 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 Poul Martin Møller “Udkast til Forelæsninger over den ældre Philosophies Historie”
in Møller’s Efterladte Skrifter, op. cit., vol. 2, pp. 273-527.
23 Ibid., vol. 2, p. 363f.
24 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.
25 Hans Christian Ørsted Aanden i Naturen, Copenhagen 1850.
26 JP 6, 6564 / Pap. X 2 A 302.
10 Introduction

This concept is set forth in his work Prolegomenon to the General The-
ory of Nature from 1811.27 The article demonstrates that Ørsted found
much of the inspiration for this concept in Kant’s theoretical philoso-
phy and philosophy of nature, specifically his Metaphysical Founda-
tions of Natural Science (1786).
The next article, “Kierkegaard’s Contribution to the Danish Discus-
sion of ‘Irony,’” takes up the central issue in Kierkegaard’s disserta-
tion. 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 demon-
strates how much of Kierkegaard’s dissertation was derivative from
that discussion and attempts to define what precisely his original con-
tribution was.
The final article in the initial section gives an overview of the impor-
tant movement of Danish Hegelianism. While readers of Kierkegaard
know that he was involved in an ongoing polemic with the Danish Hegel-
ians, such as the aforementioned Johan Ludvig Heiberg, Hans Lassen
Martensen as well as the controversial priest Adolph Peter Adler (1812-
69), not much has been written about his targets and their actual
thought. The article argues that the label “Hegelian” is an oversimpli-
fied 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 impor-

tant changes in the institution of the Danish State Church due to its
attempts to deal with a number of new revivalist movements, includ-
ing 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 vio-
lence Kierkegaard directed against it in the last year of his life.
Theology played a very central role at the University of Copenha-
gen. 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 intro-
duction 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 theo-
logical figures such as Grundtvig, Mynster and Martensen, the picture
that is presented of them is almost invariably identical to that painted

28 See Den danske Kirkes Historie vols. 1-7, ed. by Hal Koch and Bjørn Kornerup, Co-
penhagen: Gyldendalske Boghandel, Nordisk Forlag 1950-66; vol. 6, 1800-1848, by
Hal Koch.
29 See Bruce H. Kirmmse Kierkegaard in Golden Age Denmark, op. cit., pp. 27-44.
30 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, Almind-
elig 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 Kir-
mmse “Socrates in the Fast Lane: Kierkegaard’s The Concept of Irony on the Uni-
versity’s Volocifère. Documents, Context, Commentary, and Interpretation” in Inter-
national 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 Eng-
lish to explore in any detail what positions these thinkers held and
what their theological motivations were. This section devoted to the-
ology 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 ques-
tion,31 it has often been claimed, following Kierkegaard’s own state-
ments, 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 See Niels Jørgen Cappelørn “Die ursprüngliche Unterbrechung. Søren Kierkegaard

beim Abendmahl im Freitagsgottesdienst der Kopenhagener Frauenkirche” in Kier-
kegaard Studies. Yearbook 1996, pp. 328-329.
32 LD, p. 4 / B&A 1, 4. See Niels Jørgen Cappelørn “Die ursprüngliche Unterbre-
chung” op. cit., pp. 322ff.
33 “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 him-
self at the University, and evidence from Kierkegaard’s journals
bespeaks his jealousy of Martensen’s success.34 As is well known, Mar-
tensen 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 Self-
Consciousness (1837),35 his Meister Eckhart (1840),36 and his Outline of
the System of Moral Philosophy (1841).37 An overview is given of Mar-
tensen’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 develop-
ment. 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 (1805-
88), 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 Kierke-
gaard’s reaction to the work and its reception. In the Preface to Chris-
tian Dogmatics Martensen alludes to Kierkegaard’s works polemically,

34 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.
35 Hans Lassen Martensen De autonomia conscientiae sui humanae in theologiam dog-
maticam nostri temporis introducta, Copenhagen 1837. Danish translation: Den men-
neskelige Selvbevidstheds Autonomie, tr. by L.V. Petersen, Copenhagen 1841.
36 Hans Lassen Martensen Mester Eckart. Et Bidrag til at oplyse Middelalderens
Mystik, Copenhagen 1840.
37 Hans Lassen Martensen Grundrids til Moralphilosophiens System, Copenhagen
1841.
38 Hans Lassen Martensen Den christelige Dogmatik, Copenhagen 1849.
14 Introduction

and Kierkegaard’s various scattered remarks about the work in his jour-
nals show clearly that he was infuriated by this. Kierkegaard sketched a
number of different responses both to Martensen’s work and to his crit-
ics 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 trans-
lated into English,39 and for this reason he remains a somewhat
unknown figure to anglophone readers. Although in the Danish litera-
ture 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 criti-
cism of Grundtvig appears in the Concluding Unscientific Postscript,
where Kierkegaard’s pseudonymous author criticizes Grundtvig’s con-
ception 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 histori-
cally naive Grundtvig’s view that the oral tradition in the congregations
with the Apostles’ Creed, the Lord’s Prayer, the Communion, and bap-
tism 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 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.
40 See Søren Holm Grundtvig und Kierkegaard, Copenhagen: Nyt Nordisk Forlag,
Arnold Busck 1956. Hellmut Toftdahl Kierkegaard først og Grundtvig så, Copenha-
gen: Nyt Nordisk Forlag, Arnold Busck 1969. Carl Weltzer Grundtvig og Søren Kier-
kegaard, Copenhagen: Gyldendal 1952. Emanuel Skjoldager Hvorfor Søren Kierke-
gaard ikke blev Grundtvigianer, Copenhagen: C.A. Reitzels Forlag 1977. Otto Ber-
telsen Dialogen mellem Grundtvig og Kierkegaard, Copenhagen: C.A. Reitzels For-
lag 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.
41 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.
42 CUP1, pp. 34-46 / SKS 7, 41-52.
43 E.g. CUP1, p. 36f. / SKS 7, 43.
44 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 com-
plex relation to romanticism through many stages of his life. In the first
part of this essay, the sources of Grundtvig’s romanticism are exam-
ined with special emphasis on the German Romantics such as Schiller,
Fichte and Schelling. In the second half, points of comparison and con-
trast 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 tre-
mendously productive time for Danish authors. It featured some of the
best known poets in Danish literature such as Jens Baggesen (1764-
1826), Steen Steensen Blicher (1782-1848), Bernhard Severin Inge-
mann (1789-1862), Schack Staffeldt (1769-1826), Adam Oehlen-
schläger (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), Thoma-
sine Christine Gyllembourg-Ehrensvärd (1773-1856), Peter Ludvig
Møller (1814-65), and Knud Lyhne Rahbek (1760-1830), not to men-
tion Kierkegaard himself. The articles selected for this section illumi-
nate the life and work of some of these figures.
The first of these articles is dedicated to the poet Adam Oehlen-
schläger. 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 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.
46 Adam Oehlenschläger Palnatoke. Et Sørgespiel, Copenhagen 1809.
47 In Oehlenschläger’s Poetiske Skrifter vols. 1-2, Copenhagen 1805; vol. 2, pp. 75-436.
16 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 charac-
ter 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 person-
ally. 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 inti-
mate 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 sci-
ences, all the concerns of humanity were of heartfelt interest to
him.”50 The featured article points out how Andersen’s story effec-
tively 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 In Oehlenschläger’s Nordiske Digte, Copenhagen 1807, pp. 233-425.

49 Hans Christian Andersen Kun en Spillemand, Copenhagen 1837.
50 Johan Ludvig Heiberg “Autobiographiske Fragmenter” in Prosaiske Skrifter vols. 1-
11, 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 arti-
cle presented here. The author argues that while Thomasine Gyllem-
bourg is primarily concerned with portraying the changes that were
taking place in family and social life in the first half of the 19th cen-
tury, 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 explor-
ing the novel itself.

IV. Literary and Dramatic Criticism

The next section treats Kierkegaard’s relations to the literary and dra-
matic 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 JP 5, 5092 / SKS 17, 21.6, AA:12. JP 1, 133 / SKS 17, 244.21, DD:69. See Hans Chris-
tian 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.
52 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.
53 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 epi-
sodes 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 liter-
ary world. Kierkegaard was of course far from oblivious to this, pen-
ning 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 fig-
ures such as Don Juan, Faust, and Ahasverus, the wandering Jew is
explored in some detail. The picture of the young aesthetic Kierke-
gaard that emerges from this account is quite different from that of
the profoundly religious Kierkegaard often portrayed in the second-
ary 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 dra-
matic criticism and theory. In this article the author examines Kierke-
gaard’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 Kierke-
gaard adopts Heiberg’s conception of a great work as the unity of con-

54 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 Contem-
poraries, tr. and ed. by Bruce H. Kirmmse, Princeton: Princeton University Press
1996, p. 13.
55 Johan Ludvig Heiberg “Litterær Vintersæd” in Intelligensblade vol. 2, no. 24, March
1, 1843, pp. 285-292.
56 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 ref-
erence 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 care-
ful not to confuse the actress with her role or the person with her pro-
fession 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 infor-
mation regarding the number of people who attended the perform-
ances 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 Heib-
erg 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 fig-
ure 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 achieve-
ments 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), Con-
stantin 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 outstand-
ing 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 impor-
tant 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 en-
abled 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 Kierke-
gaard. 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 signifi-
cance 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 dia-
logue 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 1700-
1904, 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 Kierke-
gaard 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 com-
menced (sculpture belongs to the classical), and thus we have experi-
enced 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 Thorvald-
sen’s biography and analyzes some of his most famous works. Thor-
valdsen 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 through-
out 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 examina-
tion of his letters to friends and private diary, this article traces the dif-
ferent aspects of Lundbye’s reception of Kierkegaard’s individual

58 One noteworthy exception to this tendency is Mogens Bencard (ed.) Intersections:

Art and Science in the Golden Age, op. cit.
59 See JP 3, 3805 / Pap. I A 200.
60 CD, p. 266 / SV1 X, 270. See Niels Jørgen Cappelørn “Die ursprüngliche Unterbre-
chung” op. cit., p. 385f.
61 WA, p. 184 / SV1 XII, 286.
22 Introduction

books. The author argues that Lundbye identified closely with Kier-
kegaard’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 signifi-
cant 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 phil-

osopher. He began the study of law in 1802, but, following his gradua-
tion 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 psy-
chology, 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) Psy-
chology with a Preface on General Biology,5 (6) Speculative Cosmol-
ogy with the Rudiments of a Speculative Theology,6 and (7) Reports on
a Paper from 2135.7

1 Sibbern Menneskets aandelige Natur og Væsen. Et Udkast til en Psychologie vols. 1-2,
Copenhagen 1819-28; vol. 1.
2 Sibbern Om Erkiendelse og Granskning. Til Indledning i det akademiske Studium,
Copenhagen 1822. The English title is abbreviated here as KE.
3 Sibbern Om Poesi og Konst i Almindelighed, Copenhagen 1834.
4 Sibbern Bemærkninger og Undersøgelser, fornemmelig betreffende Hegels Philoso-
phie, betragtet i Forhold til vor Tid, Copenhagen 1838.
5 Sibbern Psychologie, Indledet med almindelig Biologie, i sammentrængt Fremstilling,
Copenhagen 1843.
6 Sibbern Speculativ Kosmologie med Grundlag til en speculativ Theologie, Copenha-
gen 1846. The English title is abbreviated here as SC.
7 Sibbern Meddelelser af et Skrift fra Aaret 2135 vols. 1-2, Copenhagen 1858-72.
26 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 defini-
tion 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 elabo-
rated 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 deter-
mination, 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: intu-
ition (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 KE, p. 3.
9 KE, p. 3.
10 KE, p. 18.
11 KE, p. 19.
12 KE, p. 20.
13 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 intu-
ition 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 reflec-
tion.”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 pos-
sibility arises of consciousness – by virtue of its active (arbitrary) fac-
ulty of apprehension – being in disagreement with the object of knowl-
edge. 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 imme-
diate 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 argumenta-
tion, study or research has arisen.18

14 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 inter-
preted as a highly developed Fürsichsein. We may see in this an association of logical,
epistemological and ontological concepts.
15 KE, pp. 29-30.
16 KE, p. 164.
17 KE, pp. 36ff.
18 KE, p. 37.
28 Poul Lübcke

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 sen-
sation. 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 dis-
tinct both from sensation’s intuitive fixation to the particular and
from the discursive questioning and argumentation of thought. Fur-
thermore, since “knowledge of truth” for Sibbern includes not only
sensation and cognition by way of understanding (Forstand) and rea-
son (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 knowl-
edge of what is normatively true. In this way devotion to science pro-
vides at one and the same time knowledge of the world in all its actu-
ality 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 radi-
cal 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 some-

19 KE, p. 40.
20 KE, p. 5.
21 KE, p. 7.
22 KE, p. 11.
23 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.
 F.C. Sibbern: Epistemology as Ontology 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 differ-
ence 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 Sick-
ness unto Death (1849) Kierkegaard says that “the self” is “consti-
tuted 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 con-
temporaries, however, is that whereas Sibbern is very optimistic with
regard to the ability of the norm (idea) to realize itself in the phenom-
enon/existence/actuality, Møller is skeptical about it, and Kierkegaard

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

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 prob-
lem; 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 manifes-
tation must have the character of consciousness becomes evident from
the fact that only consciousness can truly possess the eternal, i.e. con-
sciousness may be regarded as an ontological manifestation of the eter-
nal. Self-consciousness, intelligence, and freedom are derived there-

31 KE, pp. 32-33.

32 KE, pp. 32-33.
33 KE, p. 20.
34 KE, pp. 20-21
35 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 cate-
gory, 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.
36 KE, pp. 33-34.
 F.C. Sibbern: Epistemology as Ontology 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 manifes-
tation of the eternal divinity) presupposes a being that can choose
freely; but this presupposes a self-consciousness that again presup-
poses 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. pre-
supposes 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 free-
dom); 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 con-
sequently dependent on “faith” in the possibility of fundamental cog-
nition, 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 coordi-
nated within a wider context that tallies with intellectual cognition
(Forstand and Fornunft), a process which has the character of a “con-
struction a priori.”42 Sibbern thinks that even the most simple sensa-
tion 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 com-

37 KE, p. 34. See also KE, p. 161.

38 KE, p. 34. See also KE, p. 161.
39 KE, p. 35.
40 KE, pp. 45-46. See also KE, pp. 170-173.
41 KE, p. 55.
42 KE, p. 58.
43 KE, p. 61.
32 Poul Lübcke

pared with his earlier remark that the simple intuition to be found in
primitive sensation is abolished as soon as we seek a closer under-
standing of what is sensed. Such understanding may be regarded as
viewing what is sensed in a wider context, and the finitude of this cog-
nitive 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 philos-
opher, 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 fur-
nish 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 mod-
ern scientific conception of a model, which may be tested by means
of observation. I interpret Sibbern as meaning that whereas the con-
cept 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-under-
standing of the fundamental cognition of totality. This universal pre-
understanding acquires its concretization in the a priori construction,
which provides the structuring whole within which a possible sensa-
tion 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 KE, p. 65.
45 KE, pp. 68-69.
46 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.
 F.C. Sibbern: Epistemology as Ontology 33

E. Grounds of Knowledge and Grounds of Existence.

Grounds and Concepts
Important for Sibbern is the distinction between “grounds of knowl-
edge” (Erkendelsesgrunde) and “grounds of existence” (Tilværelses-
grunde).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 mod-
ern 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 deter-
mination, 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 Sib-

47 KE, p. 72. “Rationes cognoscendi” and “Rationes essendi.”

48 KE, p. 88.
49 KE, p. 97.
50 KE, p. 104.
51 KE, p. 105.
52 KE, pp. 105-106.
53 KE, p. 106.
34 Poul Lübcke

bern’s concept of the Absolute,54 thus acquiring a better understand-

ing 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 cogni-
tion (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 (con-
sciousness) 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 KE, p. 87, pp. 108-109.

55 KE, p. 107.
56 KE, p. 109.
57 KE, p. 110.
58 KE, p. 112.
59 KE, p. 113.
 F.C. Sibbern: Epistemology as Ontology 35

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 fun-
damental 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 “piece-
meal 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 Sib-

60 KE, p. 116.
61 KE, p. 120.
62 KE, pp. 122, 126.
63 KE, p. 147.
64 KE, p. 146.
36 Poul Lübcke

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 onto-
logical from the outset. Furthermore, without conflicting with the
book from 1822, it contains an important new elaboration of the con-
cept 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-constitu-
tive” are “the all-valid,”68 “the ideal-real,”69 “actuality”70 and “the all-
active.”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 “all-
ideal” (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 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 supplemen-
tary 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).
66 SC, p. 14.
67 SC, p. 4.
68 SC, p. 3.
69 SC, pp. 1, 5.
70 SC, p. 4.
71 SC, pp. 3, 8.
72 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 un-
altered throughout time.
73 SC, p. 2.
74 SC, p. 2.
75 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.
76 SC, p. 5.
 F.C. Sibbern: Epistemology as Ontology 37

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 unstruc-
tured 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 all-
constitutive is the ideal-real “in which the fullness of intelligence is
seen in a dynamic appearance through an actuality in which it is real-
ized 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 possi-
bilities79 which the hypothetical Idea represents. The all-constitutive is
also the power80 that brings forward the manifestation. We may there-
fore 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 extra-
rational (the real). In possessing the status of a constitutive power, the
all-constitutive is “eternal”81 in two senses: (1) as eternally constitut-
ing the Idea, qua Idea, and thereby eternal, and (2) as eternally consti-
tuting the real circumstances, which are always temporal. The latter is
what underlies the special relation of the all-constitutive to the tem-
poral and needs further elaboration.

77 SC, p. 5.
78 SC, p. 6.
79 SC, p. 2.
80 SC, p. 4.
81 SC, p. 4.
38 Poul Lübcke

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 atempo-
rality, 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 renew-
ing 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 “constitu-
tion” 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 character-
ized 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 SC, p. 14. Here “of eternity” does not mean the same as “in a timeless way” but
rather “in time without a starting-point.”
83 SC, p. 18.
84 SC, p. 18.
85 SC, p. 25. Sibbern refers to the Kant-Laplace theory of the universe.
 F.C. Sibbern: Epistemology as Ontology 39

ideal-real manifested itself as constitutive for the first time. (Unfortu-

nately, 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 starting-
point) for the constitution of the all-constitutive by means of a tempo-
ral 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 proc-
ess of the all-constitutive has been temporalized. The ontological pre-
conditions 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 ema-
nation with the concept of progress – and this is the special feature of
Sibbern’s theory of evolution. The interesting point is not that Sib-
bern possessed a theory of evolution, for so many of his contemporar-
ies 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 Stef-
fens 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-con-
stitutive. Understood in this way, time and the all-constitutive would
stand apart from each other, thus conflicting with the thesis that the

86 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.
87 These arguments are not considered in Himmelstrup’s monograph on Sibbern.
40 Poul Lübcke

all-constitutive should be related to everything that can be described

as rational. For, in that event, either time would be something irra-
tional (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-consti-
tutive 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 con-
cept of eternity may be seen in a new light, and the temporal signifi-
cance of eternity is that eternity has to create continuity in the all-
constitutive’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 succes-
sion, 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 con-
stitutes 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 spo-
radic.”89 By this Sibbern means that development does not start and
proceed further from one point or from a complete stage, but is char-
acterized 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 Sib-

88 SC, p. 77.
89 SC, p. 24.
 F.C. Sibbern: Epistemology as Ontology 41

bern as being an atomist, however, would be a grave error. Atomism

implies that the whole is the result of the interaction of isolated ele-
ments caused by the action of isolated forces that have accidentally
joined to form a whole. That Sibbern’s sporadic forces are able to co-
operate 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 atom-
ism. 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-con-
stitutive that leads the points towards the whole. Thus, Sibbern’s typi-
cal 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 suffi-
cient condition for the existence of spirit, because spirit is more than a
mere product of the coordinated forces of matter.91 Sibbern then elab-
orates 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 individual-

90 SC, p. 37.
91 SC, p. 39.
92 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 spe-
cial 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.
42 Poul Lübcke

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 consti-
tute itself in its organic unity by passing through the individual, this
individual cannot be considered as merely a means but, being a neces-
sary 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 aban-
doned, but the individual acquires value of its own precisely because
individuality is a necessary stage within the constitution (temporaliza-
tion) 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 individual-
izing and organizing tendencies within the cosmos as a whole.
This is very important because, ontologically speaking, human free-
dom has only arisen as the most extreme instance of the individualiz-
ing tendency to grant independence to what has been individually
formed sporadically. But these free beings only achieve this independ-
ent 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 free-
dom, 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 In his book Meddelelser af et Skrift fra Aaret 2135, op. cit., Sibbern argues, that liber-
alism is worse than slavery!
94 SC, p. 64.
 F.C. Sibbern: Epistemology as Ontology 43

reign supreme.”95 Sibbern is not – at least not in this work96 – a deter-

minist. The divine rules only in so far as the individuals resolve to sub-
mit, “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 con-
stitutes itself through its instances in the world. This pantheism, with
which Sibbern associates himself by virtue of his theory of the all-con-
stitutive, must then, according to him, be combined with the belief in
a personal God, or a concrete Thou to whom man can address him-
self.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 men-
tioned. 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 SC, p. 64.
96 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 free-
dom as being the opposite of causality.” Himmelstrup has not understood the rela-
tions between passivity and activity, fact and norm, individualization and organiza-
tion. However, Sibbern is not straightforward on this point; especially obscure is his
treatment of freedom in Betragtninger over og i Anledning af Professor Howitz’ Af-
handling om Afsindighed og Tilregnelse (Copenhagen 1824) and in the different edi-
tions of his Psychologie.
97 SC, pp. 61-62.
98 SC, p. 73. Sibbern quotes Fichte: “Was der von Gott begeisterte thut, das ist Gott.”
99 SC, p. 73.
100 SC, pp. 73-74.
101 SC, p. 75.
44 Poul Lübcke

good, will the world strive to realize the divine offer of the all-consti-
tutive. 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 crea-
ture 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 indi-
vidual 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 educa-
tion 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 activi-
ties handed down by his contemporaries and biographers attracts more
interest due to the humorous stories about him and his role as an amia-
ble 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 author-
ship with the publication of Either/Or.
Poul Martin Møller was not a philosopher by profession or tem-
perament. 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.

46 Peter Thielst

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 Uni-
versity at Christiania (Oslo), then professor of philosophy at Copen-
hagen itself. His Socratic bent made itself felt in his work not only
with philosophical problems, but also in questions of popular educa-
tion 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 philoso-
phy 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, notwith-
standing the idealistic portrait of him that some have drawn.2 He expe-
rienced 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 philosophi-
cal system both personally and professionally, he discovered to his dis-
may 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.
 Poul Martin Møller 47

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 frag-
ments 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 ambig-
uously and is frequently at variance with himself as to exactly how
they shall be formulated. Yet, when he composes an aphorism it rep-
resents 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 some-
thing 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 “scat-
tered thought” is thus both a random thought or thought-association
and a completed aphorism, simultaneously noncommittal and of spe-
cial 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 con-
cert 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 advan-
tage of recording one’s thoughts in writing is that one has to think

3 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.
4 ES 3, p. 4.
5 ES 3, p. 3.
6 ES 3, p. 25.
48 Peter Thielst

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 sponta-
neous 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 carried-
through 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 him-
self”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 Socra-
tes’ 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 percep-
tion’s individual assumptions for him to imagine that his insight ful-
filled 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 sys-
tem), and, on the other, as an expression of elementary dialectics
which probe more deeply into a given problem than ordinary dog-
matic or synthesized thinking.

7 ES 3, p. 92.
8 ES 3, p. 25.
9 ES 3, p. 22.
10 ES 3, p. 69.
11 ES 4, p. 100.
12 ES 3, p. 25.
 Poul Martin Møller 49

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 Socra-
tes 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 affecta-
tion. This Socratic fight against inner guardianship and the falseness
of divided minds is formulated by Møller as follows: “No manifesta-
tion 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 par-
ticular contribution to the dialectics of creative self-activity. The scat-
tered thought is not a definite interpretation: it is a factor in the inter-
pretative 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 col-
league and faithful helper throughout his career. Space does not per-
mit, unfortunately, dealing here with these connecting links.14 But if
we now return to the remark Møller made about clearness in presen-
tation arising from inability to think coherently,15 it can help to inves-
tigate a link that also exists with the great coryphaeus of the philoso-
phy 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 ES 3, p. 91, p. 176.
14 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.
15 See ES 3, p. 69.
50 Peter Thielst

philosophical problems and arguments. Møller was quick to perceive

that language (by which he meant all human speech, including philo-
sophical 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 sat-
isfied to use the means that stand at one’s disposal through the word-
store 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 terminol-
ogy 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 phil-
osophy. 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 com-
plies with the elementary crystallization of language, which is older than any philoso-
phy? 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 per-
ceived from more than one side in a philosophical system?17

Rather than follow this viewpoint to its logical conclusion of a per-

spectivistic 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 elemen-
tary desire to communicate and share his thoughts with other people:

16 ES 3, p. 132.
17 ES 3, p. 18.
 Poul Martin Møller 51

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 system-
atic 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 phil-
osophy, but by transforming its concepts into opinions. And then it is no longer a phil-
osophy – 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 self-
knowledge 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 fur-
ther than Hegel himself by regarding the popularization and conse-
quent 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 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 Phenome-
nology of Spirit, tr. by A.V. Miller, Oxford: Clarendon Press 1977, p. 35: “the strenu-
ous 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 de-
velopment.”)
19 ES 3, p. 120.
52 Peter Thielst

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 self-
activity.”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 orig-
inal concept of affectation, in which, in attacking all species of false-
ness, 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 personal-
ity’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 per-
sonality. This self-deceit consists of misinterpreting one’s own exist-
ence – and here Møller’s gradated system comes into the picture –
thereby establishing or accentuating a divided consciousness: “Affec-
tation is always based on getting led astray by some propensity with-
out being aware of it.”24 – Did somebody say something about uncon-
sciousness dominating the unconscious?

20 ES 3, pp. 91, 176.

21 ES 3, p. 25.
22 ES 3, p. 22.
23 See Ordbog over Det Danske Sprog vols. 1-28, ed. by Det Danske Sprog- og Littera-
turselskab, Copenhagen: Gyldendal 1919-56; vol. 1, column 157.
24 ES 3, p. 174.
 Poul Martin Møller 53

Møller evidently reaches his concept of affectation by way of recoil-

ing 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 con-
cept 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 follow-
ing 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 per-
son 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 simu-
lation 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 conscious-
ness of the character he portrays. Herein lies the existentialist swindle
and life-lie: voluntary self-deceit. As Svend Erik Stybe has pointed

25 ES 3, p. 165.
26 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 ver-
nünftig.” (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.)
27 Ibid., § 142.
28 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.
29 ES 3, p. 166.
54 Peter Thielst

out, a remarkable intellectual parallel can be drawn here with Jean-

Paul Sartre’s concept of la mauvaise foi in L’être et le néant30: “La
mauvaise foi a donc en apparence la structure du mensonge. Seule-
ment, ce qui change tout, c’est que, dans la mauvaise foi, c’est à moi-
même 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 uni-
versal 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 personal-
ity”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: indi-
viduality, which must follow its inner law (“its idea”) and which if not
respected – divided consciousness and bashfulness – degenerates dis-
astrously into affectation in that an assumed “I” merges with the orig-
inal, 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 apho-
ristic method. Now we see it charged with an existential commitment

30 See Svend Erik Stybe “‘Det enslige’ og ‘den enkelte,’” op. cit., p. 28.
31 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.”)
32 ES 3, p. 176.
33 ES 3, p. 184.
34 ES 3, p. 175f.
35 ES 3, pp. 91, 176.
 Poul Martin Møller 55

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 suffi-
ciently tempered.”36 This momentary self-deceit is sometimes able to
break through a person’s real character because it has not yet stabi-
lized itself or become strong enough. It is not only harmless, but to a
certain degree even desirable because: “He who is not able commu-
nally 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 peo-
ple’s circle of consciousness, may through his guardedness preserve
himself from being overwhelmed by some spiritual power; but the indi-
vidual 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 cer-
tain amount of self-deceit is necessary – for it constitutes existence.”38
Isolation and obdurate “self-defence” will render one’s character ster-
ile 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 incon-
testably 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 manifes-
tations 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 ES 3, p. 169.
37 ES 3, p. 169f.
38 ES 3, p. 176.
39 ES 3, pp. 171-172.
56 Peter Thielst

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 seri-
ous 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 interpreta-
tion 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 self-
destruction 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 scat-
tered 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 ES 3, p. 172.
41 Ibid.
42 See the account of Møller’s relations with Kierkegaard in Frithiof Brandt Den unge
Søren Kierkegaard, Copenhagen: Levin & Munksgaards Forlag 1929, pp. 336-447.
 Poul Martin Møller 57

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 pro-
nounced. Two of the “scattered thoughts” can serve here to illustrate
the wide gap that separated them: “In a completely organically devel-
oped 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 ES 3, p. 181f.
44 ES 3, p. 91.
45 ES 3, p. 188.
46 ES 4, p. 135.
47 See ES 4, p. 151.
58 Peter Thielst

We shall not dwell on the problem of Møller’s relation to Hegel

and his philosophy, but will simply record that his attempt at assimi-
lation 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 Hegelian-
ism 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 Hegelian-
ism. From about the middle of the 1830’s, however, Møller was suffi-
ciently preoccupied with a perceived crack in the Hegelian edifice
that, in an effort to rectify it, he composed the only large-scale, con-
centrated 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 individual-
ism 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 CUP1, p. 34fn. / SKS 7, 41fn.

49 Poul Martin Møller “Tanker over Mueligheden af Beviser for Menneskets Udødelig-
hed” in Maanedsskrift for Litteratur vol. 17, Copenhagen 1837, pp. 1-72, 422-53.
 Poul Martin Møller 59

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 nihil-
ism, for which reason his participation in the debate about immortal-
ity 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 sub-
jectivism 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 self-
deceit’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 convic-
tion 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 per-
sonality” 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 command-
ment 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 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.
51 ES 3, p. 157.
52 ES 3, p. 154.
53 ES 3, p. 183.
60 Peter Thielst

“Indifferentism” manifests itself in two forms, one passive, one active.

Passive indifferentism is the attitude that sets aside current and press-
ing problems and instead adopts a “melancholy tendency to brood
over the unknowable future,”54 and which thus has a certain connec-
tion 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 deliber-
ately excludes any permanent attitude to existence, and whose ran-
dom 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 disin-
tegrating 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 disinte-
gration of the character) brings one back to reason and to the re-
establishment 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, tra-
dition – i.e. the Christian tradition, which acknowledges personal
immortality – is reality in this world, the foundation on which all per-
ception 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 ES 4, p. 66.
55 See ES 3, pp. 159ff.
56 ES 6, p. 67.
57 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.)
58 ES 5, pp. 72-73.
 Poul Martin Møller 61

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 psy-
chologically 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 lan-
guage” – 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 tradi-
tion” 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 reli-
gion.”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 See ES 3, pp. 197-198.

60 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 pub-

lished an essay, “Über Gedankenexperimente,” in Zeitschrift für den
physikalischen und chemischen Unterricht.1 The article was rewrit-
ten, enlarged and published in Erkenntnis und Irrtum in 1905.2 Here
several thought experiments, known from the history of modern sci-
ence, were presented and analyzed, and attempts were made to dis-
tinguish thought experiments from “real” or “physical” experiments.
Since this essay aroused great interest among contemporary physi-
cists and philosophers, and stimulated the discussion of basic meth-
odological 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 The-
ory 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 Zeitschrift für den physikalischen und chemischen Unterricht, January 1897, pp. 1-5.
2 Ernst Mach Erkenntnis und Irrtum. Skizzen zur Psychologie der Forschung, 2nd edi-
tion, Leipzig: Verlag von Johann Ambrosius Barth 1906, pp. 183-199.
3 Hans Christian Ørsted Første Indledning til den almindelige Naturlære, Copenhagen
1811. See Hans Christian Ørsted Naturvidenskabelige Skrifter vols. 1-3, ed. by Kir-
stine Meyer, Copenhagen: Andr. Fredr. Høst 1920; vol. 3, pp. 151-190 (abbreviated
NS).
 H.C. Ørsted: Immanuel Kant and the Thought Experiment 63

experiment either. In his short sketch of “the history of the general

theory of nature,”4 he did not utilize the rich sources for exemplifica-
tion 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 Meta-
physical Foundations of Natural Science (1786), and offers the follow-
ing 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 NS 3, pp. 179-185.
5 Galileo Galilei Dialogues Concerning Two New Sciences, tr. by Henry Crew and
Alfonso de Salvio, New York: Dover Publications 1914, pp. 62-65.
6 Isaac Newton Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy and his System of the
World, tr. by Andrew Motte. Translation revised by Florian Cajori, Berkeley: Univer-
sity of California Press 1946, p. 552.
7 E.J. Dijksterhuis Archimedes, tr. by C. Dikshoorn, Princeton: Princeton University
Press 1987, pp. 16-17.
8 NS 3, p. 172.
9 NS 3, p. 173.
64 Johannes Witt-Hansen

of the experiment in physics. Such texts are to be found in the Intro-

duction 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 pre-
amble 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 underesti-
mated, apparently because the readers of the paragraph usually con-
centrated 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 presuppo-
sition for the contrivance and establishment of an experimental set-
up, 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 consider-
able 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 inter-
preting 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. Refer-
ring 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 Immanuel Kant Critique of Pure Reason, tr. by Norman Kemp Smith, London: Mac-
millan & Co. Ltd. New York: St. Martin’s Press 1963, B 1-B 30; B vii-B xliv.
11 Ernst Cassirer Das Erkenntnisproblem in der Philosophie und Wissenschaft der neu-
eren Zeit vols. 1-4, Berlin 1906-57; vol. 2, 1907, pp. 532-535.
12 Immanuel Kant Critique of Pure Reason, op. cit., B 9.
13 Ibid., B 9.
 H.C. Ørsted: Immanuel Kant and the Thought Experiment 65

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 Charyb-
dis that the physicist must face. Addressing the dogmatic metaphysi-
cian, 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, rea-
son 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 per-
formance of experimental analysis. Referring to the experiments per-
formed 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 princi-
ples 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 prin-
ciples 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 Ibid., B 9-10.
15 Ibid., B xiii.
16 Ibid., B xiii.
17 Ibid., B xiii.
18 Ibid., B 189-294.
19 Ibid., B xiii.
66 Johannes Witt-Hansen

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 phys-
ics…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 con-
cept 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 mathe-
matician] had himself formed a priori, and had put into the figure in
the construction by which he presented it to himself.”24 “[M]athemat-
ical knowledge is the knowledge gained by reason from the construc-
tion 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 has-
tens at once to intuition, in which it considers the concept in concreto,
though not empirically, but only in an intuition which it presents a pri-
ori, 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 Ibid., B xii.
21 Ibid., B xi.
22 Ibid., B xiii-xiv.
23 Ibid., B xii.
24 Ibid., B xii.
25 Ibid., B 741.
26 Ibid., B 741.
27 Ibid., B 743-744.
 H.C. Ørsted: Immanuel Kant and the Thought Experiment 67

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 con-
struction of physical concepts in intuition. It would seem that, in
Ørsted’s view, this constructive act is the core of the thought experi-
ment 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, possi-
bly involving mathematical constructions of the type discovered in
Newton’s Principia, (3) performance of “real” experiments and anal-
ysis 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 experimen-
tal 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 rea-
son’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 back-
ground 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 con-
cept we have formed of the matter, as well as according to the way in which it has devel-
oped 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 every-
day experiences. Other changes are not discovered, unless we deliberately turn our

28 Ibid., B 9.
29 Ibid., B xiii.
68 Johannes Witt-Hansen

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 con-
formity with Kant, Ørsted gives the following description of the exper-
iment: “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 cre-
ating 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 pow-
erful 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 oper-
ating 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 NS 3, p. 168.
31 NS 3, p. 169.
32 NS 3, p. 170.
33 NS 3, p. 172.
34 NS 3, p. 172.
35 NS 3, p. 172.
36 NS 3, p. 172.
 H.C. Ørsted: Immanuel Kant and the Thought Experiment 69

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 experi-
ment 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 sub-
sumed, 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 supposi-
tion together with the other known laws of nature.”39 “If one discov-
ers 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 simi-
lar 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 math-
ematics 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 NS 3, p. 172.
38 Isaac Newton Mathematical Principles, op. cit., Section 1, pp. 29-39.
39 NS 3, p. 175.
40 NS 3, p. 175.
70 Johannes Witt-Hansen

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 philoso-
phy 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 investiga-
tions, 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 trea-
tise it is clear that Ørsted at the turn of the century considered Kant’s
Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science the keystone of Newto-
nian 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 devel-
oped 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 Kirs-
tine 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 Hans Christian Ørsted Grundtrækkene af Naturmetaphysiken, Copenhagen 1799.

42 NS 1, p. 76.
43 NS 1, p. 76.
44 Kirstine Meyer “The Scientific Life and Works of H.C. Ørsted” in NS 1, p. XVI.
 H.C. Ørsted: Immanuel Kant and the Thought Experiment 71

according to the Kantian attraction/repulsion pattern, were subservi-

ent 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 Metaphys-
ical 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 atten-
tion 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 “roman-
tic 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 aprior-
ism, “romantic speculation” and “wild experiments” as performed by
the Hungarian experimentalist, Jacob Joseph Winterl, and his Ger-

45 NS 1, p. 77.
46 NS 1, p. 77.
47 Hans Christian Ørsted Aanden i Naturen, Copenhagen 1850.
48 F.J. Billeskov Jansen “Aanden i Naturen. H.C. Orsteds naturmetafysiske system” in
Oversigt over Det Kongelige Danske Videnskabernes Selskabs Virksomhed, 1970-
1971, pp. 127-137.
72 Johannes Witt-Hansen

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 develop-
ment 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 dis-
covered as a specific procedure and consciously applied.
In this new vision the history of chemistry, and the history of sci-
ence in general, is “a true development from the first origin to a com-
plete 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 Hans Christian Ørsted “Betragtninger over Chemiens Historie, en Forelæsning” in

Det skandinaviske Literaturselskabs Skrifter vol. 2, 1807, pp. 1-54.
50 NS 1, p. 333.
51 NS 1, p. 324.
52 NS 1, p. 329.
53 NS 1, p. 339.
54 NS 1, p. 334.
55 NS 1, p. 340.
56 NS 1, pp. 340-341.
 H.C. Ørsted: Immanuel Kant and the Thought Experiment 73

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 philoso-
phy 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 philoso-
phy of natural science that he had worked out himself as the product
of the reflections to which he was prompted by the competing philo-
sophical systems of his age, combined with empirical natural sci-
ence.”59
From Kant’s philosophy of physical science Ørsted borrowed the
idea of “conflicting forces,” acting according to the attraction/repul-
sion pattern. From Kant and Schelling he took possession of the idea
of “unity of physical forces.” Through his studies of the history of sci-
ence he became familiar with the idea of conceptual development and
relativity of truth. And under the influence of Kant’s theory of cogni-
tion, 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 assump-
tion 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 phe-
nomena are produced by the same original force.”60 These assump-

57 H.C. Ørsted’s “Autobiografi” in H.A. Kofod’s Conversations-Lexicon vols. 1-28,

Copenhagen 1816-28; vol. 28, p. 527.
58 NS 2, p. 11-34.
59 H.C. Ørsted “Autobiografi,” op. cit., p. 529.
74 Johannes Witt-Hansen

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 electric-
ity 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 con-

60 NS 2, p. 356.
61 NS 2, p. 356.
62 NS 2, pp. 352-353.
 H.C. Ørsted: Immanuel Kant and the Thought Experiment 75

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 mag-
netic 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 elec-
tricity 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 cur-
rent 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 elec-
tricity, he thought it possible that the magnetic effect could likewise
eradiate. The observations, recorded above, of magnetic effects pro-
duced by lightning, in steel needles not immediately struck, strength-
ened 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 com-
passes 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 NS 2, pp. 356-357.
64 NS 2, p. 357.
65 NS 2, p. 353.
76 Johannes Witt-Hansen

offer an alternative to the Kantian conception of nature by scrutiniz-

ing 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 require-
ments, 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 appara-
tus, 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 direc-
tion 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 con-
flict is not limited to the conductor itself, but expands simultaneously in the surround-
ing space, and even rather far; and it has supposedly a circular motion around the con-
ductor; the planes of this motion are at right angles to the conductor.69

66 NS 2, p. 357.
67 NS 2, p. 358.
68 NS 2, pp. 214-218.
 H.C. Ørsted: Immanuel Kant and the Thought Experiment 77

In this point of view there is, according to Pihl, a vague presenti-

ment 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 electromag-
netic 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 trigono-
metrical 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 cour-
ant 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 thought-
experimental 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

69 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.
70 André Marie Ampère Recueil de mémoires, notices, etc., Paris 1822.
71 Ibid., pp. 109-112.
72 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 Kierke-

gaard’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 roman-
ticism. 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 Soc-
rates 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 dis-
sertation, 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 sev-

1 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 phil-
osophy 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.
2 The Journals BB and DD in particular, written primarily in 1837, reveal that Kierke-
gaard read a number of articles by German authors dealing with the romantic under-
standing 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.
 Kierkegaard’s Contribution to the Danish Discussion of “Irony” 79

eral local figures familiar to Kierkegaard researchers, such as philoso-

phy professor Poul Martin Møller, playwright Johan Ludvig Heiberg,
and the young theologian Hans Lassen Martensen. A closer inspec-
tion of these named sources reveals that prior to the time Kierkegaard
wrote The Concept of Irony, a wider discussion about the literary mer-
its 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 Kierke-
gaard’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 per-
haps 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 pro-
viding 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 prob-
lems addressed by his own professors and associates. Just as impor-
tantly, 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 read-
ily apparent in Hegel’s criticism, and bringing these concerns into
view allows a reader to return to Kierkegaard’s text and find implicit

3 Important exceptions include: George Pattison The Aesthetic and the Religious, Lon-
don: Macmillan Press 1992; “Beyond the Grasp of Irony” in International Kierke-
gaard 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: Kier-
kegaard’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.
4 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.
5 CI, p. 243 / SKS 1, 282.
80 K. Brian Söderquist

arguments that are not clear in an ahistorical reading. One of my tasks

will be to identify the issues that are already presupposed by Kierke-
gaard’s audience, which will then help set Kierkegaard’s unique con-
tributions in relief.
The Danish discussion of irony is raised for the first time in the con-
text of aesthetic theory, i.e. in the context of theatrical and literary
theory. While Heiberg treats irony as a sub-genre within comedy, phil-
osophy 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 dis-
tance 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 signifi-
cant in the context of this study. The first is Kierkegaard’s understand-
ing 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?
 Kierkegaard’s Contribution to the Danish Discussion of “Irony” 81

The young Kierkegaard interprets poetry as more than a mere lit-

erary genre, of course. He interprets it as a model for practice. Per-
haps more correctly, irony represents to him a rival ethic or a dis-
placement 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 environ-
ment, 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 rel-
ativized as well. The ironist “stands proudly closed within himself.” As
Kierkegaard puts it, the ethical demands of actuality must be “sus-
pended,” or relativized. This does not mean that the ironist behaves
unethically, however, it means rather that he or she does not take con-
ventional 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 metaphysi-
cally 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 sus-
pension of the ethical, not to a religious end, but rather to a nihilistic

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

7 CI, p. 283 / SKS 1, 319.
82 K. Brian Söderquist

one or, to anticipate Kierkegaard’s later terminology for irony, to an

aesthetic one.
In Kierkegaard’s view, one implication of this freedom from con-
text is the loss of the essential element of the self: the positive free-
dom to become a self. This essential element is bound up with the con-
crete 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 develop-
ment. 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, Kierke-
gaard’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 incommen-
surable 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, unen-
cumbered 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 disserta-

8 CI, p. 279 / SKS 1, 315.

9 CI, p. 281 / SKS 1, 316.
10 CI, p. 283 / SKS 1, 318.
11 CI, p. 253 / SKS 1, 292. Translation modified.
 Kierkegaard’s Contribution to the Danish Discussion of “Irony” 83

tion committee for discussion at the public defense: “Just as philoso-

phy 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, Kierke-
gaard not only cites it, but he also diagrams its dialectical move-
ments.16 At the same time, however, it should be noted that even
though Kierkegaard reads Heiberg’s article with an eye to the ques-
tion 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 straightfor-
ward 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 CI, p. 6 / SKS 1, 65. Translation modified. Cf. SKS K1, 162.

13 CI, p. 327 / SKS 1, 356.
14 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.
15 See SKS 17, 113, BB:22-24. If one were to begin with works not mentioned by Kier-
kegaard, 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 Lund-
green-Nielsen’s article in this volume.
16 See SKS 17, 113, BB:22-24.
84 K. Brian Söderquist

II. Heiberg: Poetry and Irony

As the title of his article indicates – “A Reply to Professor Oehlen-

schläger’s Article: ‘On the Critique of The Varangians in Constantino-
ple 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 legiti-
mately be called “dramatic,” while Heiberg argues that he lacks the
genius to transcend concrete situations. Heiberg grants that Oehlen-
schläger 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 [Oehlen-
schläger] 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 Hei-

berg’s own aesthetic categories, his assessment of Oehlenschläger is
not particularly flattering. Heiberg operates with a systematic aes-
thetic theory which prioritizes works which contain and reveal a con-
sciousness of the universal and ideal as opposed to the merely individ-
ual 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 Heiberg “Svar paa Hr. Prof. Oehlenschlägers Skrift,” op. cit., p. 38.
18 Ibid., p. 50.
19 For a thorough discussion of Heiberg’s Hegelianism, see Stewart Kierkegaard’s Rela-
tions to Hegel Reconsidered, op. cit.
 Kierkegaard’s Contribution to the Danish Discussion of “Irony” 85

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 serv-
ing 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 des-
tiny.21 As part of his project, he provides a classification of genres
according to the degree to which this awareness is carried by the art-
work; he argues that “immediate” poetry by people like Oehlen-
schläger is superseded by its complimentary form, tragedy, which is in
turn superseded by an even higher form, comedy.22 Within this hierar-
chy 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 can-
not 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 sub-
jective 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 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. Jubiläums-
ausgabe vols. 1-20, ed. by Hermann Glockner, Stuttgart: Friedrich Frommann Verlag
1928-41; vol. 12, pp. 31-32. (Abbreviated as Jub.)
21 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.”
22 Heiberg “Svar paa Hr. Prof. Oehlenschlägers Skrift,” op. cit., p. 61.
23 Ibid., p. 66.
86 K. Brian Söderquist

or mood which is aware of the loss of the security found in “playful-

ness”: the immediate subjective perspective of playfulness, which
understands itself to be the only perspective, gives way to irony’s multi-
tude of possible perspectives. Every poetic work, writes Heiberg,
makes the best impression with “a multiplicity of contradictory inter-
ests, 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 confu-
sion it has brought about: “irony is precisely the consciousness of multi-
plicity and the proper relationship of its elements.”26 This is exactly the
kind of artistic intuition the age demands, and exactly what Oehlen-
schläger 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 com-
plete lack of irony in Oehlenschläger’s tragedies is their primary
defect.”27 For Heiberg then, irony as a genre is marked by a conscious-
ness of distance: the characters and/or narrative voice take a perspec-
tive beyond the immediate comfort of a pleasant playful comedy. Irony
breaks a simple world up into confusing contrasts, and then re-organ-
izes 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 slum-
bers, 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 control-
led confusion – to be the final perspective. Heiberg is content to point

24 Ibid., p. 67.
25 Ibid., p. 67.
26 Ibid., p. 67.
27 Ibid., p. 66.
28 Ibid., p. 67.
29 Ibid., p. 67.
 Kierkegaard’s Contribution to the Danish Discussion of “Irony” 87

out that “the unreasonableness of [the ironic] position has been illumi-
nated long ago,”30 perhaps alluding to Hegel’s criticisms that were
already intimated in the Phenomenology of Spirit and briefly articu-
lated in The Philosophy of Right.31 But a more developed argument for
the unreasonableness of irony will reappear in connection with Heib-
erg’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 disserta-
tion: 1) irony creates a distance between oneself and one’s own expe-
rience, and 2) irony is a controlling element which disciplines artistic
inspiration or genius. The two basic characteristics of irony as an aes-
thetic category will be repeated or presupposed by the others, includ-
ing 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 fre-
quently both at the University and in scholarly circles.”32 In seven lec-
tures, 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 pur-
poses 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 crea-

30 Ibid., p. 67.
31 See Hegel Philosophy of Right, tr. by Allen Wood, Cambridge: Cambridge Univer-
sity Press 1991, § 140, pp. 170-184 / Jub. vol. 7, § 140, pp. 204-223. Hegel Phenomenol-
ogy 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.
32 Frederik Christian Sibbern Om Poesie og Konst i Almindelighed, med Hensyn til alle
Arter deraf, dog især Digte-, Maler-, Billedhugger-, og Skuespiller-konst; eller: Fore-
drag over almindelig Aesthetik og Poetik vols. 1-2, Copenhagen: Forfatterens Forlag
1834-53; vol. 1, p. iii.
33 Sibbern published the second half of his original lecture series in a separate volume
nineteen years later, in 1853.
88 K. Brian Söderquist

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 pas-
sionate moment within a greater whole.34 In truth, Sibbern’s observa-
tions 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 dif-
ferent” 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 “contem-
plative,” 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 noth-
ing.”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 dis-
tance of pure irony. Already here, the “controlled irony” which Kier-
kegaard advocates in his dissertation has found a precursor. This not-
withstanding, 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 prac-
tical life celebrated by it.

34 Sibbern Om Poesie og Konst, op. cit., vol. 1, p. 367.

35 Ibid., p. 386.
36 Ibid., pp. 387-388.
37 Ibid., p. 388.
38 Ibid., p. 388.
 Kierkegaard’s Contribution to the Danish Discussion of “Irony” 89

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 him-
self 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 sub-
jective 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 inter-
ested in “emphasizing the inner ideal of an artistic object.”41 Contem-
porary 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 even-
tually 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 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 Skuespiller-
konst; eller: Foredrag over almindelig Aesthetik og Poetik” in Maanedskrift for Litter-
atur vol. 13, 1835, p. 200.
40 Ibid., p. 200.
41 Ibid., p. 200.
42 Ibid., pp. 200-201.
90 K. Brian Söderquist

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 impossi-
ble 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 philoso-
phers 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 bind-
ing 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 obser-
vations. His concern that irony, taken as a practical guide, leads to per-
sonal 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 phenom-
ena” often seen in the personality of the poet. Møller praises Sib-
bern’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 prob-
lematic 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 Ibid., p. 201.
44 Ibid., p. 201.
45 Ibid., p. 201.
46 Ibid., pp. 201-202.
 Kierkegaard’s Contribution to the Danish Discussion of “Irony” 91

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 experi-
ence 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 expres-
sions do not conform to the actual self, he says, there is no longer a per-
manent 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 exagger-
ated 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 enti-
tled, “The Concept of Irony.”50

47 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 Skuespiller-
konst; eller: Foredrag over almindelig Aesthetik og Poetik” in Dansk Litteratur-
Tidende, 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.
48 Møller “Forberedelser til en Afhandling om Affectation” in ES 3, pp. 291-313.
49 Ibid., pp. 291-313.
50 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 disser-
tation: “[the essay] deserves publication…because it makes a contribution to the his-
tory of the concept in question [irony] in our literature.”
92 K. Brian Söderquist

Interestingly, Møller’s posthumously published draft on irony offers

a clue to why a discussion of romantic irony took place in Copenha-
gen 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 Dan-
ish 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 con-
ventions, was convinced that in Denmark, irony was first and fore-
most an ethical problem, not an aesthetic one. The ethical objection to
irony is evident in the remainder of his essay: at the heart of romanti-
cism lies a distanced subjectivity that views the world outside the sub-
ject 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 Frie-
drich Schlegel, ground their theory of literature on the subjective ethi-
cal 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. Sch-
legel has simply made the next move: he has become fully conscious of
the implications of accepting a subjective moral standard. He has rec-

51 SKS K1, 349.

52 ES 3, p. 156.
53 ES 3, p. 156.
54 ES 3, p. 154, my italics.
55 ES 3, p. 154.
 Kierkegaard’s Contribution to the Danish Discussion of “Irony” 93

ognized that, in practice, if objective laws are subordinated to subjec-

tive will, the subject then can consciously justify any activity whatso-
ever 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 cele-
brated by the romantics is closed off not only from bourgeois culture
but also from a deeper moral order through which the self is culti-
vated. 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 subjectiv-

56 ES 3, p. 154, my italics.
57 ES 3, p. 154.
58 Møller “Recension af Extremerene” [by Thomasine Gyllembourg] in Maanedsskrift
for Litteratur vol. 15, 1836. This review is reproduced in ES 2, pp. 126-158. Kierke-
gaard 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 tar-
get 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 imme-
diately 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
94 K. Brian Söderquist

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 eter-
nity, 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 rela-
tionships in the actual world, “spiritual life, religiosity, and everyday

58 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 idealis-
tischen 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.
59 ES 2, p. 138.
60 ES 2, p. 138
61 ES 2, p. 132.
 Kierkegaard’s Contribution to the Danish Discussion of “Irony” 95

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, valua-
ble and meaningless. As Møller sees it, the ironic author has become,
like God, the creator of everything outside himself. It is perfectly con-
sistent, 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 “per-
fectly 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 Hei-
berg’s Nye Digte is cited in the cryptic concluding paragraph of The
Concept of Irony.65

62 ES 2, pp. 138-139.
63 ES 2, pp. 139-140.
64 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. Kierke-
gaard also read this essay in the Maanedsskrift and refers to it in his early journals.
See SKS 17, 134, BB:41.
65 Many Kierkegaard researchers are aware of Martensen’s negative influence on Kier-
kegaard. 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 Kierke-
gaard’s anti-Hegelian rhetoric in the pseudonymous works. See Stewart Kierke-
gaard’s Relations to Hegel Reconsidered, op. cit.
96 K. Brian Söderquist

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 “specu-
lative 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, Mar-
tensen 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 particu-

larity – of which Oehlenschläger’s poetry might be an example – Mar-
tensen 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. Con-
sistent with the system Heiberg outlines, Martensen holds that com-
edy is a higher genre than tragedy and, in Martensen’s case, this is
because comedy does not become bogged down in the conflict

66 See George Pattison’s essay in this volume.

67 Hans Lassen Martensen’s review of “Fata Morgana, Eventyr-Comedie af Johan Lud-
vig Heiberg” in Maanedsskrift for Litteratur vol. 19, Copenhagen 1838, p. 361.
68 Ibid., p. 367.
 Kierkegaard’s Contribution to the Danish Discussion of “Irony” 97

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 nar-
rowly 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 phe-
nomenon, 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. Echo-
ing Møller, he writes that this kind of comic consciousness, irony, is “in
danger of becoming immoral, frivolous, and of developing into abso-
lute 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. Mar-
tensen 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 Unlike Heiberg, whose “Reply to Oehlenschläger” of 1828 was written before

Hegel’s Lectures on Aesthetics were published in 1832, Martensen was able to con-
sult Hegel, who is likely his proximal source.
70 Martensen “Fata Morgana,” op. cit., p. 378.
71 Ibid., pp. 378-379.
72 Ibid., p. 380.
73 Ibid., p. 381.
98 K. Brian Söderquist

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 Sib-
bern’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 gen-
eral. 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 attentive-
ness 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 observa-
tion 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.
 Kierkegaard’s Contribution to the Danish Discussion of “Irony” 99

irony, Kierkegaard writes: “we find it mentioned again and again, sug-
gested 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 world-
historical 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 ora-
torical 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 posi-
tion. 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 surpris-
ingly, 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 CI, p. 243 / SKS 1, 282-283.

76 CI, p. 247 / SKS 1, 286. Translation modified.
77 CI, p. 249 / SKS 1, 288. Translation modified.
100 K. Brian Söderquist

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 immedi-
acy of bourgeois life.79 In his concluding section of the book, “Irony
as a Mastered Moment, the Truth of Irony,” for example, Kierke-
gaard reiterates his assertion that the critical eye of irony plays an
important role in the development of the self, claiming that “no gen-
uinely human life is possible without irony.”80 He begins his argu-
ment by repeating Sibbern’s argument: irony is said to be a “condi-
tion 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 CI, p. 254 / SKS 1 292.

79 CI, p. 253 / SKS 1, 292. Translation modified.
80 CI, p. 326 / SKS 1, 355.
81 CI, p. 324 / SKS 1, 353.
82 CI, pp. 324-325 / SKS 1, 352-354.
83 CI, pp. 324-325 / SKS 1, 352-353.
84 CI, p. 326 / SKS 1, 354.
 Kierkegaard’s Contribution to the Danish Discussion of “Irony” 101

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 prob-
lems 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 objec-
tive 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 free-
dom 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 responsibil-
ity. 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 orig-
inal in him, his an sich.”86 The conditions for the possibility of becom-
ing 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 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 Kier-
kegaard’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.
86 CI, p. 281 / SKS 1, 317.
87 CI, p. 284 / SKS 1, 319.
88 CI, p. 284 / SKS 1, 319.
102 K. Brian Söderquist

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 happi-
ness 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 inter-
nally 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 con-
tribute to the authentic self.
For Kierkegaard, this loss of the inner life is bound up with his sec-
ond 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 obli-
gation 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 incor-
porates 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 CI, p. 284 / SKS 1, 319.

90 CI, pp. 284-285 / SKS 1, 320. Translation slightly modified.
91 CI, p. 283 / SKS 1, 318. Translation slightly modified.
 Kierkegaard’s Contribution to the Danish Discussion of “Irony” 103

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 arbitrari-
ness, 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 posi-
tion 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 per-
sonal concerns in the actual world, he also goes beyond them and con-
tributes something unique. In a move which combines Møller’s cri-
tique of the autonomy of art with Martensen’s discussion of a religious
“transfiguration” of the world, Kierkegaard insists a religious commit-
ment is the only way the finite world can be brought back into relation-
ship 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 self-
imposed values. It is a position of dependence that is highlighted. Kier-
kegaard 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 rec-
onciliation with actuality. Interestingly he uses language very similar to

92 CI, p. 283 / SKS 1, 318.

93 Matt. 16.19, 18.18; SKS K1, 342. See also CI, p. 277 / SKS 1, 312.
94 CI, p. 297 / SKS 1, 331.
104 K. Brian Söderquist

Martensen’s – but with an important twist. As cited above, Martensen

claims that Heiberg’s “speculative poetry…takes the form of a harmo-
nious 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 corrobo-
rated. 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 tran-
substantiation of the given actuality takes place by virtue of this recon-
ciliation…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 Kier-
kegaard’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 crea-
tor, “closed off” from anything outside his or her subjective will. The
religious consciousness is characterized as just the opposite: it is open-
ness. He writes elsewhere in “Part Two” that the disciplined elimina-
tion of the particular will sets religion apart from irony. While the
ironic mind is content to remain closed off from the divine and cele-
brate its own nihilistic insights, the religious mind, sets aside “all dis-
turbing 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 Martensen “Fata Morgana,” op. cit., p. 367.

96 CI, p. 297 / SKS 1, 330.
97 CI, p. 297 / SKS 1, 330-331. Translation slightly modified.
98 CI, pp. 257-258 / SKS 1, 296.
 Kierkegaard’s Contribution to the Danish Discussion of “Irony” 105

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 exis-
tential “openness” to the divine is ultimately the answer to the prob-
lem of romantic nihilism. Kierkegaard can synthesize what his con-
temporaries 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 existen-
tial dangers of living in isolated self-sufficiency. And he can use much
of Martensen’s discussion about irony and a reconciliation with actu-
ality. 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 contin-
ued 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 popu-
larized 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 think-
ers in their own right who responded to the most important intellec-
tual 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 bit-
ter critics. The goal of this article is to sketch briefly (1) the main per-
sonalities involved in the reception of Hegel’s philosophy in Den-
mark 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 inter-
preted and reacted to Hegel in his own way based on his own educa-
tion, intellectual interests and goals. Thus, it would be a mistake to
 Kierkegaard and Hegelianism in Golden Age Denmark 107

assume that the figures that made up the movement of Danish Hegel-
ianism 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 coun-
terparts, the Danish Hegelians can best be characterized not by their
unanimous agreement on some specific issue but by the internal dis-
agreement about various aspects of Hegel’s thought. When discuss-
ing these thinkers, one must thus resist the urge to regard them as
uncritical parrots of Hegel (despite the fact that they are often por-
trayed 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 (1779-
1850) and the physicist Hans Christian Ørsted (1777-1851). He gradu-
ated 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 belong-
ing 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 him-

1 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, Copenha-
gen: 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.
2 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.)
3 See Johan Ludvig Heiberg “Autobiographiske Fragmenter” in Prosaiske Skrifter, op.
cit., vol. 11, pp. 498ff.
108 Jon Stewart

self, Heiberg became so taken by them that he made a journey to Ber-

lin in 1824 in order to meet the philosopher personally. There he
attended Hegel’s lectures and met with some of the leading intellec-
tual 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 method-
ology 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 fre-
quently to Hegel’s main works, effectively introduced him into Dan-
ish 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 con-
cepts such as necessity, probability, and contingency from a Hegelian
perspective. It was taken as another declaration of Heiberg’s affilia-
tion 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 spekula-
tiver Wissenschaft,9 where he attempts to work out a theory of aesthet-
ics based on Hegel’s speculative system. Regrettably, he never pub-
lished this work since he was unable to bring it to a satisfactory com-
pletion. It is interesting to note that the composition of this study
antedated the publication of Hegel’s posthumous Lectures on Aesthet-

4 Johan Ludvig Heiberg Om den menneskelige Frihed. I Anledning af de nyeste Strid-

igheder over denne Gjenstand, Kiel 1824. (Reprinted in Heiberg’s Prosaiske Skrifter,
op. cit., vol. 1, pp. 1-110.)
5 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 1861-
62; vol. 10, p. 590.)
6 See Oluf Thomsen F.G. Howitz og hans Strid om Villiens Frihed, Copenhagen: Levin
og Munksgaard 1924.
7 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.)
8 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.
9 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.
 Kierkegaard and Hegelianism in Golden Age Denmark 109

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 philos-
ophy 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 phil-
osophical lectures which were to be based on Hegel’s philosophy. The
work caused a great controversy, above all for its statements about

10 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. Voll-
ständige Ausgabe vols. 1-18, Berlin 1832-45.
11 See “Heiberg an Hegel,” February 20, 1825 in Breve og Aktstykker vedrørende Johan
Ludvig Heiberg, op. cit., vol. 1, pp. 162-163.
12 See Flemming Conrad Smagen og det nationale. Studier i dansk litteraturhistorie-
skrivning 1800-1861, Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanums Forlag 1996, pp. 150-179.
Morten Borup Johan Ludvig Heiberg, op. cit., vol. 2, pp. 14-17.
13 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 Heib-
erg’s Prosaiske Skrifter, op. cit., vol. 1, pp. 111-380.)
14 Johan Ludvig Heiberg Om Philosophiens Betydning for den nuværende Tid, Copen-
hagen 1833. (Reprinted in Heiberg’s Prosaiske Skrifter, op. cit., vol. 1, pp. 381-460.)
110 Jon Stewart

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 nihil-
ism. 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 phil-
osophy alone can provide the framework with which the contempo-
rary chaos of thought can be overcome. Only it offers a viable and sta-
ble 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 book-
review of the novel by Hans Christian Andersen (1805-75), Only a Fid-

15 Henning Fenger The Heibergs, op. cit., pp. 132-134.

16 Johan Ludvig Heiberg Indlednings-Foredrag til det i November 1834 begyndte logiske
Cursus paa den kongelige militaire Høiskole, Copenhagen 1835. (Reprinted in Hei-
berg’s Prosaiske Skrifter, op. cit., vol. 1, pp. 461-516.)
 Kierkegaard and Hegelianism in Golden Age Denmark 111

dler;17 the review was eventually published as an independent mono-

graph 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 enti-
tled, “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 Philoso-
phy 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 writ-
ten 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 criti-
cisms.20 This debate attracted much attention, and many of Copenha-
gen’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 sys-
tem a way to understand these art forms as representing a higher phil-
osophical 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 Specula-
tive Logic and his “The System of Logic” are intended to provide the

17 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.
18 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.)
19 Jakob Peter Mynster “Rationalisme, Supranaturalisme” in Tidsskrift for Litteratur
og Kritik no. 1, 1839, pp. 249-268. (Reprinted in Mynster’s Blandede Skrivter vols. 1-
6. Copenhagen 1852-57; vol. 2, pp. 95-115.)
20 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.)
112 Jon Stewart

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 Heib-
erg generally follows Hegel’s sequence, he weights the individual cat-
egories somewhat differently. Likewise, in his response to Oehlen-
schläger,23 he, apparently unknowingly, diverges from Hegel’s order-
ing of the poetic arts (presumably since he did not have Hegel’s Lec-
tures 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 Dan-
ish-speaking public since he was one of the leading public figures in
diverse aspects of Copenhagen’s intellectual and cultural life through-
out 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 See Johan Ludvig Heiberg “Det logiske System” in Perseus, Journal for den specula-
tive 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.”
22 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.
23 Johan Ludvig Heiberg “Svar paa Hr. Oehlenschlägers Skrift: ‘Om Kritiken i
Kjøbenhavns flyvende Post, over Væringerne i Miklagard’ ” in Kjøbenhavns fly-
vende Post nos. 7-8, 10-16, 1828. (Reprinted in Heiberg’s Prosaiske Skrifter, op. cit.,
vol. 3, pp. 194-284.)
24 See Henning Fenger The Heibergs, op. cit., p. 136.
 Kierkegaard and Hegelianism in Golden Age Denmark 113

Aalborg, writes the following to Mynster: “The most important sup-

port 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 immedi-
ately 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 sug-
gest 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 “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.
26 See “J.L. Heiberg til H.C. Ørsted,” March 25, 1825 in Breve og Aktstykker vedrø-
rende 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.
114 Jon Stewart

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 criti-
cism.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 none-
theless 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

27 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.)
28 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.
29 See H.P. Holst’s Letter to H.P. Barfod, September 13, 1869 in Encounters with Kier-
kegaard, tr. and ed. by Bruce H. Kirmmse, op. cit., p. 13.
30 For an account of the significance of this journal, see Henning Fenger The Heibergs,
op. cit., pp. 118-141.
31 Recounted in Henrik Hertz’s diaries in Encounters with Kierkegaard, tr. and ed. by
Bruce H. Kirmmse, op. cit., p. 218.
32 Johan Ludvig Heiberg “Litterær Vintersæd” in Intelligensblade vol. 2, no. 24, March
1, 1843, pp. 285-292.
 Kierkegaard and Hegelianism in Golden Age Denmark 115

on Kierkegaard had nothing but scorn for Heiberg. Under the name
of the pseudonymous editor of the work, Victor Eremita, he first pub-
lished a polemical response to this review with the title, “A Word of
Thanks to Professor Heiberg.”33 In another article in his journal Ura-
nia,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, Kier-
kegaard’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 In COR, pp. 17-21 / SV1 XIII, 411-415. Fædrelandet no. 1168, March 5, 1843.
34 Johan Ludvig Heiberg “Det astronomiske Aar” in Urania, 1844, pp. 77-160. (Re-
printed in Heiberg’s Prosaiske Skrifter, op. cit., vol. 9, pp. 51-130.)
35 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 Lit-
tle Contribution by Constantin Constantius, Author of Repetition” in R, Supple-
ment, pp. 299-319 / Pap. IV B 112-117, pp. 275-300.
36 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).
116 Jon Stewart

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 Hei-
berg’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 philoso-
phy for his fellow countrymen. One must be particularly careful not to
regard Martensen as an uncritical Hegelian, although this is the pic-
ture 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 recep-
tion 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 See Johanne Luise Heiberg Et liv genoplevet i erindringen, op. cit., vol. 2, pp. 172-
176.
38 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, Ud-
vikling 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 ana-
lyser 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.
 Kierkegaard and Hegelianism in Golden Age Denmark 117

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 christli-
che 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 theo-
logian, Karl Daub (1765-1836), who tried to employ Hegel’s dialecti-
cal 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 con-
troversy. The next stop on his tour was Munich where he attended
Schelling’s lectures and made the acquaintance of the speculative the-
ologian 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 See JP 4, 3843-3844 / Pap. I C 20, in Pap. XII, pp. 126-131. See also Hans Lassen Mar-
tensen Af mit Levnet, op. cit., vol. 1, p. 78.
40 See Hans Lassen Martensen Af mit Levnet, op. cit., vol. 2, pp. 85ff. See also Mar-
tensen’s letter to H.C. Ørsted from December 20, 1834 in Breve fra og til Hans Chris-
tian Ørsted vols. 1-2, ed. by Mathilde Ørsted, Copenhagen 1870; vol. 2, pp. 134-140.
41 “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.
42 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.
118 Jon Stewart

the journal, Maanedsskrift for Litteratur, Martensen reviewed Hei-

berg’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 criti-
cizes 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 Dog-
matics,” 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 affin-
ities 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 aca-
demic discussion and even controversy. It was the success of Mar-
tensen’s lectures that occasioned Heiberg to declare that Hegel’s phil-
osophy had finally become a causa victrix in Danish intellectual life.49

43 Hans Lassen Martensen “Indledningsforedrag til det i November 1834 begyndte lo-
giske 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.
44 See Niels Thulstrup Kierkegaard’s Relation to Hegel, tr. by George L. Stengren, Prince-
ton: Princeton University Press 1980, p. 93.
45 Hans Lassen Martensen De autonomia conscientiae sui humanae in theologiam dog-
maticam nostri temporis introducta, Copenhagen 1837. Danish translation: Den men-
neskelige Selvbevidstheds Autonomie, tr. by L.V. Petersen, Copenhagen 1841. Eng-
lish translation: The Autonomy of Human Self-Consciousness in Modern Dogmatic
Theology in Between Hegel and Kierkegaard: Hans L. Martensen’s Philosophy of Re-
ligion, tr. by Curtis L. Thompson and David J. Kangas, Atlanta: Scholars Press 1997,
pp. 73-147.
46 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.
47 SKS 18, 374-386, KK:11. See also Pap. II C 27-28, in Pap. XIII, pp. 3-116.
48 Pap. II C 25, in Pap. XII, pp. 316-331.
 Kierkegaard and Hegelianism in Golden Age Denmark 119

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 Uni-
versity 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 func-
tioned as a sort of forum for the general debate about the legitimacy
of the introduction of Hegelian philosophy into theological ques-
tions.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 fun-
damental 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 Philos-

49 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 1861-
62; vol. 10, p. 591.)
50 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.
51 PF, Supplement, pp. 226-227 / Pap. X 2 A 155, p. 117. Translation slightly modified.
52 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.
53 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, Jan-
uary 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.
120 Jon Stewart

ophy,54 which bears a decidedly Hegelian stamp.55 But in 1842, how-

ever, 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 Chris-
tentums56 and Strauss’ Die christliche Glaubenslehre57 claimed to be
furthering Hegel’s philosophy, yet the Danish theologian could rec-
ognize 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 invi-
tation 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 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 acad-
emiske 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.
55 See the discussion in Bruce H. Kirmmse Kierkegaard in Golden Age Denmark,
Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press 1990, pp. 172-175.
56 Ludwig Feuerbach Das Wesen des Christentums, Leipzig 1841.
57 David Friedrich Strauss Die christliche Glaubenslehre vols. 1-2, Tübingen 1840-41.
Danish translation: Fremstilling af den christelige Troeslære i dens historiske Ud-
vikling og i dens Kamp med den moderne Videnskab vols. 1-2, tr. by Hans Brøchner,
Copenhagen 1842-43.
58 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 Teolo-
giske 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.
59 Hans Lassen Martensen “Nutidens religiøse Crisis” in Intelligensblade vol. 1, no. 3,
1842, pp. 53-73.
60 For an account of both of these episodes, see Jens Holger Schjørring Teologi og filo-
sofi. Nogle analyser og dokumenter vedrørende Hegelianismen i dansk teologi, op.
cit., pp. 27-35.
 Kierkegaard and Hegelianism in Golden Age Denmark 121

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 Mar-
tensen; 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 straight-
forwardly “Hegelian,” although it is clearly a piece of systematic theol-
ogy 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 intel-
lectual 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 main-
tained 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 decla-
rations 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 “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.
62 Hans Lassen Martensen Den christelige Dogmatik, Copenhagen 1849.
63 See Helweg’s assessment: Hans Friedrich Helweg “Hegelianismen i Danmark” in
Dansk Kirketidende vol. 10, no. 51, December 16, 1855, pp. 827-828.
64 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 specula-
tive theology.” Leif Grane “Det Teologiske Fakultet 1830-1925,” op. cit., p. 363.
65 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.
122 Jon Stewart

support for Martensen’s claim. In a letter from as early as 1836 Mar-

tensen indicates that he is no longer satisfied with the “autonomic prin-
ciple” 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 Hegel-
ian. 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 gener-
ally 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 immor-
tality of the individual.71 With these points of divergence, one can see

66 “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.
67 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.
68 “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.
69 “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.
70 See Hans Lassen Martensen Af mit Levnet, op. cit., vol. 1, pp. 103ff.
71 Pap. II C 25, in Pap. XII, p. 328. See also p. 331.
 Kierkegaard and Hegelianism in Golden Age Denmark 123

that Mynster’s assessment seems to be correct: Martensen’s Hegelian-

ism 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 mem-
ber 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 Copen-
hagen, 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 crit-
icism 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 per-
ceived 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 invaria-
bly assured us that he has gone beyond Hegel, he certainly did not go farther in this case.74

72 Jens Holger Schjørring Teologi og filosofi. Nogle analyser og dokumenter vedrørende

Hegelianismen i dansk teologi, op. cit., p. 27.
73 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.
74 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.”
124 Jon Stewart

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 autobio-
graphy, 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 phil-
osopher 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 fur-
ther; one was supposed to build one’s own system and go beyond
Hegel and become the great man of the scholarly world.”78 Kierke-
gaard 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 neg-
atively 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

75 See commentary to “at gaae videre” in SKS K4, 259-260.

76 See Hans Lassen Martensen Af mit Levnet, op. cit., vol. 2, p. 4.
77 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 Reformations-
festen.)” 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 cor-
rectly make use of the great content discussed here [sc. of Hegel’s philoso-
phy]…one must go beyond it.”
78 Johannes Fibiger Mit Liv og Levned som jeg selv har forstaaet det, ed. by Karl Gjel-
lerup, Copenhagen 1898, p. 73.
 Kierkegaard and Hegelianism in Golden Age Denmark 125

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 corre-
spondent 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 aca-
demic 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 star-
tled 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 Kier-
kegaard’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 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 master-
mind 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.
80 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.
81 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.
82 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.
83 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.
126 Jon Stewart

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 recog-
nition 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 dis-
parage me, my abilities, and my work in many ways. He sought to annihilate and extin-
guish 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 Mar-
tensen’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 Mar-
tensen’s eulogy to his predecessor Mynster, in which he said that the
deceased bishop had been a witness to the truth, that set off Kierke-
gaard’s campaign of criticism in the first place.88 Kierkegaard’s ani-
mosity 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 move-
ment of Danish Hegelianism is the philosopher and theologian Ras-
mus Nielsen (1809-84).89 Nielsen is particularly important since he at

84 See Arild Christensen “Efterskriftens Opgør med Martensen” in Kierkegaardiana

no. 4, 1962, pp. 45-62.
85 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.
86 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.
87 Pap. X 6 B 103-193, pp. 129-193.
88 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.
89 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 Philoso-
phie 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.
 Kierkegaard and Hegelianism in Golden Age Denmark 127

least for a period was Kierkegaard’s friend at a time when Kierke-

gaard 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 Pri-
vatdocent until 1841 when he received the professorship in philosophy
that was vacant after Poul Martin Møller’s death. He became profes-
sor 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 enthusi-
astic supporters of Hegel’s philosophy. He was awarded the professor-
ship 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 com-
plex.95 At least three distinct stages can be discerned: an original aliena-
tion, a rapprochement and even friendship, and finally a revived hostility.
During Kierkegaard’s years as a student, he regarded Nielsen, like Mar-
tensen, with great suspicion. When Sibbern encouraged Kierkegaard to
apply for an academic position at the University of Copenhagen, Kierke-

90 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.
91 Rasmus Nielsen Pauli Brev til Romerne, Copenhagen 1841.
92 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.
93 Rasmus Nielsen Den propædeutiske Logik, Copenhagen 1845.
94 Rasmus Nielsen Forelæsningsparagrapher til Kirkehistoriens Philosophie. Et Schema
for Tilhørere, Copenhagen 1843.
95 See Helge Hultberg “Kierkegaard og Rasmus Nielsen” in Kierkegaardiana no. 12,
1982, pp. 9-21.
128 Jon Stewart

gaard expressed reservations, stating that he did not feel adequately pre-
pared. 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 Kierke-

gaard’s dissertation committee, even though Sibbern asked him per-
sonally 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 Kier-
kegaard had a generally positive assessment of Nielsen: “At a later
point, when Nielsen had allied himself with Kierkegaard, he [Kierke-
gaard] 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 immi-
nent,100 he conceived of Nielsen as his eventual literary executor.101

96 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.
97 See Carl Weltzer “Omkring Søren Kierkegaards Disputats” in Kirkehistoriske Sam-
linger, Sjette Række, ed. by J. Oskar Andersen and Bjørn Kornerup, Copenhagen:
G.E.C. Gads Forlag 1948-50, p. 286.
98 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.
99 Hans Brøchner “Erindringer om Søren Kierkegaard” op. cit., § 21. English transla-
tion cited from Encounters with Kierkegaard, tr. and ed. by Bruce H. Kirmmse, op.
cit., p. 235.
100 Pap. IX A 178.
101 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.
 Kierkegaard and Hegelianism in Golden Age Denmark 129

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 Kierke-
gaard.102 In the same year Nielsen published a joint review of Kierke-
gaard’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 posi-
tions 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 com-
munication, 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 signifi-
cance 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 nou-
veau riche in Copenhagen’s high society. Adler began his studies in the-
ology at the University of Copenhagen in 1832. In 1837 he traveled
abroad to Germany, Italy, Switzerland and France. In Germany he was

102 Rasmus Nielsen Evangelietroen og den moderne Bevidsthed. Forelæsninger over

Jesu Liv, Copenhagen 1849.
103 Rasmus Nielsen Magister S. Kierkegaards Johannes Climacus og Dr. H. Martensens
Christelige Dogmatik. En undersøgende Anmeldelse, Copenhagen 1849.
104 Pap. X 1 A 343.
105 Pap. X 6 B 83-102. See LD pp. 208-210 / B&A 1, pp. 228-230.
106 M, p. 345 / SV1 XIV, 354.
107 Rasmus Nielsen S. Kierkegaard’s Bladartikler, med Bilag samlede efter Forfatternens
Død, udgivne som Supplement til hans øvrige Skrifter, Copenhagen 1857.
108 E.g. Rasmus Nielsen “Om S. Kierkegaards ‘mentale Tilstand’” in Nordisk Univer-
sitet-Tidskrift vol. 4, no. 1, 1858, pp. 1-29.
109 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 Kierke-
gaards Hemmelighed og Eksistensdialektik, Copenhagen: C.A. Reitzels Forlag 1994.
130 Jon Stewart

able to familiarize himself with Hegel’s thought. He returned to Den-

mark in 1839, and on the basis of his studies abroad he wrote his disser-
tation, 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 Lec-
tures on Hegel’s Objective Logic.111 This work was an important source
for Kierkegaard’s understanding of Hegel’s logic and the object of crit-
icism 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 Born-
holm 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 rea-
son or another, this rejection was nowhere so dramatic as in the case
of Adler. After his appointment as priest Adler claimed to have expe-
rienced a revelation, and this event marked his turn away from Hegel-
ianism. 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. More-
over, 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 inquir-
ies 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 con-
troversial 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 Adolph Peter Adler Den isolerede Subjectivitet i dens vigtigste Skikkelser, Copenha-
gen 1840.
111 Adolph Peter Adler Populaire Foredrag over Hegels objective Logik, Copenhagen
1842.
112 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.
113 Adolph Peter Adler Nogle Prædikener, Copenhagen 1843, pp. 3-4. See A, Supple-
ment, pp. 339-340.
 Kierkegaard and Hegelianism in Golden Age Denmark 131

Kierkegaard followed closely the controversy surrounding Adler’s sus-

pension 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 reve-
lation, 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 per-
sonalities. 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 intellec-
tual 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 Hans Brøchner “Erindringer om Søren Kierkegaard,” op. cit., § 20. English transla-
tion cited from Encounters with Kierkegaard, tr. and ed. by Bruce H. Kirmmse, op.
cit., pp. 234-235.
115 Leif Grane “Det Teologiske Fakultet 1830-1925,” op. cit., p. 363. See also Skat Arild-
sen Biskop Hans Lassen Martensen. Hans Liv, Udvikling og Arbejde, op. cit., p. 163.
132 Jon Stewart

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 Den-
mark 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 aca-
demic life in Denmark, a handful of anti-Hegelians rose up in opposi-
tion 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-Hege-
lians” 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 Univer-
sity of Copenhagen.116 Sibbern was an interestingly ambivalent figure.
He was profoundly influenced by German thought and from the earli-
est 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 Kier-
kegaard and his role as the towering figure on the Danish philosophi-
cal scene of the day.
After completing his doctoral dissertation in Copenhagen in 1811,
Sibbern made an extended trip to Germany where he came into con-
tact 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.
 Kierkegaard and Hegelianism in Golden Age Denmark 133

returned to the University of Copenhagen in 1813 to assume a profes-

sorship. 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 Phil-
osophical 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 con-
tingency.119 At the time Sibbern was already an established professor
of philosophy, whereas Heiberg was just beginning to write philosoph-
ical 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 conti-
nuity 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 reso-
lute 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 philoso-
phy and to make it better known. In the body of the review Sibbern
explicitly lauds Heiberg for his use of Hegel’s speculative method-
ology. This short review, which shows a very positive disposition

117 Frederik Christian Sibbern Om Erkjendelse og Granskning. Til Indledning i det

academiske Studium, Copenhagen 1822, p. 21.
118 Ibid., p. 82.
119 [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.
120 Ibid., p. 691.
134 Jon Stewart

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 Philo-
sophical 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 jour-
nal, 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 reputa-
tion 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 Frederik Christian Sibbern Philosophiskt Archiv og Repertorium vols. 1-4, Copen-
hagen 1829-30; vol. 1, p. 5, pp. 25-26fn.
122 Ibid., vol. 2, p. 116.
123 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 Maaneds-
skrift for Litteratur vol. 19, 1838, Article I, pp. 283-360; Article II, pp. 424-460; Arti-
cle 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.
124 “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.
125 Frederik Christian Sibbern Bemærkninger og Undersøgelser, fornemmelig betref-
fende Hegels Philosophie, betragtet i Forhold til vor Tid, Copenhagen 1838.
 Kierkegaard and Hegelianism in Golden Age Denmark 135

number of things in Hegel’s philosophy, i.e. his logic, his philosophy of

religion, and his general philosophical methodology. Sibbern is particu-
larly 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 har-
mony 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 con-
cepts. 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 pre-
sented 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 Kierke-
gaard was particularly incensed at Heiberg’s evangelizing for Hegelian-
ism. That this comes to expression in a critical review of Heiberg’s jour-
nal is no accident since the journal was intended as an organ for the
promulgation of Hegel’s philosophy in Denmark.

126 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.
127 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.
136 Jon Stewart

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 Kierke-
gaard’s studies. Kierkegaard attended many courses which Sibbern
offered on various subjects.129 Sibbern was the first reader on Kierke-
gaard’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 criti-
cisms 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 experi-

128 See Encounters with Kierkegaard, tr. and ed. by Bruce H. Kirmmse, op. cit. 1996, p. 37.
129 Valdemar Ammundsen Søren Kierkegaards Ungdom. Hans Slægt og hans Ud-
vikling, Copenhagen: Universitetstrykkeriet 1912, pp. 77-107.
130 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.
131 See JP 6, 6196 / Pap. IX A 493. Pap. VI B 201. Pap. X 1 A 446.
132 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, 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 Kilde-
skriftkommission, vol. 3, no. 1, 1908, pp. 1-20. Johannes Brøndum-Nielsen Poul
Møller Studier, Copenhagen: Gyldendalske Boghandel, Nordisk Forlag 1940.
133 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 An-
dersen 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.
 Kierkegaard and Hegelianism in Golden Age Denmark 137

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 develop-
ment 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 His-
tory 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 Immortal-
ity.”140 This work was a response to the discussions among the Ger-

134 See Frederik Ludvig Bang Zeuthen Et Par Aar af mit Liv, Copenhagen 1869, p. 44.
135 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.
136 Poul Martin Møller “Forelæsninger over den ældre Philosophies Historie” in
Møller’s Efterladte Skrifter, op. cit., vol. 2, p. 284.
137 Ibid., p. 285.
138 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 1833-
36; vols. 13-15 in Hegel’s Werke. Vollständige Ausgabe vols. 1-18, Berlin 1832-45.
139 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 Philos-
ophien. 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.)
140 Poul Martin Møller “Tanker over Mueligheden af Beviser for Menneskets Udøde-
lighed” 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.)
138 Jon Stewart

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 immor-
tality of the soul as a mistaken belief, whereas the right Hegelian Karl
Friedrich Göschel (1784-1861) argued that in fact proofs for the exist-
ence of God could be derived from Hegel’s philosophy.142 Other lead-
ing figures such as Immanuel Hermann, the younger, Fichte (1797-
1879) 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 philos-
ophy 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 consist-
ent 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 indi-
vidual 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 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.
142 Karl Friedrich Göschel Von den Beweisen für die Unsterblichkeit der menschlichen
Seele im Lichte der spekulativen Philosophie, Berlin 1835.
143 Johan Ludvig Heiberg “Recension over Hr. Dr. Rothes Treenigheds- og Forsonings-
lære” 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.”
 Kierkegaard and Hegelianism in Golden Age Denmark 139

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 Kierke-
gaard of an important mentor and ally. In 1844 Kierkegaard dedi-
cated 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 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.
145 CUP1, p. 34fn. / SKS 7, 41fn.
146 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 post-
humous 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.
147 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.
148 Frithiof Brandt Den unge Søren Kierkegaard, op. cit., p. 432. Walter Lowrie Kierke-
gaard, London: Oxford University Press 1938, pp. 143-149.
149 CA, Supplement, p. 178 / Pap. V B 46.
150 E.g. Poul Lübcke “Det ontologiske program hos Poul Møller og Søren Kierke-
gaard” in Filosofiske Studier vol. 6, 1983, pp. 127-147.
140 Jon Stewart

One of the most important and the most consistent of the Hegel
critics in Denmark was the theologian and Bishop Jakob Peter Myn-
ster (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 genera-
tion 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 phil-
osophy 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

151 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 Dan-
mark, 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.
152 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.
153 Jakob Peter Mynster Meddelelser om mit Levnet, op. cit., 1884, p. 239.
 Kierkegaard and Hegelianism in Golden Age Denmark 141

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. Myn-
ster concentrated his critique on Heiberg’s interpretation of Hegel’s
philosophy of religion, criticizing Heiberg for reading Hegel as a sec-
ular thinker. Thus, the criticism is ultimately of Heiberg’s interpreta-
tion of Hegel and not of Hegel himself. Mynster quotes Hegel’s Lec-
tures 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 Hei-
berg 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, Super-
naturalism,”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 supernatural-
ism 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 mid-
dle 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 medi-

154 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.)
155 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.)
156 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.
142 Jon Stewart

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 Her-
bart (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 supernatural-
ism 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 Hegel-
ianism, Mynster never dedicated a large portion of his energy to com-
batting it.160 Indeed, he did not view himself as a major critic of Hegel.
In his autobiography he describes his overall relation to Hegelian phil-
osophy as follows:
[Hegelianism] was the one aspect of the age which left me cold and showed me how lit-
tle 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, Supernat-
uralism” (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 book-
review, “On the Laws of Logic” (ibid. VII, 325).161

157 Johann Friedrich Herbart De principio logico exclusi medii inter contradictoria non
negligendo commentatio, qua ad audiendam orationem…invitat, Göttingen 1833.
158 Immanuel Hermann Fichte De principiorum contradictionis, identitatis, exclusi tertii
in logicis dignitate et ordine commentatio, Bonn 1840.
159 Jakob Peter Mynster “De principio logico exclusi medii inter contradictoria non neg-
ligendo commentatio, qua ad audiendam orationem…invitat. Jo. Fr. Herbart. Gottin-
gae 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.)
160 For Mynster’s view on Hegelianism see Leif Grane “Det Teologiske Fakultet 1830-
1925,” op. cit., p. 360.
161 Jakob Peter Mynster Meddelelser om mit Levnet, op. cit., (1884), pp. 240-241.
 Kierkegaard and Hegelianism in Golden Age Denmark 143

It is perhaps something of an overstatement to cast him in the role

of an outspoken Hegel critic, especially given the fact that his anti-
Hegelian 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, Myn-
ster never had a Hegelian period but rather seems to have rejected
Hegel’s philosophy from the beginning and never to have substan-
tially 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 ser-
mons, 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, Kier-
kegaard 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 discre-
tion 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 fol-
lowed the debates in Denmark surrounding Hegelianism in conjunc-
tion with or in lieu of reading the primary texts. Thus, the picture that

162 LD, p. 4 / B&A 1, p. 4.

163 “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.
144 Jon Stewart

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 famil-
iar 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 Myn-
ster, 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 phil-
osophy, 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 Kierke-
gaard’s death, Hans Friedrich Helweg (1816-1901) lists the common
set of names associated with Danish Hegelianism. Somewhat surpris-
ingly, 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 Hegel-
ianism 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. More-
over, Helweg implies that Kierkegaard’s relation to Hegel changed
over the course of his life. This is in accordance with the thesis of Hel-
weg’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 Hans Friedrich Helweg “Hegelianismen i Danmark” in Dansk Kirketidende vol. 10,
no. 51, December 16, 1855, p. 829.
165 Ibid., p. 829.
 Kierkegaard and Hegelianism in Golden Age Denmark 145

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 fol-
lower, 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 dis-
dains 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 accord-
ance with his own intellectual agenda. It is thus conceivable that Kier-
kegaard 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 cen-
tury 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 intel-
lectual spirit of the age in support of an absolutist monarchy, a class
structure and an established Church to which he was wedded by tem-
perament 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 theo-
logical 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 Kier-
kegaard, 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.
150 John Saxbee

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 attempt-
ing 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, Superin-
tendent 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 stubborn-
ness 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 advan-
tages 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 stim-
ulus 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
 The Life and Times of Bishop J.P. Mynster 151

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 com-
mended 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 Jakob Peter Mynster Meddelelser af mit Levnet, Copenhagen 1854, p. 38.

2 Bruce H. Kirmmse Kierkegaard in Golden Age Denmark, Bloomington and Indiana-
polis: Indiana University Press 1990, p. 100.
152 John Saxbee

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 fol-
low 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 develop-
ment 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 pos-
sess 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 biogra-
pher enthuses that the breakthrough “rose like a mountain and estab-
lished 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 Jakob Peter Mynster Meddelelser af mit Levnet, op. cit., p. 151f.

4 Kirmmse, op. cit., pp. 107-108.
5 Ibid., p. 108.
6 Jakob Peter Mynster Meddelelser af mit Levnet, op. cit., p. 157.
7 H. Schwanenflügel Jakob Peter Mynster. Hans Personlighed og Forfatterskab vols. 1-2,
Copenhagen: Det Schubotheske Forlag 1900; vol 1, p. 68.
 The Life and Times of Bishop J.P. Mynster 153

found the land-owning farmers arrogantly indifferent to his preach-

ing. He wrote poetry and gained intellectual and societal stimulus
from his contacts with Kamma Rahbek who invited him to partici-
pate 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 Myn-
ster’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. Conven-
iently enough the position of Kapellan with Frue Kirke in Copenha-
gen became vacant and, by using Moltke’s good influence with the
King, Mynster was duly appointed in 1811. Somewhat disingenu-
ously, 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 Chris-
tian 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 evan-
gelical orthodoxy than, say, Larsen or Kirmmse, and Mynster’s recol-

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

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, peo-
ple 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 his-
torian 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 Myn-
ster 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 demonstrat-
ing 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.

 The Life and Times of Bishop J.P. Mynster 155

published in 1833.11 Mynster was now upwardly mobile in no uncer-

tain 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 cer-
tain that Otto Laub was echoing the thoughts of many Danes, espe-
cially in Copenhagen, when he wrote in his diary on hearing of Myn-
ster’s appointment: “What an excellent development! Who could be
Zealand’s Bishop other than he? Who could carry on in the Slots-
kirke, in preaching to the capital, the students, the priests and the
whole country, what he has begun, other than himself?”12 Niels Thul-
strup 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 Dio-
cese….Mynster inspected thoroughly clergy and teachers, congregations and school
children, church buildings, rectories and their gardens, school buildings etc. He pub-
lished 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 con-
servative 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 hymn-
book, the constitutional position of the King, the power of the priest’s

11 Jakob Peter Mynster Betragtninger over de christelige Troeslærdomme vols. 1-2,

Copenhagen 1833.
12 Nogle Blade fra J.P. Mynster’s Liv og Tid, ed. by C.L.N. Mynster, Copenhagen: Den
Gyldendalske Boghandel 1875, pp. 290.
13 Kierkegaard’s Teachers (Bibliotheca Kierkegaardiana, vol. 10), ed. by Niels Thulstrup
and Marie Mikulová Thulstrup Copenhagen: C.A. Reitzels Forlag 1982, pp. 24-25.
156 John Saxbee

conventicles or the correct interpretation of Luther’s Catechism,

Mynster by virtue of his office could not avoid becoming heavily com-
mitted. 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 com-
promise 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 Meddele-
lser 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 Myn-
ster, 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 compro-
mise. 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 pre-
cisely 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 socio-

political 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 middle-

14 Schwanenflügel, op. cit., vol. 1, p. 140.

15 Kierkegaard’s Teachers, ed. by Niels Thulstrup and Marie Mikulová Thulstrup, op.
cit., p. 25.
 The Life and Times of Bishop J.P. Mynster 157

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 hierar-
chical society married to Christianity – “Christendom” – the stable, serviceable synthe-
sis of religion and society that had characterized the absolutist regime….As the influ-
ence 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 gratifica-
tions 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 Christen-
dom.” 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 Kir-
mmse 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 presid-
ing 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 Kirmmse, op. cit., p. 119.

17 Kirmmse, op. cit., p. 129.
158 John Saxbee

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 theolog-
ical 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 emerg-
ing 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 symbol-
ize his heart-felt concern at the passing of the old order and the emer-
gence of new conditions which he felt able neither to accept nor ade-
quately 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, some-
what 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 episco-
pate. 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. Myn-

18 H.L. Koch Den Danske Kirkes Historie i Aarene 1817-54, Copenhagen 1883, p 161.
 The Life and Times of Bishop J.P. Mynster 159

ster believed that as Baptists refused to accept children as members of

their congregation before they are of an age to make personal profes-
sion 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 Kierke-
gaard (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 nev-
ertheless asserted that this was just what should be done. But the
opposition proved too strong, with H.N. Clausen, Monrad, Mar-
tensen, 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 Bap-
tists 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 Myn-
ster could marshall a range of theological arguments to support his
opposition to populist pietism, there is no escaping the fact that protec-
tion 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 cir-
cle of people who read them, would have agreed with Mynster in his
defence of absolutism does nothing to mitigate a sense of disappoint-
ment 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 surpris-
ing 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 iden-
tified 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 despond-
ency 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.

160 John Saxbee

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 assump-
tions 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, deliv-
ered 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 Chris-
tendom, 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 Myn-
ster as “pleasure-loving” and “self-indulgent.” If only he would
acknowledge how much he fell short – and it is this quest for an hon-
est “admission” which governs Kierkegaard’s dialectical dance with

20 Kirmmse, op. cit., p. 135.

21 Hans Lassen Martensen Prædiken holdt i Christiansborg Slotskirke paa 5te Søndag
efter Hellig Tre Konger, Copenhagen 1854, p. 6.
 The Life and Times of Bishop J.P. Mynster 161

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 Kier-
kegaard and “my father’s priest,” such an admission was not forth-
coming. So Kierkegaard saw no option but to press ahead with pro-
viding a corrective to Mynster’s compromised and compromising cor-
ruption of Christian ideality.
Kierkegaard had his own philosophical, theological and socio-politi-
cal 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 evalua-
tion 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, Oehlen-
schläger’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 “revolu-
tion.” 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 privi-
leged status in Copenhagen’s cultural milieu. He also courted and cov-
eted popularity amongst the clergy and those in Danish Church life he
would have considered significant on account of their social or intellec-
tual 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 occa-
sionally 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 rep-
utation whilst remaining true to his convictions.

22 Kirmmse, op. cit., p. 115.

162 John Saxbee

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 dis-
turbed 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 mid-
dle classes and the status quo.
In terms of his private life and lifestyle we have no reason to ques-
tion 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 Myn-
ster 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 renunci-
ation 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 Prot-
estantism of his small homeland, whose provincial capital was ‘The
King’s Old Copenhagen.’”25

23 C.L.N. Mynster Nogle Erindringer og Bemærkninger om J.P. Mynster, Copenhagen:

Gyldendalske Boghandels Forlag 1877, p. 33f.
24 C.L.N. Mynster Nogle Erindringer, ibid., p. 14.
25 Kierkegaard and the Church in Denmark (Bibliotheca Kierkegaardiana, vol. 13), ed.
by Niels Thulstrup and Marie Mikulová Thulstrup, Copenhagen: C.A. Reitzels For-
lag 1984, p. 10.
 The Life and Times of Bishop J.P. Mynster 163

There are those who would argue that when Savanarola asserted
that in the early Church the chalices were made of wood and the bish-
ops 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 judg-
ment. Indeed, Mynster was an earthen vessel whose talent was para-
sitic 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 philos-
ophy, 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 explod-
ing from that setting. An intriguing figure within the culture of
Golden Age Denmark is Hans Lassen Martensen (1808-84).1 If cul-
ture 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 Aarhun-
dredes sidste Halvdel, Copenhagen: Schønberg 1897. Josepha Martensen H.L. Mar-
tensen 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. Aar-
hundredes 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. 328-
381 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 (Bib-
liotheca Kierkegaardiana, vol. 10), ed. by Niels Thulstrup and Marie Mikulová Thul-
strup, Copenhagen: C.A. Reitzel 1982, pp. 177-207. Hermann Brandt Gotteserkennt-
nis und Weltentfremdung: Der Weg der spekulativen Theologie Hans Lassen Mar-
tensens, 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 Kier-
kegaard in Golden Age Denmark, Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University
Press 1990, pp. 169-197.
 H.L. Martensen’s Theological Anthropology 165

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 free-
dom a theonomous rather than an autonomous form. The purpose of
this essay is to elucidate Martensen’s understanding of the God-
human 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, metaphys-
ical 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 essen-
tially must become true existentially. Just as the more explicit manifes-
tation of religion is centered in a subjective experience of the religious
relationship between God and the human being, so too the metaphysi-
cal God-relatedness enables one to speak of human beings as possess-
ing 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 reli-
gion 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 ontolog-
ical 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.
166 Curtis L. Thompson

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 influ-

ences. As a result of his two-year study trip abroad in 1834-36, Mar-
tensen had learned much from the likes of Baader, Schelling, and
Daub as well as from his readings in the medieval mystics. Also influ-
ential 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 con-
ditions 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 meta-
morphosis; 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 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.
4 Ibid., p. 109.
 H.L. Martensen’s Theological Anthropology 167

So here Grundtvig in developing his view of religion affirms a dis-

tinction between essence and existence that is the result of the actual-
ization of human freedom. The Fall is the dividing line between Reli-
giousness 1 and Religiousness 2-3 in the early Grundtvig.
Even more influential on Martensen was Mynster. Mynster’s theol-
ogy 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 for-
ward 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 eter-
nity.”5 Mynster’s theological anthropology can be seen in his little trea-
tise 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 primi-
tive in religion is neither a thought nor a willing nor a feeling, but
something higher which has an impact on all these functions and condi-
tions 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 activ-
ities. “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 exter-
nal 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, Myn-

5 Niels Munk Plum Jakob Peter Mynster. Som Kristen og Teolog, Copenhagen: G.E.C.
Gad 1938, p. 132.
6 I am working with the Danish version of the treatise which was first published in Ger-
man: Jakob Peter Mynster Om Begrebet af den christelige Dogmatik, Copenhagen
1831.
7 Ibid., p. 4.
8 Ibid., p. 4.
9 Ibid., p. 14.
168 Curtis L. Thompson

ster claims that it, like all religion, is revealed. Since he believes that
nothing can be known unless it becomes revealed knowledge, Myn-
ster 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 def-
inite 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 pene-
trates 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 mutu-
ally recognize one another.
Mynster definitely wants to give natural religion its due. And yet
he holds tenaciously to a qualitative difference between natural reli-
gion and the Christian religion. The distinction between Religious-
ness 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 sit-
uation: “Either God reveals himself only in nature, in the given pow-
ers 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 theolog-
ical enterprise can be seen as an effort to sublate the contradictory
positions of supernaturalism and rationalism. But the impact of Myn-
ster 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 Ibid., pp. 17-18.

11 Ibid., p. 17.
12 Ibid., p. 21.
13 Martensen winsomely differentiates his position from that of Mynster in his article
“Rationalisme, Supranaturalisme og principium exclusi medii” in Tidsskrift for Litter-
atur og Kritik no. 1, 1839, pp. 456-473.
 H.L. Martensen’s Theological Anthropology 169

III.

In his Lectures on Speculative Dogmatics delivered in 1838-39 at the

University of Copenhagen, Martensen defines religion as a conscious-
ness of God.14 The regulative notion for Martensen’s logical inquiry
into religion is the Idea, where the Idea is understood not in the Kant-
ian 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 con-
siders 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 conscious-
ness of God can be a totally objective affair; it can be merely an
expression of relatedness to God rather than an expression of rela-
tionship with God. Therefore, Martensen is speaking here of Reli-
giousness 1 when he equates religion with philosophy and art. Reli-
gion 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 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.
15 Pap. XIII, p. 7.
16 Pap. XIII, p. 8.
170 Curtis L. Thompson

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 Reli-
giousness 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 phenom-
enon in the self. That is why Martensen believes the qualitative differ-
ence 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 manifesta-
tions 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 inclu-
sion 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 objec-
tivity, 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 Pap. XIII, p. 8.
18 Pap. XIII, p. 9.
 H.L. Martensen’s Theological Anthropology 171

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 Three-
fourths 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 com-
prehend Martensen’s theological anthropology.
The essence of mysticism, according to Martensen, can be character-
ized in terms of the three moments of mystery, revelation, and the high-
est 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 personal-
ity. The mystic desires to move from the God of Religiousness 3 to the
God of Religiousness 1. The mystical consciousness is finally uncom-
fortable with that participation in the divine which comes through reli-
gious 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 Hans Lassen Martensen Mester Eckart. Et Bidrag til at oplyse Middelalderens Mys-
tik, 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.)
20 BHK, p. 178 / Mester Eckart, p. 41.
172 Curtis L. Thompson

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 determi-
nate content, and in order to find this it must give itself over to the kingdom of the Trin-
ity 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 revela-
tion, 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 mys-

tery, 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 mys-
tery, 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. Rev-
elation contains the difference, negation, and contrast which are the
conditions for all consciousness and knowledge…. The concepts mys-
tery 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. Mysti-
cism 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 BHK, p. 183 / Mester Eckart, p. 50.

22 BHK, p. 184 / Mester Eckart, p. 51.
23 BHK, p. 184 / Mester Eckart, p. 51.
24 BHK, p. 184 / Mester Eckart, p. 52.
25 BHK, pp. 184-185 / Mester Eckart, p. 52.
 H.L. Martensen’s Theological Anthropology 173

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 com-
municate 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 wit-
nessed 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 Mar-
tensen’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 Auton-
omy of Human Self-Consciousness in Modern Dogmatic Theology.28
This work begins with a discussion of the internal relatedness of phil-
osophy and theology. And the major portion of it is devoted to criti-

26 BHK, p. 185 / Mester Eckart, p. 53.

27 BHK, p. 185 / Mester Eckart, p. 53.
28 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-Conscious-
ness 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.)
174 Curtis L. Thompson

cizing the autonomic systems of Kant’s moral theology and Schleier-

macher’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 acknowl-
edges the human’s fundamental relation. The metaphysical God-
relatedness 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 real-
ized. 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 trans-
moral 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 sepa-
rates 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 char-

29 BHK, p. 81 / Autonomie, p. 9.
30 BHK, p. 81 / Autonomie, p. 10.
31 BHK, pp. 80-81 / Autonomie, pp. 9-10.
32 BHK, p. 81 / Autonomie, p. 10.
33 BHK, p. 81 / Autonomie, p. 10.
 H.L. Martensen’s Theological Anthropology 175

acteristic mark of the human creature. The human is properly under-

stood 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 con-
ditioning 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 knowl-
edge 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 includ-
ing the illuminating divine light and the limit-character of that condi-
tion. 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 Religious-
ness 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 com-
pact and yet rich abstract of the structure of Martensen’s moral phil-
osophy 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 eth-
ics. This is not inappropriate, for the Outline is a very Hegelian docu-
ment 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 “sys-
tem” of freedom. The main body of the work lays out the systematic

34 BHK, p. 82 / Autonomie, p. 11.

35 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. Mar-
tensen’s Philosophy of Religion, tr. by Curtis L. Thompson and David J. Kangas, op.
cit., pp. 245-313.)
176 Curtis L. Thompson

implications of his concise proposal for a religious understanding of

volition which is articulated at the outset of the work. It is that pro-
posal 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 dis-
tinction 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 Reli-
gion’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 overcom-
ing the possibility of its opposite can freedom actually substantiate itself.40

36 BHK, p. 258 / Grundrids, p. 9.

37 BHK, p. 258 / Grundrids, p. 9.
38 BHK, p. 258f. / Grundrids, p. 89f.
39 BHK, p. 259 / Grundrids, p. 10.
40 BHK, p. 259 / Grundrids, p. 10.
 H.L. Martensen’s Theological Anthropology 177

Of course, in realizing its freedom, the will has to enter into a sys-
tem of conditions and boundaries. The limits presented by the given-
ness 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 incor-
porates 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 pre-
supposes the creative will of the Godhead as its innermost ground of determination, a
new antinomy appears, namely, the antinomy between the dependence of human free-
dom 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 self-
determining, 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 theologi-
cal 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 com-
ical, the person of Christ, law and duty, the Fall, guilt, etc. In Mar-
tensen’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 Mar-
tensen. 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 BHK, p. 259 / Grundrids, p. 11.

42 BHK, p. 259 / Grundrids, p. 11.
43 BHK, p. 260 / Grundrids, p. 12.
178 Curtis L. Thompson

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 Mar-
tensen’s understanding of human cognition (V above) resolves the
epistemological antinomy between thought and being, so his under-
standing 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 Chris-
tian 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 contempo-
rary 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 com-
municated to Regin Prenter that of all theologians, he felt the right-
wing Hegelians Martensen and Marheineke stood closest to his theol-
ogy.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 BHK, p. 266 / Grundrids, pp. 23-24.

45 Hermann Brandt Gotteserkenntnis und Weltentfremdung: Der Weg der spekulativen
Theologie Hans Lassen Martensens, op. cit., p. 257, n. 16.
 H.L. Martensen’s Theological Anthropology 179

While the creative achievement of Tillich’s systematic theology rests

secure, one is able to discern possible points of dependence on Mar-
tensen. 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. Fur-
thermore, 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 devel-
opments 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 commit-
ted 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 commu-
nity. Martensen’s difference with Feuerbach finally lies in a disagree-
ment over the status of a central human faculty which we have not dis-
cussed 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 pro-
jected 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.
180 Curtis L. Thompson

Martensen had a vision of reality in which God was viewed as being

in the most intimate union with the human. He consistently main-
tained an infinite qualitative difference between God and the human,
but such difference was understood as transpiring within a basic relat-
edness. 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 bet-
ter 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 anti-
quated; their own society, however, would have arrived at the oppo-
site 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 Dan-
ish editions of the work, of which the last to be published appeared
in 1905, the English edition was provided with an index. Since Mar-
tensen’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 Arild-
sen’s monograph.3

1 Hans Lassen Martensen Den christelige Dogmatik, Copenhagen 1849, abbreviated

CD.
2 Hans Lassen Martensen Christian Dogmatics, tr. by William Urwick, Edinburgh:
T.&T. Clark 1866.
3 Skat Arildsen Hans Lassen Martensen. Hans Liv, Udvikling og Arbejde, Copenhagen:
G.E.C. Gads Forlag 1932.
182 Niels Thulstrup

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 origi-
nal and palpable common knowledge, that is, knowledge shared with
God (conscientia) concerning one’s personal and existential relation-
ship to him. This relationship encompasses the whole of man’s spirit-
ual 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 par-

4 CD, § 4.
5 CD, § 8.
6 CD, § 10.
 Martensen’s Dogmatics and its Reception 183

ticipate reciprocally in the highest forms of expression of natural

human life. The idea of truth is the necessary presupposition of Chris-
tian knowledge. Since the human spirit has been “darkened” by sin,
rebirth is the ineluctable presupposition for achieving a clear under-
standing of divine and human things. The conception of truth is com-
municated 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 Chris-
tian 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 Introduc-
tion to his Dogmatics by posing the question of the limits of Christian
knowledge. When the subjective concept of truth which is communi-
cated 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 foun-
dation 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 sys-
tem, of which some individual issues are supported by theosophical
positions, is a development of the so-called soterio-ecumenical teach-
184 Niels Thulstrup

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 cre-
atio was to be the beginning and incarnatio the perfecting act of crea-
tion. 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 path-
way 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. There-
fore, Christ is not merely to be understood in terms of history, religion,
and ethics, but also with a view to his metaphysical and cosmic signifi-
cance. 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 sys-
tem. Its basis is the metaphysics of the doctrine of the Trinity. Consid-
ered 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 dogmat-
ics 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 con-
cepts contained within it, though sometimes on the basis of unclear
concepts or empty rhetoric. The development is illuminated from uni-
versal vantage points: metaphysical and empirical, theoretical and tel-
eological, cosmic and eschatological, and so forth. Martensen pro-
ceeds like a theological juggler, following the worst of the Germanic
patterns. In his hands the various doctrines are transformed into reli-
gious fantasies which are moderated and tempered by means of a dia-
lectical-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 characteris-
tic of his Dogmatics. Martensen praises a Christianly colored, idealis-

7 Ephesians 1.10f.
 Martensen’s Dogmatics and its Reception 185

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 cul-
ture 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 Mar-
tensen arrives at on the basis of the principles arranged in his work, all
divergent theories are dismissed as both untrue and unsound. In con-
sequence of this and on the basis of the same handy yardstick, Mar-
tensen rejects (without mentioning their author) Kierkegaard’s “max-
ims, 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 phil-
osophers, 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 evi-
dent in his choice of terms, which to a modern reader appears old-
fashioned 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 Mar-
tensen the foremost was Frederik Christian Sibbern, who emphasized
that the creative imagination was a facet of the process of acquiring

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

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 pre-
serve 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 virtu-
ally forgotten in our time. Martensen corresponded with Dorner for a
considerable period of time.
On a single, important issue, Martensen seems to have been influ-
enced by Schleiermacher, since, like the latter he insisted on the inti-
mate 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 Mar-
tensen’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 Ischari-
oth 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 Hans Lassen Martensen Jacob Bøhme. Theosophiske Studier, Copenhagen 1881.

English translation: Jacob Boehme: His Life and Teaching, tr. by T. Rhys Evans, Lon-
don: Hodder & Stoughton 1885.
12 Carl Daub Judas Ischarioth oder das Böse in Verhältniss zum Guten betrachtet vols. 1-
2, Heidelberg 1816-18.
 Martensen’s Dogmatics and its Reception 187

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 some-
time comrade-in-arms and friend, Professor of Philosophy Rasmus
Nielsen (1809-84), happened to be fascinated by Kierkegaard’s writ-
ings 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 dis-
cusses 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 mis-
understood 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 sepa-
rated 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 Karl Hase Hutterus redivivus oder Dogmatik der evangelisch-lutherischen Kirche, 4th
improved edition, Leipzig 1839.
14 Rasmus Nielsen Mag. S. Kierkegaards ‘Johannes Climacus’ og Dr. Martensens ‘Chris-
telige Dogmatik’. En undersøgende Anmeldelse, Copenhagen 1849.
188 Niels Thulstrup

object of objective study or for dogmatic speculation. Is speculation to

be assigned some religious or Christian validity, or is Christianity trans-
formed 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 epistemol-
ogy.”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 sal-
vation. Thus, the fundamental question must be that of the relation of
the individual to Christianity, rather than questions relating to prob-
lems within Christianity. Nor can the relation of the individual to
Christianity be realized via the objective pathway advocated by Mar-
tensen. 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 presupposi-
tion of faith…. Where faith has up to this point had a useful chastiser in the form of uncer-
tainty, 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 subjec-

tive. 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 contradis-
tinction to speculation, which pretends to be objective knowledge. In a
Christian context the main thing is to exist, while in a speculative con-
text 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 Ibid., p. 6.
16 Ibid., p. 6.
17 Ibid., p. 16.
18 Ibid., e.g. p. 34.
19 Ibid., p. 36.
 Martensen’s Dogmatics and its Reception 189

speculation which attempts to mediate between Christianity and spec-

ulation 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 rela-
tion between Christianity and speculation may be described as fol-
lows: 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 sup-
ported 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 phil-
osophy, but his distinction is inconsistent. On the one hand, Mar-
tensen 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 academi-
cally 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 specula-
tive 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 Ibid., p. 41.
21 Ibid., p. 56.
22 Ibid., pp. 98, 109.
190 Niels Thulstrup

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. Mar-
tensen 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 objec-
tive 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 spec-
ulation 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 eluci-
dation of objective evidence, then it must be based solely on a subjec-
tive 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 Ibid., pp. 23-24.

24 Ibid., pp. 61, 72, 92, 96.
 Martensen’s Dogmatics and its Reception 191

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 fan-
tastic thing about which one would be at a loss to comment.
Nielsen finds Martensen’s account of the principles of Protestant-
ism 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 sec-
tion: 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 unintelli-
gible. 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 uni-
versal 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 Chris-
tianity – in which case he would hardly have written his Dogmatics.

25 Ibid., pp. 98-99.

26 Ibid., e.g. pp. 16, 18-20, 25-26, 35.
27 Ibid., p. 103.
192 Niels Thulstrup

Like Nielsen, Peter Michael Stilling (1812-69) began as a conserva-

tive Hegelian and even published some works which illustrate his ini-
tial position. However, under the influence of Kierkegaard’s pseudon-
ymous writings and presumably, as in the case of Nielsen, after per-
sonal conversations with Kierkegaard, Stilling’s views on the relation-
ship 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 espe-
cially critical of Martensen’s ambivalent attitude towards the theoret-
ical 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 Christi-
anity in worship and thus in the obedience of faith to yield to the par-
adox. Martensen’s mediation is only a superficial solution.
Naturally the Grundtvigian theoretician Peter Christian Kierke-
gaard (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 unenthusi-
astic 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 Peter Michael Stilling Om den indbildte Forsoning af Tro og – Viden med saerligt
Hensyn til Prof. Martensens ‘christelige Dogmatik’. Kritisk-polemisk Afhandling,
Copenhagen 1849.
29 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 Tors-
dagen 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, Copen-
hagen: Karl Schønbergs Forlag 1902-1905; vol. 4, pp. 99-120.
 Martensen’s Dogmatics and its Reception 193

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 dom-
inates 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 Mar-
tensen again to be imprecise: he teaches that dogmatics must have con-
fessional character, but he fails to mention to what extent or on which
conditions this confessional character is to be affirmed. Martensen fur-
ther leaves his reader in doubt when the latter attempts to clarify the
relationship between the contents of dogmatics and Christian and non-
Christian 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 (1803-
77), attempted to assist the dogmatician by defending him against the
attacks of Nielsen and Stilling in particular.32 Scharling’s defense was

30 Jens Paludan-Müller Om Dr. Martensens ‘Christelige Dogmatik,’ Copenhagen 1850.

31 Ibid., p. 53.
32 Carl Emil Scharling “Den christelige Dogmatik. Fremstillet af Dr. H. Martensen.
Anmeldt af Dr. C.E. Scharling under Hensyn til Mag. S. Kierkegaards ‘Johannes Cli-
macus’ 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. Palu-
dan-Müller, residerende Capellan ved Budolphi Kirke i Aalborg” in Nyt Theologisk
Tidsskrift vol. 1, 1850, pp. 348-375.
194 Niels Thulstrup

unfortunate, and the two philosophers had an easy time of it with

their subsequent polemics.
Another theologian who was almost universally regarded as an out-
sider was the pugnacious Magnus Eiriksson (1806-81). As early as in
September of 1849, Eiriksson had a diffuse and caustic attack on Mar-
tensen’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 contra-
indicative 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 carica-
ture because of arbitrary wrestling with various concepts and all man-
ner of contradictions. Martensen is further criticized for making arbi-
trary 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 criti-
cized 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 Magnus Eiriksson Speculativ Rettroenhed, fremstillet efter Dr. Martensens “christelige

Dogmatik” og geistlig Retfærdighed, belyst ved en Biskops Deeltagelse i en General-
fiskal-Sag, Copenhagen 1849.
34 Ibid., p. 67.
35 Ibid., p. 66.
36 Ibid., p. 68.
37 Ibid., p. 76.
38 Ibid., pp. 76-77.
39 Ludvig Helweg “Prof. Martensens Dogmatik og dens Angribere” in Danske Kirketid-
ende vol. 5, no. 229, 1850, columns 345-357; no. 230, columns 369-373.
40 Hans Lassen Martensen Dogmatiske Oplysninger, Copenhagen 1850.
 Martensen’s Dogmatics and its Reception 195

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 misun-
derstandings 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: Eiriks-
son has seriously misunderstood matters, Stilling is beyond the aca-
demic pale, and therefore irrelevant, while Nielsen has both misun-
derstood and misinterpreted the Dogmatics and has himself no theo-
retical basis. Martensen regards Kierkegaard’s authorship as some-
thing “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 Mar-
tensen 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 Mar-
tensen 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 relation-
ship 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 the-
ological questions” which he may answer at his convenience. Mar-
tensen 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 Ibid., pp. 1-2.

42 Ibid., p. 12.
43 Rasmus Nielsen Dr. H. Martensens Dogmatiske Oplysninger belyste, Copenhagen
1850.
44 Ibid., p. 65.
45 Magnus Eiriksson Den nydanske Theologies Cardinaldyder, Copenhagen 1850.
196 Niels Thulstrup

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 dog-
matics. 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 Dog-
matics, 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 charac-
terization 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 Wilhelm Rothe “Breve om den Martensenske Dogmatik” in Nyt Theologisk

Tidsskrift vol. 4, 1853, pp. 292-338.
47 See Ktl. 701, 703, 709, and 802. (Ktl. = Auktionsprotokol over Søren Kierkegaards
Bogsamling, ed. by H.P. Rohde, Copenhagen: The Royal Library 1967.)
48 In Pap. X 6.
49 JP 6, 6448 / Pap. X 1 A 553.
 Martensen’s Dogmatics and its Reception 197

it is really ridiculous! There has been talk of the system and scientificity and about sci-
entificity, 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 observa-
tion, is not only directed against Martensen’s work, but against dog-
matic 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 sys-
tematizing is evil, then all theology must be upbuilding or edifying. Systematizing con-
tains 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 pas-
tor” 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 govern-
ment, came into effect. To Kierkegaard this was a decisive sign that dis-
integration 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 JP 6, 6449 / Pap. X 1 A 556.

51 JP 3, 3564 / Pap. X 1 A 561.
52 Ibid.
53 Pap. X 6 B 108; where they are presented as a guide for Nielsen.
54 See especially LD, pp. 320-321 / B&A 1, pp. 251-252, which almost verbatim repro-
duces the last-cited quotation above.
198 Niels Thulstrup

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 Sick-
ness 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 Dog-
matics. 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 men-
tion 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 corre-
spondence 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 Media-
tion,” (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 See LD, pp. 322-337 / B&A 1, pp. 253-264.

56 LD, pp. 377-378 / B&A 1, p. 297.
57 Pap. X 1 A 674.
 Martensen’s Dogmatics and its Reception 199

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 neverthe-
less 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 criti-
cized 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 after-
wards 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; how-
ever, Kierkegaard maintains, a consistently worked out theory cannot
be dismissed on academic terms. It can only be rejected by faith.66 As

58 JP 1, 673 / Pap. X 1 A 566.

59 Pap. X 1 A 578.
60 JP 6, 6456 / Pap. X 1 A 576. JP 6, 6460 / Pap. X 1 A 588.
61 Pap. X 1 A 604.
62 Pap. X 1 A 618.
63 Pap. X 1 A 619.
64 Pap. X 1 A 620.
65 Pap. X 1 A 622.
66 Pap. X 1 A 606.
200 Niels Thulstrup

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-specu-
lative 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 ret-
icence 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 Kierke-
gaard’s plan was that after his death Nielsen would undertake to pub-
lish 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 Univer-
sity; they were entitled, Evangelical Faith and the Modern Conscious-
ness. Lectures on the Life of Jesus.69 The work contained a powerful
attack on speculative theology which was clearly inspired by Kierke-
gaard, 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 delib-
erate 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 E.g. JP 6, 6211 / Pap. IX A 178.

68 Pap. X 6 B 102.
69 Rasmus Nielsen Evangelietroen og den moderne Bevidsthed. Forelæsninger over Jesu
Liv, Copenhagen 1849.
70 JP 6, 6402 / Pap. X 1 A 343.
71 See LD, pp. 290-292 / B&A 1, pp. 228-230.
72 Pap. X 6 B 83-102 (included in part in JP 6, 6403, 6404, 6405, 6406, 6663).
 Martensen’s Dogmatics and its Reception 201

fortunate I did not die [in 1848]. Nor did it take long before I discov-
ered that this Professor Nielsen was probably a worrisome misunder-
standing. 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 Kierke-
gaard was unable either to approve of or to assent to Nielsen’s previ-
ously mentioned major book or to his attack on Martensen’s Dogmat-
ics. 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 Kierke-
gaard himself decided not to publish any direct criticism of Mar-
tensen. 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, inciden-
tally, 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 con-
tent 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 devel-
opment 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 resent-
ment 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 commu-
nication 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 specula-
tion resides in its having forced the Christian aspect to recede by the

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

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 con-
sists 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 Kierke-
gaard’s corrective into a doctrine.79 Nor does Kierkegaard spare Mar-
tensen’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 Dog-
matic 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 Chris-
tianity’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 dig-
nity as the seriousness of life: this is not to be borne!”86 This was Kier-
kegaard’s final evaluation of Martensen’s Dogmatics and of his Dog-
matic 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 JP 6, 6475 / Pap. X 6 B 105. Translation modified.

78 Pap. X 6 B 114, p. 147.
79 Pap. X 6 B 114, p. 159.
80 Pap. X 6 B 107.
81 Pap. X 6 B 109.
82 JP 6, 6574 / Pap. X 6 B 121.
83 Pap. X 6 B 125. JP 6, 6558 / Pap. X 6 B 130. JP 6, 6559 / Pap. X 6 B 131.
84 JP 6, 6596 / Pap. X 6 B 128.
85 Pap. X 6 B 135-143.
86 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 versi-
fier, 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
204 Flemming Lundgreen-Nielsen

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 rid-
icules a modern pedagogue called Fichte for his emotional and free-and-
easy 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 peas-
ant 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 roman-
ticism’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 Icelan-
dic, and in a series of unpublished stories from the saga-material he
transferred a number of Icelandic words to Danish and formed Dan-
ish 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 argu-
ment 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 N.F.S. Grundtvig Ulfhild, Grundtvig Archive, The Royal Library, Copenhagen, Fasci-
cle 492, hefte 6, 8 recto.
2 N.F.S. Grundtvig Skoleholderne, Grundtvig Archive, The Royal Library, Copenha-
gen, Fascicle 490.1.
 Grundtvig and Romanticism 205

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 impres-
sions 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 Con-
stance 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 sub-
ject 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 eter-
nal, and man has a means of sensing this in the pure, natural percep-
tion 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 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.
4 Ibid., vol. 1, pp. 218-26.
206 Flemming Lundgreen-Nielsen

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 dis-
crepancy between the dull, everyday life and the higher but intangible
existence. And thus the romantic poet suffers from a certain sickli-
ness. 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 char-
acteristic 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 every-
thing. 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 real-
ity 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 inci-
dental 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 lim-
iting, or it must coincide with its pure primordial vision. The inner

5 Ibid., vol. 1, p. 330.

 Grundtvig and Romanticism 207

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 Ham-
let. For they fought on the basis of their glimpse of the eternal in their
miserable existence, just as their reader must do today. The unharmo-
nious 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 Sicil-
ians, in classical style, submit calmly to the vicissitudes of life in their
belief in a superhuman fate. For Grundtvig, only the absolute engage-
ment 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 clas-
sical 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 8.19-
23, 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 Ibid., vol. 1, p. 370.

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

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 Leon-
ardo 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 half-
finished 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 Oehlen-

schläger, 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 feel-
ing – a romantic concept – that there was more meaning in our fore-
fathers’ 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, writ-

10 Grundtvig Archive, The Royal Library, Copenhagen, File 213. 11 verso.

11 Adam Oehlenschläger Poetiske Skrifter vols. 1-2, Copenhagen 1805.
 Grundtvig and Romanticism 209

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 Stef-
fens’ 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 exe-
cution 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, chop-
ping, 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 Jens Møller “Skirners Reise” in Ny Minerva, May 1806, pp. 212-230.

13 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.)
14 N.F.S. Grundtvig “Freis Kærlighed” in Grundtvigs Udvalgte Skrifter, op. cit., vol. 1,
pp. 295-317.
210 Flemming Lundgreen-Nielsen

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 Encour-
agement,”16 romantically maintains not only that spirit controls and
forms material reality, but also that spiritual life presupposes the reli-
gious 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 Sum-
mer 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 ser-
mon 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 N.F.S. Grundtvig “Om Religion og Liturgie” in Theologisk Maanedsskrivt vol. 9,

1807, pp. 129-201.
16 N.F.S. Grundtvig “Om Videnskabelighed og dens Fremme” in Ny Minerva, February
1807, pp. 249-298.
17 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.)
18 N.F.S. Grundtvig “Rejsen i Sommeren 1807” in Grundtvig Archive, The Royal
Library, Copenhagen, Fascicle 386.1.
19 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.)
 Grundtvig and Romanticism 211

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 Eng-
lish.20 In its execution, however, this strange little story interspersed
with songs – Grundtvig’s first book – is more a dry, intellectual alle-
gory than what the subtitle promised, “a vision.” In the confusion sur-
rounding 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 pres-
ervation 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 composi-
tion 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 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.)
21 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.)
22 N.F.S. Grundtvig “Gunderslev Skov” in Nyeste Skilderie af Kjøbenhavn vol. 5, no.
101, September 27, 1808, columns 1597-1600.
212 Flemming Lundgreen-Nielsen

journey through a dark and enclosed forest to a large and ancient dol-
men, 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 mytholog-
ical 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 Dan-
ish 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 bal-
lads 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 histor-
ically 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 stimu-
lated 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 his-
torical 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 Adam Oehlenschläger “Guldhornene” in his Digte, Copenhagen: Universitets-

boghandler Fr. Brummers Forlag 1803, pp. 75-82.
24 N.F.S. Grundtvig “Aftenen (Ved min Færd til Middelsyssel)” in Nyeste Skilderie af
Kjøbenhavn vol. 37, February 14, 1809, columns. 585-588.
25 N.F.S. Grundtvig “Freias Pris” in Nyeste Skilderie af Kjøbenhavn vol. 66, May 27,
1809, columns. 1063-1064.
26 N.F.S. Grundtvig “Kommer hid, I Piger smaa!” in Danske og Norske historiske Minde-
sange, ed. by K.L. Rahbek, Copenhagen 1810, pp. 166-172. (Reprinted in Grundtvigs
Udvalgte Skrifter, op. cit., vol. 1, pp. 764-768.)
 Grundtvig and Romanticism 213

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 pur-
pose in mind, even though they obviously conflicted with the purely
pagan plot. Both of the Scenes are characterized by Grundtvig’s vacil-
lation 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 calcu-
lated 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 Sib-
bern) 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 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.)
28 Adam Oehlenschläger Hakon Jarl hin Rige in his Nordiske Digte, Copenhagen:
Andreas Seidelin 1807.
29 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.)
214 Flemming Lundgreen-Nielsen

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 deci-
sively 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 Mythol-
ogy, 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 signif-
icance 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 cre-
ated by an old and gifted poet, who wanted to order all the contradictory
phenomena of life and therefore interpreted them into a colossal trag-
edy in five acts. So far the book’s attitude is pure romanticism.
But towards the end of the work, Grundtvig oversteps his self-
imposed 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 explana-
tion of the baffling conflicts of earthly life. They point forward to a

30 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. 458-
459.)
31 N.F.S. Grundtvig Nyaars-Morgen. Et Riim, Copenhagen 1824. (Reprinted in
Grundtvigs Udvalgte Skrifter, op. cit., vol. 4, pp. 249-343.)
 Grundtvig and Romanticism 215

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 Ezek-
iel (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 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.)
33 Gustav Albeck Omkring Grundtvigs Digtsamlinger, Copenhagen: Universitetsfor-
laget i Aarhus and Ejnar Munksgaard 1955, pp. 102-104.
34 Draft in the Grundtvig Archive, The Royal Library, Copenhagen. Fascicle 386. Pub-
lished in Gustav Albeck, Omkring Grundtvigs Digtsamlinger, op. cit., p. 103.
216 Flemming Lundgreen-Nielsen

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 subse-
quent 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 abun-
dant 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 Christ-
mas 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 Ibid.
36 N.F.S. Grundtvig Roskilde-Riim, Copenhagen: Andreas Seidelins Forlag 1814.
(Reprinted in Grundtvigs Udvalgte Skrifter, op. cit., vol. 2, pp. 427-608.)
37 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.)
38 N.F.S. Grundtvig Nyaars-Morgen. Et Riim, Copenhagen 1824. (Reprinted in Grundt-
vigs Udvalgte Skrifter, op. cit., vol. 4, pp. 249-343.)
 Grundtvig and Romanticism 217

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 Chris-
tian 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 pri-
vate 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 arch-
romantics, 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 Nova-
lis, Tieck and the Schlegel brothers for wanting to turn time into eter-
nity, to immerse themselves in themselves and lose themselves in the
world. In Denmark Grundtvig accuses Holberg, Baggesen and espe-
cially 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 har-
mony who preferred calm inquiries within the framework of a specu-
lative 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.
218 Flemming Lundgreen-Nielsen

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 com-
ments: “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 Dan-
ish by Grundtvig to specify the subservient position of poetry to reli-
gion. 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 Nova-
lis 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 subse-
quent 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 condemna-
tory Chronicles of the 1810’s Grundtvig also admits that in the great
battle between Christianity and materialism (the latter being particu-
larly 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 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.
41 Ibid., p. 195.
42 Ibid., p. 195f.
43 Ibid., p. 196.
44 Ibid., p. 197.
 Grundtvig and Romanticism 219

been attacking Oehlenschläger since 1813 – not without some justifi-

cation – for the falling curve in his career as poet and cultural person-
ality. 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 hall-
mark. 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 sen-
suality 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 lit-
erary 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 leg-
end 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 bor-
rowed them from Christian or ecclesiastical thought and reshaped
them secularly. And because Grundtvig was already extremely well-
220 Flemming Lundgreen-Nielsen

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 composi-
tion. 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 interven-
ing in and changing some situation or other whose possible conse-
quences 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 ambi-
guity between what is real and what is invisibly spiritual in his meta-
phors 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.
 Grundtvig and Romanticism 221

with Baggesen’s concept of spirit).46 In his only work on contempo-

rary history, Within Living Memory, lectures given in 1838 and pub-
lished 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 methodol-
ogy 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 prin-
ciple: 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 cen-
tury who had attempted to read myths as disguised lessons in meteor-
ology 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 Copen-
hagen, his priorities were lessons in the native language, in folk-song,
in the history of the country and in the nation’s literature – a continu-

46 N.F.S. Grundtvig “Om Digterne Baggesen og Oehlenschläger” in his journal Danne-

Virke vol. 4, hefte 3, November 1818. (Reprinted in Grundtvigs Udvalgte Skrifter, op.
cit., vol. 3, p. 612.)
47 Svend Grundtvig (ed.), N.F.S. Grundtvig: Mands Minde 1788-1838, Copenhagen:
Karl Schønbergs Forlag 1877.
222 Flemming Lundgreen-Nielsen

ation of ideas on national upbringing and education from both the

German pre-romantics and German Romanticism. His so-called his-
torical and poetic method of teaching makes use of the “hawk’s eye”
from romanticism’s philosophy of history, in contrast to the mechani-
cal 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 com-
memorative poem for Steffens in 1845 he dreams of having the philos-
opher’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 possi-
ble, 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 devel-
oped 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 (1848-
51) – 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.)
 Grundtvig and Romanticism 223

a Danish version of Saxo’s Latin Chronicle of the Kingdom of Den-

mark, Gesta Danorum,49 and Snorri Sturluson’s Old Icelandic com-
panion work on Norway, Heimskringla,50 both from around 1220.
Grundtvig chose to translate them into the simple, oral style of a Zea-
land 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 schol-
ars can capture “what inflames the song, what penetrates all barriers
and plays under the open sky like a sounding flame” – also or espe-
cially 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 poeti-
cally 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 impover-
ished 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 circum-
vent 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 N.F.S. Grundtvig (translator), Danmarks Krønike af Saxo Grammaticus, fordansket

vols. 1-3, Copenhagen 1818-22.
50 N.F.S. Grundtvig (translator), Norges Konge-Krønike af Snorro Sturlesøn, fordansket
vols. 1-3, Copenhagen 1818-22.
51 N.F.S. Grundtvig Literatur-Tidende Skudsmaal i Henseende til Prøverne af Saxo og
Snorro, Copenhagen: A Seidelin 1816, p. 20.
52 N.F.S. Grundtvig (translator) Bjowulfs Drape. Et Gothisk Helte-Digt fra forrige Aar-
Tusinde, Copenhagen: Andreas Seidelin 1820.
53 Ibid., p. XXXIV.
224 Flemming Lundgreen-Nielsen

poverty especially of the self-governing farms in the wake of the

financial ordinance of 1813 had the effect of more or less quietly kill-
ing 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 per-
haps 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 ideol-
ogy 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 pro-
gram. 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 trans-
ferred 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’ suf-
fering 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 pie-

54 N.F.S. Grundtvig Christenhedens Syvstjerne, Copenhagen 1860. See “Den nordiske

Menighed,” stanzas 62-86.
55 Ibid., stanzas 85-89.
 Grundtvig and Romanticism 225

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 Pro-
metheus sub Jove” (Shaftesbury), in nature like God, albeit in minia-
ture – 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 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.)
57 See Grundtvigs Udvalgte Skrifter, op. cit., vol. 7, p. 541.
58 Nicolai Frederik Severin Grundtvigs Værker i Udvalg vols. 1-10, ed. by Georg Chris-
tensen and Hal Koch, Copenhagen: Gyldendal 1941; vol. 2, pp. 241-270.
226 Flemming Lundgreen-Nielsen

It is always dependent on something it can imagine and relate to, and

since it is impossible to imagine a nothing, the phrase “freely creat-
ing”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 Revela-
tion, 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 trans-
ferred from these attacks to a positive view of true poetry as condi-
tioned 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 transfig-
ure 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 reve-
lation. 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 spir-
itedly to his surroundings, through reading the works of earlier periods
or in an interaction with contemporary writers. With his very wide read-
ing 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 Bal-
der 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 Ibid., vol. 2, p. 265.

60 Ibid., vol. 2, p. 269.
61 N.F.S. Grundtvig “Om Aabenbaring, Kunst og Vidskab” in the Grundtvig Archive,
The Royal Library, Copenhagen. Fascicle 162.1 6v-9v, 12r.
62 N.F.S. Grundtvig “Om Aabenbaring, Konst og Vidskab” in his journal Danne-Virke
vol. 3, hefte 3, 1817, p. 293.
63 N.F.S. Grundtvig “Om Oehlenschlägers Baldur hiin Gode” in Ny Minerva, Decem-
ber 1807, pp. 301-320.
64 N.F.S. Grundtvig “Ragna-Roke, (et dansk Æmter)” in his journal Danne-Virke vol. 3,
hefte 4, 1817, pp. 301-312.
 Grundtvig and Romanticism 227

continuation of the historical chronicle tradition, pouring scorn on slo-

gans 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 narrow-
ing 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 writ-
ers.”66 The endeavor to join the historical tradition and to lose the rep-
rehensible 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 sharpen-
ing 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 con-
trast, absorbs the religious element without great difficulty and finds
an undogmatically conceived God in his fertile inner chaos.

65 N.F.S. Grundtvig Den Danske Stats-Kirke upartisk betragtet, Copenhagen 1834.

66 See Grundtvigs Udvalgte Skrifter, op. cit., vol. 8, p. 84.
228 Flemming Lundgreen-Nielsen

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 condi-
tion for the latter, he was also reconciling himself with the romantics.
He made peace and an alliance with those he characterized as “natu-
ralists,” 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, half-
Aesir, 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 Prometh-
eus – 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 con-
sequences 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 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.)
68 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.
69 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.)
 Grundtvig and Romanticism 229

VIII.

After a spiritual adolescence approaching romanticism Grundtvig

broke with romanticism’s radical individualism. In place of the indi-
vidual formation and development of personality he set as his ulti-
mate goal the incorporation of the individual into a greater commu-
nity – linguistically into the community of the native language, nation-
ally 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 per-
spective 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 par-
allel with the Heidelberg school in the national and Christian works
from 1809-1824, and finally more or less sliding backwards to roman-
ticism’s pre-conditions, Herder’s philosophy of the organism. How-
ever, 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 Den-
mark in motion towards popular education and popular government,
at a faster tempo in fact than he himself actually believed was reason-
able for the beginning of a movement.
Faced with visions of the great communities, romanticism’s cultiva-
tion of the individual began to pale in his world of ideas. The scrupu-
lous 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 pro-
grammed 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.
230 Flemming Lundgreen-Nielsen

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 characteris-
tic 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 ship-
wreck 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 val-
ued 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 recogni-
tion 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 con-
sciousness, out of his age, out of history. Their elucidation is the pre-
rogative of God. Perhaps Grundtvig’s literary philosophy should be
called a “baptized romanticism.”

71 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.
72 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 romanti-

cism in Denmark, which is reiterated in most of the standard Scandi-
navian 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 three-
volume 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., Copen-
hagen: 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. Traust-
edt 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 Imagi-
nation 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 Pub-
lications 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. 1-
180), and Leif Ludwig Albertsen (Auf der Schwelle zum Goldenen Zeitalter: Däne-
mark um 1800, Copenhagen: Das königliche dänische Ministerium des Äussern 1979).
Fritz Paul suggests sympathy with the latter group, though specifically not with Albert-
234 Kathryn Shailer-Hanson

this story, which owes its inception to Oehlenschläger’s own account

in his memoirs,2 the natural scientist and philosopher, Henrich Stef-
fens, converted the young poet to the philosophy and poetics of the
German “nyere Skole”3 during the course of a sixteen-hour conversa-
tion 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 impression-
able 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 her-
alded the beginning of romantic poetry in Scandinavia.
Largely as a result of these events and also because Oehlenschlä-
ger’s poetry – from the Poems through the Poetic Writings of 18055 – is
indeed replete with superficial elements clearly borrowed from Ger-
man Romanticism, scholars of European literature came to view Dan-
ish Romanticism as merely a hybrid of the German.6 A careful read-

2 sen, in his defence of romanticism and a distinct epoch (“Die skandinavische Roman-
tik: Tradition oder Literarhistorischer Paradigmenwechsel? Anmerkungen zu Proble-
men der Epochenzäsur und der Literaturgeschichtsschreibung” in Nordische Roman-
tik. 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).
2 Adam Oehlenschläger Oehlenschlägers Erindringer vols 1-4, Copenhagen: A.F. Hosts
Forlag 1850-51; vol. 1, p. 188.
3 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, lit-
erary theorists and historians, who shared a common world-view and theoretical
framework, they were identifiable as a circle from about 1797 to 1802. Steffens stud-
ied 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.
4 Adam Oehlenschläger Digte, Copenhagen 1803.
5 Adam Oehlenschläger Poetiske Skrifter vols. 1-2, Copenhagen 1805.
6 The few articles that attempt to position Scandinavian romanticism within the Euro-
pean romantic movement all accept Steffens’ “conversion” of Oehlenschläger as a
starting point and speak of Danish romanticism as a hybrid of the German: See Frede-
rik 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 Kohl-
schmidt 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 235

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 Friend-
ship,”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 Uni-
versity 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 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.
7 Adam Oehlenschläger “Viisdom, Kierlighed og Venskab” in Den danske Tilskuer
nos. 97-98, December 19, 1799, pp. 776-784.
8 For a chronological listing of all Oehlenschläger’s Danish publications, see F.L. Lie-
benberg Bidrag til den oehlenschlägerske Literaturs Historie vols. 1-2, Copenhagen:
Samfundet til den danske Literaturs Fremme 1868; vol. 1, pp. 3-236
9 “Var det gavnligt for Nordens skiønne Litteratur, om den gamle nordiske Mytholo-
gie 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.
10 Adam Oehlenschläger “Blomster fra den nordiske Oldtid” in Almeen Læsning nos.
5-6, June 1800, pp. 33-38.
11 F.L. Liebenberg Bidrag til den oehlenschlägerske Literaturs Historie, op. cit., vol. 1,
p. 257.
236 Kathryn Shailer-Hanson

idea of national soul,” and such Rousseauian sentiments as “Huck-

sterism 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 predomi-
nantly 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 unen-
lightenment 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 devel-
ops 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 tangi-
ble 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 fan-
tasy’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 cen-
turies 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 inter-
ested 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 Ibid., vol. 1, p. 257.

13 Ibid., vol. 1, p. 258.
14 Ibid., vol. 1, p. 293.
15 Ibid., vol. 1, p. 294. (My emphasis.)
16 Ibid., vol. 1, p. 305.
17 Ibid., vol. 1, p. 305.
 Adam Oehlenschläger’s Erik and Roller and Danish Romanticism 237

So when the modern poet employs mythology as a medium, he at

once immerses himself in the nebulous past, which allows his imagina-
tion 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 advan-
tage 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 consid-
erably 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 particu-

18 Ibid., vol. 1, p. 294.

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

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-emi-
nence 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 representa-
tions….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 Ger-
man 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, Oehlen-
schläger set his studies aside and drew his inspiration from a current

23 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.
24 Kr. Langdal Møller “Var Oehlenschlägers romantiske Gennembrud forberedt for
Modet med Steffens?” op. cit., p. 129.
25 Ibid., p. 128.
26 F.L. Liebenberg Bidrag til den oehlenschlägerske Literaturs Historie, op. cit., vol. 1,
pp. 293-294.
27 Ibid., vol. 1, p. 312.
28 Ibid., vol. 1, p. 305.
 Adam Oehlenschläger’s Erik and Roller and Danish Romanticism 239

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 out-
side Copenhagen.29
Throughout the 1790’s, Denmark’s neutral political stance and geo-
graphical 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 ide-
als 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 cre-
ated an atmosphere akin to his idealized vision of the saga age. To cel-
ebrate 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 vio-
lence, / and who earned the hero’s wages, / in the dark business of hea-
then 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 Oehlenschlager describes the event in his memoirs (Erindringer, op. cit., vol. 1,
pp. 157-158).
30 Frederic Durand Histoire de la littèrature danoise, Paris: Aubier-Montaigne 1967,
pp. 129ff. George Bisztray “Lumières et romantisme scandinaves,” op. cit., pp. 421-
423.
31 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.
32 “Dansk Somandssang,” “Dansk Heltesang,” “Den 2den April 1801, et Digt,”
“Gravsang,” “Anden April 1801, en dramatisk Situation” – all reprinted in Lieben-
berg, op. cit.
240 Kathryn Shailer-Hanson

on this wide earth.”33 The heroic honor of a handful of seamen tran-

scended 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 hov-
ers over Copenhagen. / All small-spiritedness, every grudge is extin-
guished today; / for the thunder at Denmark’s harbor / has broken cir-
cumstance’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 Oehlen-
schläger’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 read-
ing public became more receptive to a revival of literature from the
national past; and Oehlenschläger, though conscious of his own myth-
making, 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 Stef-
fens. This novel, which remained unpublished until 1897, marked a
crucial stage in Oehlenschläger’s poetic development, for the material

33 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 for-
tiente 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.”
34 Ibid., p. 415: “Der higes efter Intet uden Ære, / men Ære higer ogsaa Alle efter. / For-
trolig gaaer den Arme med den Rige, / den Høie med den Lave Haand i Haand.”
35 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.”
36 Springer, in particular, has described Oehlenschläger’s pre-Steffens work as charac-
teristic 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.
 Adam Oehlenschläger’s Erik and Roller and Danish Romanticism 241

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 (Chris-
tian) 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 cor-
rupt 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.
242 Kathryn Shailer-Hanson

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 for-
tune, 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 mythologi-
cal 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 Adam Oehlenschläger Erik og Roller, ed. with an introduction and notes by Viggo
Bierring, Copenhagen: Det Nordiske Forlag 1897, p. 157.
39 Ibid., p. 143.
 Adam Oehlenschläger’s Erik and Roller and Danish Romanticism 243

roses as the most beautiful? Who has never heard Njord’s storm-
voice? Who has never listened to Ran’s daughters, the dancing sea-
maids’ song, when the ocean foamed or hissed? Odin’s wise eye pene-
trates the whole.”40 By identifying man with the gods through associa-
tion and by suggesting man’s organic and spiritual connection with
nature,41 Oehlenschläger completes his vision of a harmonious, uni-
fied 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 inter-
polated into Hroars Saga from 1817),43 associates Christ with Balder.
He does, however, foreshadow the demise of the gods, both in his ref-
erence to Surtur and in the skald’s fable about Idunn;44 and he adum-
brates 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 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.
41 Ibid., p. 120: “Does not a voice deep in your soul say: I am immortal?”
42 Adam Oehlenschläger Jesu Christi gientagne Liv i den aarlige Natur in Poetiske
Skrifter vols. 1-2, Copenhagen 1805; vol. 1, pp. 421ff.
43 Adam Oehlenschläger Hroars Saga, Copenhagen 1817.
44 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.
45 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. Never-
theless, it is important to bear in mind that the Eddic poems were originally written
244 Kathryn Shailer-Hanson

In terms of poetic style, the work falls considerably short of his

Poems and Poetic Works. Suffused with Ossianic imagery and Wer-
theresque sorrows, the tale is cloyingly sentimental. Nevertheless,
behind the tears and mist, one finds evidence of poetic experimenta-
tion 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 inter-
play 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 attain-
ing Oehlenschläger’s poetic goal “to express the intangible in a
beautiful tangible form”47:

46 down or transcribed in the 13th and 14th centuries by monks. See the following pas-
sages 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.
46 See Jørgen Fafner Oehlenschlägers verskunst (Oehlenschläger Selskabets Skriftserie,
vol. 5), Copenhagen: B. Luno 1965, p. 9, p. 19. However, Ida Falbe-Hansen (“Ret-
telse” 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.
47 F.L. Liebenberg Bidrag til den oehlenschlägerske Literaturs Historie, op. cit., vol. 1,
p. 293.
 Adam Oehlenschläger’s Erik and Roller and Danish Romanticism 245

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 con-
stellation called Freya’s Spinning Wheel (Orion), Oehlenschläger
takes the shapeless mass of night and stars, and, like a sculptor, gradu-
ally 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 dis-
integrates 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.”
246 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 emo-
tion, but a vision of the human being incarnate in objective nature. In
doing so, he lends a substantially different perspective to the relation-
ship 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-sup-
pressed, less-than-successful effort of a twenty-two year old part-time
poet, on another, Erik and Roller clearly represents an important ele-
ment in the development of romantic poetry in Denmark. Had Oeh-
lenschläger completed and published the work in 1802 as planned,
literary historians would doubtless have had to deal with it more seri-
ously than they have. The fact that Oehlenschläger did not, like his
German counterparts, renounce reason and vault headlong into a sub-
jective fantasy world, does not, as certain critics have argued, auto-

49 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!”
50 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 (Oehlen-
schläger Selskabets Skriftserie, vol. 8), Copenhagen: B. Luno, n.d. [1963] and John
Greenway “‘Naturens hemmelige Urkraft’: Orsted’s ‘Theory of Light’ and Oehlen-
schläger’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 Stef-
fens: 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 Oeh-
lenschläger 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.
 Adam Oehlenschläger’s Erik and Roller and Danish Romanticism 247

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, Copen-
hagen: 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 transi-
tion, 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, harmoni-
ous 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.
 The Tragic Moment in Oehlenschläger’s Hakon Earl the Mighty 249

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 Oeh-
lenschläger, now in favor of a more humanitarian, moralistic outlook,
thus turned against the romantic individualism he had earlier champi-
oned.2 Hakon, in his final moments, redeems himself through self-judg-
ment 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 suf-
fer 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 addi-
tion 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 main-
tained, 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 situa-
tion in his last moments, will hopefully show that these value-judg-
ments can be modified in the favor of Hakon Earl the Mighty. Though
the drama may not be entirely successful, its shortcomings hardly

2 In Vilhelm Andersen’s Adam Oehlenschläger. Et Livs Poesie (vols. 1-3, Copenhagen:

Nordisk Forlag 1899-1900), Hakon’s defeat is characterized as “Genimoralens Neder-
lag under Borgermoralen” (p. 247).
3 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 Guld-
hornene. 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.
4 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.
250 Niels Ingwersen

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 ulti-
mate 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 char-
acter 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 Oehlen-
schläger’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 Oeh-
lenschläger’s contemporaries as well. The management of the Royal
Theater wanted the very last scene eliminated because it seemed sen-
timental.7 But the author argued that if Thora’s monologue were

5 Adam Oehlenschläger Poetiske Skrifter vols. 1-5, ed. by Helge Topsøe-Jensen, Copen-
hagen: G.E.C. Gads Forlag 1926-30; vol. 3, p. 22.
6 Adam Oehlenschläger “Svar paa Hr. Capt. Abrahamsons Recension over mine nord-
iske 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 Al-
mindelighed. 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).
7 Adam Oehlenschläger Oehlenschlägers Erindringer vols 1-4, Copenhagen: A.F. Hosts
Forlag 1850-51; vol. 2, pp. 36-37.
 The Tragic Moment in Oehlenschläger’s Hakon Earl the Mighty 251

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 Oehlen-
schläger, 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 con-
demns 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 percep-
tion 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 criti-
cizing 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, character-
ize 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 tre-

8 Adam Oehlenschläger Poetiske Skrifter, ed. by Helge Topsøe-Jensen, op. cit., vol. 3,
note on p. 422.
9 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.
10 Adam Oehlenschläger “Svar paa Hr. Capt. Abrahamsons Recension over mine
nordiske Digte,” op. cit., pp. 270-272.
252 Niels Ingwersen

mendous inspirational force and which permeated all Oehlenschlä-

ger’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 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 compre-
hends 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.
12 Adam Oehlenschläger “Svar paa Hr. Capt. Abrahamsons Recension over mine
nordiske Digte,” op. cit., pp. 264-266.
13 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 knowl-
edge, 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-
 The Tragic Moment in Oehlenschläger’s Hakon Earl the Mighty 253

It was thought that in an ideal state all men would share this aware-
ness, 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 Scandi-
navia” 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 moti-
vated 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 tem-
porary 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 protago-
nists 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 less flux of reality. It may be suggested that, in his portrayal of Hakon’s death, Oeh-
lenschläger envisaged what would happen to a man who experienced the loss of the
awareness that had granted his life meaning.
14 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).
15 Adam Oehlenschläger “Svar paa Hr. Capt. Abrahamsons Recension over mine nord-
iske 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”
254 Niels Ingwersen

form can no longer sustain a noble race. Auden’s touching description,

in Act IV, of the old belief has much seductive beauty. But Oehlen-
schläger 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 seri-
ous 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 mat-
ter 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 All page references are to Poetiske Skrifter, ed. by Helge Topsøe-Jensen, vol. 3, p. 354:
“den rette Odin.”
17 Adam Oehlenschläger “Svar paa Hr. Capt. Abrahamsons Recension over mine
nordiske Digte,” op. cit., p. 268.
18 Ibid.
19 Adam Oehlenschläger Poetiske Skrifter, ed. by Helge Topsøe-Jensen, op. cit., vol. 3,
pp. 372-373.
 The Tragic Moment in Oehlenschläger’s Hakon Earl the Mighty 255

Hakon’s deeds, no matter how inhuman they seem, are, then, con-
sequences 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 man-
ner 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 extra-
ordinary 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 mis-
taken 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 Ham-
mer, Thor? Hvor, Asatyr! / Din stærke drabelige venstre Haand? / Siig, høie Skare, har
du hyllet dig / I Mulm, og fulgt til Hæl den fromme Baldur?”
256 Niels Ingwersen

which cancels out all personal ambition on his part. He immediately

reasserts his belief in his gods and declares himself to be willing to sac-
rifice 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, enthu-
siastic Einar, in order to console Thora, tells her that her fallen broth-
ers 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.”
 The Tragic Moment in Oehlenschläger’s Hakon Earl the Mighty 257

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 behav-
ior 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 Asa-
gods 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 ago-
nizing 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 antici-
pation 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 Ibid., vol. 3, p. 369.

23 Ibid., vol. 3, p. 370: “en farlig, ny, en rædsom Tilstand.”
24 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.
258 Niels Ingwersen

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 sup-
pressor, 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 tur-
moil 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 surpris-
ing 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 Adam Oehlenschläger “Svar paa Hr. Capt. Abrahamsons Recension over mine
nordiske Digte,” op. cit., p. 272.
26 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!”
 The Tragic Moment in Oehlenschläger’s Hakon Earl the Mighty 259

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 pro-
tagonist, 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 som-
nambulistic state, he subjects himself to a completely devastating self-
analysis which reveals the truth about his past deeds. During these
moments he totally relinquishes his belief in the values of his world-
order 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 per-
sonal 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 pic-
ture / 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 Ibid., vol. 3, p. 385.

28 Ibid., vol. 3, p. 384.
29 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.
260 Niels Ingwersen

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 artisti-
cally 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 “conver-
sions” – 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 man-
aged to present a man who, from having gained a full and meaning-
ful, 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, accord-
ingly, 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 hor-
rifying 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!
 The Tragic Moment in Oehlenschläger’s Hakon Earl the Mighty 261

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 devel-
opment 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 com-
plete change in character been depicted as that which makes us real-
ize 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 qval-
tes 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 Impro-
viser 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 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 Phi-
lologie vol. 19), ed. by Oskar Bandle, et al., Basel and Frankfurt am Main: Helbing &
Lichtenhahn Verlag 1991, pp. 376-381.
1 Hans Christian Andersen Eventyr, fortalte for Børn vols. 1-2, Copenhagen 1835-42.
2 H.C. Andersen og Henriette Wullf: En Brevveksling vols. 1-3, ed. by H. Topsøe-Jensen,
Odense: Flensted 1959; vol. 1, p. 211.
3 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” 263

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 mys-
terious 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 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.
5 Ibid., p. 206.
6 Ibid., p. 206.
7 Ibid., p. 207.
8 Ibid., p. 208.
9 Ibid., p. 208.
10 Ibid., p. 208.
11 Ibid., p. 208.
264 John L. Greenway

Clearly, the story demands interpretation. Grønbech points out

that, while Andersen’s literary works resist being regulated by a sys-
tematic 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 inno-
cence, 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 imagina-
tive 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 electromag-
netism, 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 sug-
gests that electricity could be generated through sound vibrations,
and that light acts on the eye much as sound does on the ear. Antic-
ipating 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 Pleas-
ure 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 Bo Grønbech Hans Christian Andersens Eventyr, Copenhagen: Munksgaard 1967,

pp. 177-178.
13 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).
14 NS 2, p. 34.
15 Hans Christian Ørsted “Om Grunden til den Fornøjelse Tonerne frembringe, en
Samtale” in Det Skandinaviske Literatur-Selskabs Skrifter, 1808, pp. 1-57.
 Ørsted’s Acoustics and Andersen’s “The Bell” 265

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 acousti-
cal 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 empha-
sizes 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, sym-
metry, and essential reason, much as did his early work with acous-
tical 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 Hans Christian Ørsted Aanden i Naturen, Copenhagen 1850. English translation:

The Soul in Nature, tr. by Leonora and Joanna B. Homer, London 1852 (reprint Lon-
don: Pawsons of Pall Mall 1966).
17 Hans Christian Ørsted The Soul in Nature, ibid., pp. 325-351.
18 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.
19 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
20 David M. Knight “The Scientist as Sage” in Studies in Romanticism vol. 6, 1967,
pp. 65-88, see 82-87.
266 John L. Greenway

lads) held similar theories and expressed them in poetry21 while dis-
trusting 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, elec-
tricity, and light are but differing expressions of the unity, of the “spirit
in nature.” Ørsted saw the significance of his 1820 discovery of electro-
magnetism 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 funda-
mental 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 reg-
ulated 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 tran-
scendent unity and reason: he says, “in acoustics, that which exalts and
enchants us, letting us forget everything while ascending on the stream

21 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.
22 Hans Christian Ørsted “Theorie om Lyset” in NS 2, pp. 433-435.
23 Hans Christian Ørsted “Betragtninger over Forholdet mellem Lyden, Lyset, Varmen
og Electriciteten” in NS 2, pp. 479-482.
24 Hans Christian Ørsted “Undersøgelse over Lyset med Hensyn paa det Skjønnes
Naturlære” in NS 2, pp. 506-510.
25 NS 2, p. 509.
26 Hans Christian Ørsted “Betrachtungen über die Geschichte der Chemie” in NS 1,
pp. 315-343.
27 Hans Christian Ørsted The Soul in Nature, op. cit., pp. 320-323.
 Ørsted’s Acoustics and Andersen’s “The Bell” 267

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 imagina-
tive 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 dar-
ing, 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 heav-
ens, but he ought to know that something very different from the
darkness, from this chill would occur; these occurrences are the imag-
ination 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 NS 2, p. 34.
29 Hans Christian Ørsted The Soul in Nature, op. cit., p. 363.
30 Hans Christian Ørsted “Undersøgelse over Lyset med Hensyn paa det Skjønnes
Naturlære,” op. cit.
31 Hans Christian Ørsted Naturvidenskabelige Skrifter, op. cit., vol. 2, p. 507.
32 Hans Christian Andersen Mit livs Eventyr vols. 1-2, ed. by Helge Topsøe-Jensen, Co-
penhagen: Gyldendal 1951; vol. 2, p. 167.
33 Hans Christian Andersen Samlede Digte, Copenhagen 1833, pp. 65-68.
34 Hans Christian Andersen Mit livs Eventyr, op. cit., vol. 2, pp. 10-11.
35 Ibid., vol. 2, p. 245.
268 John L. Greenway

from them, we see how Andersen could well have used Ørsted’s theo-
ries of sound and light to underscore his theme with what, at the time,
would be realistic detail: realistic in the sense of conforming to con-
temporary 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 His-
tory 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 col-
lection 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 Hans Christian Ørsted The Soul in Nature, op. cit., p. 323.

37 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.)
38 Hans Christian Andersen Romaner og Rejeskildringer, ibid., vol. 7, p. 121.
39 Hans Christian Andersen Mit Livs Eventyr, op. cit., vol. 2, p. 117.
40 Ibid., vol. 2, p. 118.
41 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.
 Ørsted’s Acoustics and Andersen’s “The Bell” 269

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 under-
stood 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 experimen-
tal 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 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. Forhi-
storie, Idé og Form, Sprog og Stil, op. cit., 94.
43 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 experi-
ments 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. Wil-
liam Michelsen Om H.C. Ørsted og tankebilledet bag Oehlenschlägers Aladdin (Oeh-
lenschlägers Selskabets Skriftserie, vol. 3), Copenhagen: Bianco Luno 1963, p. 35.
44 Nicolai Frederik Severin Grundtvig Kort Begreb af Verdens Krønike i Sammenhæng,
Copenhagen 1812. Kort Begreb af Verdens Krønike, betragtet i Sammenhæng. Copen-
hagen 1814. Udsigt over Verdens-Krøniken fornemmelig i det Lutherske Tidsrum,
Copenhagen 1817.
45 Hans Christian Ørsted The Soul in Nature, op. cit., p. 451.
270 John L. Greenway

allows us to penetrate into nature and not only knits us into the uni-
verse, 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 communi-
cated 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 rea-
son: 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 ele-
vated prose: “The holy engagement of art does not spring from con-
scious 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 Ibid., p. 113.
47 William Michelsen Om H.C. Ørsted og tankebilledet bag Oehlenschlägers Aladdin,
op. cit., p. 36.
48 Hans Christian Andersen “Klokken,” op. cit., p. 208.
49 Ibid.
50 Hans Christian Andersen “Det nye Aarhundredes Musa” in his Nye Eventyr og His-
torier. 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.
51 Hans Christian Ørsted The Soul in Nature, op. cit., p. 351.
 Ørsted’s Acoustics and Andersen’s “The Bell” 271

As we have seen, we cannot separate Ørsted’s physics from his aes-

thetics, and Andersen, I believe, incorporated Ørsted’s physics of
sound and light to give his tale a realistic context we no longer recog-
nize. 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

52 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 numer-
ous 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 Revolu-
tion (“The Age of Revolution”) until the 1840’s (“The Present Age”).
A couple of months after the appearance of the book, Søren Kierke-

1 Thomasine Christine Gyllembourg-Ehrensvärd To Tidsaldre. Novelle af Forfatteren til

»En Hverdags-Historie,« published by J.L. Heiberg, Copenhagen 1845. (All textual ref-
erences 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 Virkelig-
hed, To Tidsaldre, 2nd edition, ed. by Anni Broue, Copenhagen 1993, pp. 71-230.)
 Thomasine Gyllembourg’s Two Ages and her Portrayal of Everyday Life 273

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 Kierke-
gaard’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 interest-
ing 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 over-
view 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 cer-
tain 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 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. Kier-
kegaard, Copenhagen 1846. (Reprinted in SV1 VIII, 1-105.)
3 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. Kierke-
gaard, tr. by Alastair Hannay, Harmondsworth: Penguin Books 2001.
274 Katalin Nun

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 Copenha-
gen. At the time of Peter Andreas’ banishment, Thomasine Gyllem-
bourg 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 hus-
band in Paris asking him to consent to a divorce because of the
changed circumstances. He refused and applied to the Danish author-
ities 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 liter-
ary 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 philoso-
phy 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. Hei-
berg 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 Gyllem-
bourg died in 1856, at the age of eighty-three.6

4 “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.
5 For further reading on the Heibergs in English, see Henning Fenger The Heibergs,
New York: Twayne Publishers, Inc. 1971. (In Danish as Familien Heiberg, Copenha-
gen: Museum Tusculanum 1992.)
6 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 kvinde-
litteratur. Leonora Christina, Thomasine Gyllembourg, Amalie Skram, Erna Juel-
Hansen, 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.
 Thomasine Gyllembourg’s Two Ages and her Portrayal of Everyday Life 275

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 Polon-
ius.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 Every-
day Life,” which effectively served the function of a pseudonym.
Johan Ludvig Heiberg’s name appeared on the title page as the pub-
lisher. 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 fig-
ure 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 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 realisme-
essays, Copenhagen: Borgen 1979. Grethe Kjær “Thomasine Gyllembourg, Author of
‘A Story of Everyday Life’” in International Kierkegaard Commentary. Early Polemi-
cal 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.
7 Kjøbenhavns Flyvende Post nos. 4, 6, 9, 12-19, 42-43, 58-59, Copenhagen 1827.
8 “Familien Polonius” in Samlede Skrifter af Forf. til »En Hverdags-Historie,« Fru Gyl-
lembourg-Ehrensvärd, op. cit., vol. 1, pp. 45-160.
9 “En Hverdags-Historie” in Kjøbenhavns Flyvende Post nos. 69-76. Copenhagen 1828.
(Reprinted in Samlede Skrifter af Forf. til »En Hverdags-Historie,« Fru Gyllembourg-
Ehrensvärd, op. cit., vol. 1, pp. 161-218.)
276 Katalin Nun

identity, was published posthumously in 1862 by Johanne Luise Hei-

berg 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 nov-
els and stories give a reliable picture of the bourgeois culture and men-
tality of the Danish capital of the 1830’s and 1840’s. Madame Gyllem-
bourg 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 cen-
tury had been lyric poetry. Modern prose had its breakthrough in Dan-
ish literature in the 1820’s, influenced by contemporary literary devel-
opments, 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 por-
trayed everyday life. But it was also due to the popularity of her novels
and stories which were written in a clean and uncomplicated but pol-
ished 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 begin-
ning 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 summing-
up 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 “Fru Gyllembourg’s Litterære Testament” in Breve fra og til Johan Ludvig Heiberg,
Copenhagen: C.A. Reitzels Forlag 1862, pp. 217-222.
11 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 Kier-
kegaard’s “Petition to the King” in LD, pp. 23-25 / B&A 1, pp. 17-18. See also SKS
K1, 129-132.
 Thomasine Gyllembourg’s Two Ages and her Portrayal of Everyday Life 277

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 every-
day 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 fea-
tures an analysis of Two Ages can shed light on many elements charac-
teristic 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 con-
trast between the period of the Revolution and that of the Restora-
tion. 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 Clau-
dine, 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 buy-
ing 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).
278 Katalin Nun

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 sur-
render 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 vil-
lage, 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 hap-
pily 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-year-
old son, Charles Lusard de Montalbert. He has been on a long jour-
ney 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, Ferdi-
nand 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 man-
ners of the present age as “wanton, immodest and raw.”13

13 TT, p. VII.
 Thomasine Gyllembourg’s Two Ages and her Portrayal of Everyday Life 279

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 fol-
lows:
…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 civi-
lized 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. Whole-
saler 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 fol-
lowed 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 circum-
stances were regarded as being of secondary importance. By contrast,
in the 1840’s lovers were ready to subordinate their love to external cir-

14 TT, p. 10.
15 TT, p. 24.
16 TT, p. 21.
280 Katalin Nun

cumstances.17 This difference between the two ages is clearly demon-

strated 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 Den-
mark and their future is completely uncertain. Mariane’s fiancé Ferdi-
nand 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. How-
ever, Mariane’s patience, steadfastness, and deep feelings represent a
contrast to the superficiality of the mainstream of the young genera-
tion 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 por-
trayed 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 TT, p. VII.
18 TT, pp. 200ff.
19 TT, pp. 219-233.
 Thomasine Gyllembourg’s Two Ages and her Portrayal of Everyday Life 281

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 exam-
ple, 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 reso-
nating 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 Den-
mark 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 them-
selves in an innocent and proper way.23 He believes that these places

20 TT, p. VII.
21 TT, p. 187.
22 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.
23 Cf. George Pattison “The Present Ages: the Age of the City” in Kierkegaard Studies.
Yearbook 1999, pp. 1-20.
282 Katalin Nun

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 sum-
mer 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 pub-
lished 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 back-
drop. 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 descrip-
tion of Claudine’s life in the small village appears to represent the
blueprint of an ideal everyday life: it is peaceful, quiet and harmoni-
ous. 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 TT, pp. 224-227.

25 TT, p. 285.
26 TT, pp. 113-114.
 Thomasine Gyllembourg’s Two Ages and her Portrayal of Everyday Life 283

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 contempo-
raries 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 Gyllem-
bourg’s biography, if one considers her willingness to sacrifice every-
thing to become the wife of her lover, Gyllembourg. Madame Gyllem-
bourg’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 diffi-
culties. 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 Clau-
dine is not merely cultivated but also well-educated, means in this
context that she is a widely read woman who speaks foreign lan-
guages. 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 TT, p. 114.
28 One can here mention, for example, Johanne Luise Heiberg’s memoirs, Et liv genop-
levet i erindringer vols. 1-4, 5th revised edition, Copenhagen: Gyldendal 1973; vol. 1,
p. 146.
29 See, for example, her aforementioned letter from September 11, 1801, the “lettre re-
marquable” in Johanne Luise Heiberg Peter Andreas Heiberg og Thomasine Gyllem-
bourg, op. cit., vol. 1, pp. 103-111. Cf. Elisabeth Hude Thomasine Gyllembourg og
Hverdagshistorierne, op. cit. pp. 20ff.
284 Katalin Nun

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, Ferdi-
nand 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 emanci-
pation 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 TT, p. 15.
31 TT, pp. 19-20.
 Thomasine Gyllembourg’s Two Ages and her Portrayal of Everyday Life 285

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 con-
ception of the ideally educated and cultivated human being. It means
in short a harmonious and general education of human beings, the per-
fect 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 educa-
tion 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 con-
ception 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 eth-
ical 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 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.
33 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 Gyllem-
bourg-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.
286 Katalin Nun

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 impor-
tance 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 empha-
sizes 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 Gyllem-
bourg’s novel primarily to explore and develop his own assessment of
his own age. These considerations were influenced by two main ele-
ments, 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 analy-
sis is based upon theoretical categories which he developed in other
works before ever reading Madame Gyllembourg’s novel. Thus,

34 [Anonymous] “Novelleliteraturen” in Almindelig dansk og norsk Literatur- og

Boghandels Tidende no. 2, November 15, 1845, pp. 1-2.
35 [Anonymous] “To Tidsaldre” in Den Frisindede vol. 11, no. 139, November 27, 1845,
pp. 553-555.
36 Since Thomasine Gyllembourg published her works anonymously, her contempo-
rary 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 Sto-
ries,” but for the sake of discretion he also refers to her works as “his.”
37 For further commentaries to Thomasine Gyllembourg’s literary works by her con-
temporaries, see, for example, C.L.N. Mynster Nogle Erindringer og Bemærkninger
om J.P. Mynster, Copenhagen 1877, p. 16.
 Thomasine Gyllembourg’s Two Ages and her Portrayal of Everyday Life 287

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 Kier-
kegaard’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 Cor-
sair, 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 Post-
script 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 dem-
onstrates, 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 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 Un-
derstanding 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.
39 “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.)
288 Katalin Nun

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 wel-
come 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 phil-
osophical, 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 effec-
tively distanced him from the ideas presented in his works. The pas-
sage quoted above seems to indicate that Kierkegaard regarded writ-
ing a book-review as serving more or less the same function since,
although the review appeared under his own name, the ideas dis-
cussed 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 PJ, p. 204 / SKS 18, 279, JJ: 419. (Cf. LRP, pp. x-xi.)
41 CUP1, pp. 625ff. / SKS 7, 569ff.
42 EPW, pp. 64ff. / SKS 1, 20ff.
43 PV, p. 30 / SV1 XIII, 521.
44 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.)
 Thomasine Gyllembourg’s Two Ages and her Portrayal of Everyday Life 289

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 men-
tion his conflict with the witty, gossipy and satirical periodical, the Cor-
sair, 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 Kierke-
gaard 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 writ-
ing. 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 carica-
tured 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 pas-
sionate disjunction between being silent and speaking. Only the per-
son 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 pub-
lic. He writes:
Because of this chatting the distinction between private and public is nullified in a pri-
vate-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-

45 “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.
46 “The Activity of a Traveling Esthetician and How He Still Happened to Pay for the
Dinner” in Fædrelandet no. 2078, December 27, 1845.
47 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.
48 LRP, p. 87 / SV1 VIII, 91.
290 Katalin Nun

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 laughing-
stock for his contemporaries.
Thus, the Review lies somewhat at a crossroads in Kierkegaard’s
authorship. It was written when he had just acknowledged his pseu-
donymous authorship and was uncertain about his future as a writer
and when he had to face the consequences of his conflict with the Cor-
sair, 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 (“Prospec-
tus 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. Kierke-
gaard 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 LRP, pp. 89-90 / SV1 VIII, 93.

50 LRP, pp. 21-26.
51 LRP, pp. 27-52.
52 LRP, pp. 52-101.
 Thomasine Gyllembourg’s Two Ages and her Portrayal of Everyday Life 291

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 dialec-
tically 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, pas-
sionless 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 pas-
sion 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 inward-
ness 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 pas-
sion-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 them-
selves 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 LRP, pp. 58, 53 / SV1 VIII, 64, 60.

54 LRP, p. 72 / SV1 VIII, 76.
55 LRP, pp. 54, 57-58 / SV1 VIII, 60-61, 63.
56 LRP, pp. 68-69 / SV1 VIII, 73.
57 EO1, p. 27 / SKS 2, 36.
292 Katalin Nun

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 under-
stood 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 spe-
cifically 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 con-
demned 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: “Psychologi-
cally, 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 EO1, p. 28 / SKS 2, 36.

59 FT, p. 7 / SKS 4, 103.
60 FT, p. 41 / SKS 4, 136.
61 FT, p. 42 / SKS 4, 138.
62 CUP1, pp. 262-263 / SKS 7, 238f.
 Thomasine Gyllembourg’s Two Ages and her Portrayal of Everyday Life 293

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 dichot-
omy, which the Review uses to evaluate Two Ages, well before he actu-
ally 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 charac-
terize a reflective and passionless age. One of these elements is
“envy,” which Kierkegaard regards as the “negative unifying princi-
ple” 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, syn-
onymous 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 nega-
tively unifying principle in a passionless and very reflective age.”66 He
continues: “This self-establishing envy is levelling, and while a passion-
ate age accelerates, raises and topples, extols and oppresses, a reflec-
tive, passionless age does the opposite – it stifles and impedes, it lev-
els.”67 Thus, levelling receives in this context a very negative character
as “hindering,” “repressing” or “restraining.”

63 CUP1, p. 611 / SKS 7, 555.

64 LRP, p. 30 / SV1 VIII, 32.
65 LRP, p. 30 / SV1 VIII, 33.
66 LRP, p. 72 / SV1 VIII, 76.
67 LRP, p. 74 / SV1 VIII, 79.
294 Katalin Nun

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, illus-
trating 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 Cor-
sair. 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 level-

ling, the public and the press appear nowhere in Thomasine Gyllem-
bourg’s text and have in fact nothing to do with it.
After its publication in March of 1846, Kierkegaard sent two cop-
ies 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, Thoma-
sine Gyllembourg wrote a letter to Kierkegaard, signed The Author
of “A Story of Everyday Life,” and sent by her son.72 After having

68 LRP, pp. 80-81 / SV1 VIII, 84-85.

69 LRP, p. 84 / SV1 VIII, 88.
70 COR, p. 176 / Pap. VII 1 B 43.
71 Cf. LD, pp. 191-192 / B&A 1, p. 151.
72 LD, pp. 196-198 / B&A 1, pp. 154-157.
 Thomasine Gyllembourg’s Two Ages and her Portrayal of Everyday Life 295

expressed her gratefulness for Kierkegaard’s Review, Thomasine Gyl-

lembourg 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 obser-
vations, 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 Kier-

kegaard 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 theoret-
ical 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 con-
tinue 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 mis-
leading 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.

296 Katalin Nun

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 illustra-
tion 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 for-
gotten. 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 Thoma-
sine 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 phil-
osophy 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 Gyllem-

74 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.
75 Bruce H. Kirmmse (ed.) Encounters with Kierkegaard. A Life as Seen by His Con-
temporaries, Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press 1996, p. 215.
76 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. 210-
214. To Poul Martin Møller, see Peter Thielst’s article in the present anthology.
 Thomasine Gyllembourg’s Two Ages and her Portrayal of Everyday Life 297

bourg and Kierkegaard can be seen as two examples of a single domi-

nant direction in the then contemporary Danish literature.
However, in contrast to Kierkegaard, Madame Gyllembourg con-
centrates 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 pri-
marily 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.
302 Henning Fenger

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 pro-
tection 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 remem-
bered “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 Talley-
rand’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 Gyllem-
bourg, 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 lit-
erary history under the name of Fru Gyllembourg (1773-1856).
The young Heiberg received an excellent education in Copenha-
gen, 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 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.
3 P, pp. 47-48 / SKS 4, 508-509. Translation slightly modified.
 Kierkegaard: A Literary Approach 303

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 some-
what 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 vaude-
villes 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 liter-
ary 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 Copenha-
gen and charmed everybody by her wit, talent and dazzling, exotic
beauty. Most of the poets fell in love with her, and the dramatist Hen-
rik 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
304 Henning Fenger

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 nour-
ish 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, Heibergian-

ism, 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 jour-
nals 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-
 Kierkegaard: A Literary Approach 305

spondence between the idea of a drama and its structure, while Kier-
kegaard 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 concep-
tions 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 fig-
ures, 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 sensu-
ality 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 Ahas-
verus 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 lyri-
cally (therefore with music); the Wandering Jew epically, and Faust dra-
matically.”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.

306 Henning Fenger

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 Kierke-
gaard’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 soci-
ety? 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 rep-
resents 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 watch-
ing 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. Kier-
kegaard seems, however, to have thrown away his leisure in restau-
rants, 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 reli-

5 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.
6 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.
 Kierkegaard: A Literary Approach 307

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 theol-
ogy 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 pub-
lished 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 unread-
able book on one of the weakest novels by Andersen. It is a long pen-
etrating, 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 expres-
sion of Andersen’s weak, sentimental personality, with its self-pity
and lack of serious philosophy and character. Kierkegaard, inciden-
tally, 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 Kier-
kegaard was a flame growing into a stormy fire. The different explana-
tions 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 Kier-
kegaard 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.

308 Henning Fenger

So far Heiberg’s importance to Kierkegaard is clear. He had

encouraged his first literary steps, helped him and advised him when-
ever 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. Gradu-
ally and slowly he made progress, but he was never uniformly success-
ful 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 distinc-
tion 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 consid-
erable 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.
 Kierkegaard: A Literary Approach 309

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 prome-
nades 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 secre-
tary. He was all his life a great egocentric.
At home his habits were even more luxurious. He was very particu-
lar 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 centi-
grade, all lighted and provided with paper, pen and ink. Several wit-
nesses 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 con-
sisted 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 Hei-
berg considered women an indispensable part of this way of life. Kier-
kegaard 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.
310 Henning Fenger

V.

The good relations between the two men came to an end when Hei-
berg 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 Kierke-
gaard 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, con-
sisting 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 Kier-
kegaard ridicules Heiberg’s alliance with theologians such as Mynster
and Martensen, as well as his unfinished aesthetic system and his pre-
occupations 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 Kier-
kegaard tried to humiliate the young critic Peder Ludvig Møller
(1814-66), who had, as the first of a new generation, started an oppo-
sition against Heiberg. The same ambiguity is found in the two writ-
ings on Fru Gyllembourg and Fru Heiberg, the only two aesthetic
essays in the religious period after the Postscript. In his own explana-
tion 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.
 Kierkegaard: A Literary Approach 311

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 Cri-
sis 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 ver-
bal 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 Kier-
kegaard’s life if the Heibergs had not preferred the company of Myn-
ster and Martensen to his. Even though it is hard to prove, this Hei-
berg 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 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 Kierke-
gaard 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.)
12 SL, pp. 131-132fn. / SKS 6, 123-125fn.
312 Henning Fenger

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. Kierke-
gaard 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 pessi-
mism, 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 cos-
tumes 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 sub-
ject 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.

 Kierkegaard: A Literary Approach 313

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 con-
trast 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 dan-
dies 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 Kier-
kegaard were the same as ideas, and more than anyone else Kierke-
gaard became an author of ideas. His comprehensive and vivid imagi-
nation needed ideas as their inspiration and subject-matter. The triad

14 Carl Christian Bagger Min Broders Levnet, Copenhagen 1835.

15 Frederik Paludan-Müller Dandserinden. Et Digt, Copenhagen 1833.
314 Henning Fenger

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 consid-
ered 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 Copen-
hagen, 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 enter-
tained 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 phys-
ical 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, Kierke-
gaard was not content with this seducer, representing the lowest level
of love. So he invented Johannes, the intermediate seducer, whose gen-
ius does not reside in the senses but in the erotic idea which he incar-
nates. He does not desire women as such, as bodies, he wants them as
stimulation and inspiration. Woman to him does not exist as an individ-
ual, but as an infinity of possibilities. As the erotic idea cannot be real-

16 LD, p. 124 / B&A 1, p. 96.

17 EO1, p. 316 / SKS 2, 307.
 Kierkegaard: A Literary Approach 315

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 Johan-
nes 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 cre-
ated 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 dis-
appointment 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 gen-
ius – 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 maid-
ens 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,” Repeti-

tion 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 Repe-
tition has no need whatsoever for his fiancée and is quite content only
to dream of her. In “Guilty/Not Guilty” Quidam draws the final con-
clusion of this conception of love. To him the beloved woman is only a

18 SL, p. 55 / SKS 6, 56.

19 JP 6, 6899 / Pap. XI 1 A 424.
316 Henning Fenger

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 oppo-
site, 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 aes-
thetic papers of A. in Either/Or. It belongs to the literary traditions of
German Romanticism which Kierkegaard had dealt with in his disser-
tation 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 nat-
ural, 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 jour-
nals and letters was very popular in the last decades of the eighteenth
century, for instance in Choderlos de Laclos’ famous Les liaisons dan-
gereuses from 1782, translated into Danish in 1832, and Goethe’s Wil-
helm 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 Gyllem-
bourg even published a novel with the title A Correspondence,22 and
both she and Heiberg had previously dealt with the Seducer – Hei-
berg in his play on Don Juan from 1814,23 Fru Gyllembourg in her

20 Steen Steensen Blicher “Brudstykker af en Landsbydegns Dagbog” in his Læsefrug-

ter: samlede paa Literaturens Mark, Aarhus 1824, pp. 145-187.
21 Frederik Christian Sibbern Efterladte Breve af Gabrielis, Copenhagen 1826.
22 Thomasine Christine Gyllembourg-Ehrensvärd En Brevvexling, meddeelt af Forf. til
»En Hverdags-Historie,« Copenhagen 1843.
23 Johan Ludvig Heiberg Marionettheater, Copenhagen 1814; consisting of two works,
Don Juan and Pottemager Walter.
 Kierkegaard: A Literary Approach 317

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 sec-
ond 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, composi-
tion and structure, though he might have achieved more concentra-
tion. As he continues to pursue his more and more abstract concep-
tion 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 Kier-
kegaard, 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 Thomasine Christine Gyllembourg-Ehrensvärd Een i Alle. Novelle af Forf. til »En

Hverdags-Historie,« Copenhagen 1840.
25 EO1, pp. 354-359 / SKS 2, 343-348.
318 Henning Fenger

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 mag-
nificent 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 insignif-
icant, 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 furi-
ous 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, fortu-
nate 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 conceal-
ing 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 JP 5, 5738 / SKS 18, 219, JJ:245. See also SL, p. 388 / SKS 6, 360.
27 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 inves-
tigate whether or not the idea has acquired the properly correspond-
ing 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 princi-
ple and how he employed it in his critical practice, with particular ref-
erence to his theatrical reviews.
From the standpoint of the history of literature, Kierkegaard’s writ-
ings 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 crit-
ical 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 light-
weight in philosophy, Heiberg was one of the dominant figures in Dan-
ish literature from the 1820’s through until the 1840’s. Indeed one histo-
rian has described him as the “Pontifex Maximus” of Danish literature

1 EPW, p. 47 / Pap. I B 2, p. 172.

2 See, for example, CUP1, p. 184 / SKS 7, 169f. The high-point of Kierkegaard’s pub-
lished 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.
320 George Pattison

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 dis-
tinctions of form, the ignoring of which is the hallmark of dilettant-
ism.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 (con-
tent) 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 Hei-
berg illustrates by reference to Beaumarchais’ Barber of Seville and
Mozart’s Figaro.7 Likewise, epic poetry may contain supernatural ele-
ments which cannot be presented in the theater without overstretch-
ing 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-estab-
lished 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 com-
bines both aspects, being lyrical in the portrayal of character, epic in
depicting situation.11

3 P.M. Mitchell A History of Danish Literature, Copenhagen: Gyldendal 1957, p. 135.

4 Johan Ludvig Heiberg Om Vaudevillen og andre kritiske Artikler, ed. by Hans Her-
tel, 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.
5 OV, p. 15.
6 OV, p. 130.
7 OV, p. 25f.
8 OV, p. 35.
9 OV, p. 35.
10 Johan Ludvig Heiberg Grundtræk til Philosophiens Philosophie eller den speculative
Logik. Som Ledetraad ved Forelæsninger paa den kongelige militaire Højskole, Co-
penhagen 1832, p. 6.
11 OV, p. 36.
 Søren Kierkegaard: A Theater Critic of the Heiberg School 321

Opera and ancient tragedy represent the lyrical, character-orien-

tated 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 Hegel-
ian 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 dra-
matic). 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 genu-
inely “Hegelian” is highly questionable.
If we now turn to Kierkegaard, it is clear that although he had res-
ervations about the details of Heiberg’s schematization of genres, he
accepted the basic principle concerning the relationship of form, con-
tent and the task of criticism. I shall now proceed to look at his theat-
rical reviews in the light of this principle.
Kierkegaard’s first major published work, Either/Or (1843), con-
tains 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 OV, p. 43.
13 Hans Lassen Martensen “Fata Morgana, Eventyr-Comedie af Johan Ludvig Heiberg.
1838. 125S. 8º. Kjøbenhavn. Schubothes Boghandling” in Maanedsskrift for Litter-
atur vol. 19, 1838, pp. 361-397.
14 Oluf Friis Poetisk Realisme og Romantisme in Dansk Litteratur Historie, Copenha-
gen 1965, vol. 2, p. 467.
322 George Pattison

The nub of the Mozart piece is that Don Giovanni is an authenti-

cally “classical,” an “immortal” work, because of the perfect coinci-
dence 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 cate-
gorizing it as the demonic, made it into a free-standing principle.
Thus the legendary character of Don Juan developed on the Chris-
tian 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 sensuous-
ness, 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 immedi-
acy which is qualified by its relationship to Spirit (its kinship to lan-
guage) but qualifies it in such a way that it is excluded from the spirit-
ual (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 any-
thing 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 ele-
vation of situation over character, Kierkegaard writes, “the personal

15 EO1, p. 89 / SKS 2, 94.

16 EO1, p. 90 / SKS 2, 95. Translation modified.
17 EO1, p. 67 / SKS 2, 73. Translation modified.
18 EO1, p. 68 / SKS 2, 74.
19 EO1, p. 68 / SKS 2, 75.
20 EO1, p. 68 / SKS 2, 75.
21 EO1, p. 72 / SKS 2, 78.
 Søren Kierkegaard: A Theater Critic of the Heiberg School 323

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-enact-
ment 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 con-
templates the patterns of tobacco clouds. This casual reference to
tobacco hints at his own taste for expensive cigars, a part of his “dan-
dyism,” and it is tempting to associate the tone of his aesthetic formal-
ism with the typical dandy pose of the refined connoisseur.
In any case, just as the contemplation of tobacco clouds is essen-
tially 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 relation-
ships. “In it there must not be a single character, not a single stage sit-
uation 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 pre-
sented “immediately.” The comic interest of the play subsists precisely

22 EO1, p. 247 / SKS 2, 240.

23 EO1, p. 262 / SKS 2, 254. Translation modified.
24 EO1, p. 263 / SKS 2, 256. Translation modified.
25 EO1, p. 273 / SKS 2, 265.
26 EO1, p. 253 / SKS 2, 246.
324 George Pattison

in the destruction of the immediate. “The immediately actual situa-

tion 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 vol-
ume relate to opposing poles of the aesthetic spectrum, Don Giovanni
representing the immediate, or musical, with its emphasis on charac-
ter (in Kierkegaard’s view the character of the Don is the content of
the opera), and The First Love representing the annulment of imme-
diacy – reflection – where all depends on situation and the ironic anni-
hilation 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 con-
ceptual framework. In farce, he says, the effect “depends largely on
the self-activity and the viewer’s improvisation, the particular individ-
uality 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 EO1, p. 277 / SKS 2, 268f. Translation modified.

28 R, p. 159 / SKS 4, 34.
29 R, p. 161 / SKS 4, 36. My italics.
 Søren Kierkegaard: A Theater Critic of the Heiberg School 325

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 pat-
terns of tobacco smoke; its atmosphere is positively Dionysian. Per-
haps 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 par-
ticular 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 insig-
nificant. 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 arti-
cle, in a not too indirect manner, implies a fundamental critique of the
whole production.
The character of Zerlina, according to Kierkegaard, is one of natu-
ral, 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 Zer-
lina is struggling to come to a decision.33
Don Giovanni, as immediate sensuousness incarnate, is in his ele-
ment with Zerlina; he commands her by the force of the power of
nature which he embodies, and he addresses himself directly, com-
mandingly 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 sophisti-
cated 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 reflec-
tively – and therefore misconceived. It does not express the immedi-

30 R, p. 166 / SKS 4, 40.

31 COR, pp. 28-37 / SV1 XIII, 447-456.
32 COR, p. 30 / SV1 XIII, 449.
33 COR, p. 30 / SV1 XIII, 449.
34 COR, p. 34 / SV1 XIII, 454. Translation modified.
326 George Pattison

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 excel-
lence 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 pert-
ness – 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 win-
ters.”36 If she has the makings of an actress, if “in the mood of imme-
diate passion she is attuned to idea and thought,”37 a genuine aesthe-
tician 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 gen-
ius 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 artis-
tic ability.

35 C, p. 305 / SV1 X, 325.

36 C, p. 306 / SV1 X, 326. Translation modified.
37 C, p. 311 / SV1 X, 331.
38 C, p. 322 / SV1 X, 341.
 Søren Kierkegaard: A Theater Critic of the Heiberg School 327

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 lan-
guage 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, Bravis-
simo, etc. No more than Heiberg would Kierkegaard accept “immedi-
ate 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 immedi-
acy of character. Comic character is character involved in self-contra-
diction. 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 foggi-

39 C, p. 330 / Pap. IX B 68, p. 384. Translation modified.

40 C, p. 331f. / Pap. IX B 68, p. 386.
41 OV, p. 131.
42 C, p. 335 / Pap. IX B 68, p. 390.
43 C, p. 335 / Pap. IX B 68, p. 390.
328 George Pattison

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 peo-
ple 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 exist-

44 C, p. 333 / Pap. IX B 68, p. 388.

45 C, p. 339 / Pap. IX B 68, p. 394. Translation modified.
46 C, p. 339 / Pap. IX B 68, p. 395. Translation modified.
47 C, p. 340 / Pap. IX B 68, p. 395. Tranlsation modified.
48 C, p. 343f. / Pap. IX B 68, p. 399f. Translation modified.
 Søren Kierkegaard: A Theater Critic of the Heiberg School 329

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 empha-
sizing form and ideality as the key categories of aesthetics, Kierke-
gaard places limitations on the power of art to give a total interpreta-
tion of human existence, which, as he sees it, is characterized by anxi-
ety, despair, guilt and sin, and which demands commitment, concern,
and faith on the part of those who seek to exist authentically. Kierke-
gaard 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, per-
haps, 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 inappro-
priate 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 understand-
ing 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 philoso-
pher Søren Kierkegaard was writing dramatic drafts and theater com-
mentary interwoven with his unsparingly honest, Christian contem-
plations of his time and himself. It is no mere chance that he wrote
under a system of pseudonyms, each one commenting on the aes-
thetic, 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 perform-
ances 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 bet-

1 PV, p. 78 / SV1 XIII, 563.

 Towards Transparency: Søren Kierkegaard on Danish Actresses 331

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 con-
trasted 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 book-
lets in the repertoire series put out by the Royal Theater. They pre-
sented 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 insignifi-
cant dramas or vaudevilles.
He paid particular attention to some of the better contemporary
actors. He wrote detailed studies of roles played by the male comedi-
ans 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 EO1, p. 120 / SKS 2, 122.

3 PV, p. 61 / SV1 XIII, 547.
332 Janne Risum

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 gen-
eral 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 charac-

ters 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 some-

one who has died” most especially becomes “the occasion that contin-
ually 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 him-
self in concert with the rest, and such will be the approach here. Only

4 JP 3, 3305 / SKS 18, 274-275, JJ:404.

5 WL, p. 347 / SV1 IX, 329.
6 WL, p. 347 / SV1 IX, 329.
7 EO1, p. 120 / SKS 2, 122.
 Towards Transparency: Søren Kierkegaard on Danish Actresses 333

through the indirect mode of communication do the very few treat-

ments 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 subcon-
scious stages or “metamorphoses” are the awakening of male sensu-
ality, which A. finds expressed musically in Cherubino the page in
Figaro, in Papageno in The Magic Flute, and in Don Giovanni him-
self. All three operas were performed regularly and in Danish, but
they were performed without recitatives, and the dialogue was spo-
ken 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 repre-
sent 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 contem-
poraries 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 EO1, p. 48 / SKS 2, 56.

9 EO1, p. 75 / SKS 2, 81.
10 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.)
11 EO1, p. 77 / SKS 2, 83.
334 Janne Risum

The unconscious feminine sensuality also emerges from this para-

dise 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 seduc-
tion scene depends, then, to Kierkegaard’s aesthete on the interpreta-
tion 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 Gio-
vanni 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 qual-
ifications 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 EO1, p. 97 / SKS 2, 101.

13 EO1, p. 98 / SKS 2, 102.
14 EO1, p. 97 / SKS 2, 101.
15 COR, pp. 28-37 / SV1 XIII, 447-456.
16 COR, p. 28 / SV1 XIII, 447.
17 COR, p. 28 / SV1 XIII, 448. Translation changed from “the absolute prize.”
 Towards Transparency: Søren Kierkegaard on Danish Actresses 335

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 fer-
menting 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 char-
acter, 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 COR, p. 29f. / SV1 XIII, 449.

19 COR, p. 30f. / SV1 XIII, 450.
20 COR, p. 31 / SV1 XIII, 450.
21 COR, p. 33 / SV1 XIII, 452.
22 COR, p. 34 / SV1 XIII, 454.
23 COR, p. 33 / SV1 XIII, 453.
336 Janne Risum

zither-player”24 and the seduction duet must be sung unreflected, but

with “decorum and grace.”25 “The dreamy generality”26 of the accom-
paniment must be clearly audible when Don Juan as the personifica-
tion of a natural power addresses Zerlina, and when Mozart’s accom-
paniment to the first “Be mine” (Vieni, mio bel diletto!) is not “ingra-
tiating, 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, Kierke-
gaard’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 non-
sense satire in his journal on stereotypical theater reviews. The occa-
sion 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 every-
body apparently knows what to think.
Last evening Shakespeare’s glorious masterpiece, The School for Scandal was per-
formed 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 com-
monly 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 Hegel-
ianism, not to mention his vaudevilles and his love of Scribe. Fru Heib-
erg, on the other hand, he greatly admired, and there are many similar-
ities between the way Kierkegaard saw himself as the author writing
under pseudonyms and his perception of a successful actor’s difficulties

24 COR, p. 34 / SV1 XIII, 454.

25 COR, p. 35 / SV1 XIII, 454.
26 COR, p. 35 / SV1 XIII, 455.
27 COR, p. 36 / SV1 XIII, 455.
28 COR, p. 36f. / SV1 XIII, 456.
29 WS, pp. 78-79 / Pap. VII 2 B 274.6.
 Towards Transparency: Søren Kierkegaard on Danish Actresses 337

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 novel-
consuming 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….Emme-
line’s whole nature is a contradiction and therefore cannot be represented spontane-
ously. 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 con-

cerning 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 frivo-
lous symposium in Stages on Life’s Way (1845).
Anna Nielsen was tall, blond and gentle with big, blue eyes, a beau-
tiful voice and brilliant diction. Her calm emotive acting made her the

30 CUP1, p. 289f. / SKS 7, 264.

31 EO1, p. 278f. / SKS 2, 269f.
32 EO2, p. 122 / SKS 3, 122.
338 Janne Risum

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 real-
ism 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 per-
formance 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 con-
summation that did not entail any sacrifice. Magistrate William
speaks on behalf of many when he praises Anna Nielsen for every-
thing 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 art-

33 SL, pp. 131-132fn. / SKS 6, 124fn.

34 SL, p. 132fn. / SKS 6, 125fn.
35 Pap. VI B 2.
 Towards Transparency: Søren Kierkegaard on Danish Actresses 339

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 rep-
resent 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 34-
year-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 inno-
cence 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 achieve-
ment 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 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.
37 Johanne Luise Heiberg Et liv genoplevet i erindringen, vols. 1-4, 5th revised edition,
Copenhagen: Gyldendal 1973; vol. 2, pp. 163ff.
38 C, p. 308 / SV1 X, 328.
39 C, p. 322 / SV1 X, 241. Translation changed from “the light characters of the fleeting
sea nymphs.”
40 C, p. 312 / SV1 X, 331.
41 Gunnar Sandfeld Komedianter og skuespillere: Dansk teaterliv uden for hovedstaden
o. 1790-o. 1870, Copenhagen: Nyt Nordisk Forlag, Arnold Busck 1971, p. 219.
340 Janne Risum

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 enter-
tained 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 essen-
tially 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 phenom-
ena 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 dialecti-
cal. 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 unaes-
thetically 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 meta-
morphosis 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 C, p. 321 / SV1 X, 340.

43 C, p. 324 / SV1 X, 343.
44 C, p. 325 / SV1 X, 344.
45 C, p. 323 / SV1 X, 342.
 Towards Transparency: Søren Kierkegaard on Danish Actresses 341

Conversely, Johanne Luise Heiberg’s metamorphosis has sprung

from the biological ties of the role of the ingenue, out of the immedi-
acy 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 meta-
morphosis 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 dia-
lectic.”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 con-
temporary 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 por-
trayals. She has then a “naturalistic” intention, as far as that could be
had in her profession during the time between Diderot and Stanis-
lavskij. 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 indi-
vidual emotion”;50 (2) the comic actresses; and (3) the character
actresses, into which category she puts herself. They take their point of

46 C, p. 321 / SV1 X, 340.

47 C, p. 324 / SV1 X, 343.
48 C, p. 324 / SV1 X, 343.
49 Johanne Luise Heiberg Et liv genoplevet i erindringen, op. cit., vol. 3, pp. 218ff.
50 Ibid., p. 219.
342 Janne Risum

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 con-
scious 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 van-
ished, 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 trans-
illuminate the whole performance, which in this illumination will be completely trans-
parent.52

This existential transparency created by the reflective attentive pres-

ence 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 Tacitur-
nus 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 specta-
tor must not confuse the theater and actuality, or himself with a spec-
tator 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 Ibid., p. 222.
52 C, pp. 322-323 / SV1 X, 341-342.
53 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 drama-
tist, Peter Andreas Heiberg, and the author, Thomasine (Heiberg) Gyl-
lembourg; 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 fel-
low writers during an extended period of popularizing activity from 1825
to 1840. These fifteen years during a half-century in Danish literary his-
tory 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 sig-
nificant 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 burgh-
ers and the style of life they represented in nineteenth-century Den-
mark. 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 Dale Land (Department of History) and Damon Williams (Honors College), Michi-
gan State University, prepared an electronic version of the original article, which I
then revised for the present anthology.
1 Sven Møller Kristensen Digteren og samfundet i Danmark i det 19. århundrede vols. 1-
2, 2nd edition, Copenhagen: Munksgaard 1970; vol. 1, p. 86.
344 Peter Vinten-Johansen

The self-styled elite among Golden Age writers were, by and large, stu-
denter – that is, men who passed the university matriculation examina-
tion (whether or not they elected to study at the university thereafter)
and thereby attained the social status of academic burgher. They com-
prised 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 fundamen-
tal cultural values in nineteenth-century Danish society and spoke for
the “true” interests and aspirations of other social groups. Such a prefer-
ence for academics and their literature explains why Kristensen’s con-
cept of the Danish public in the first half of the nineteenth century is lim-
ited 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 Hei-
berg had been editing for several years already.2 While this list does
not document actual purchasers, it does show that academics consti-
tuted 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 subscrib-

2 Kjøbenhavns flyvende Post, Copenhagen: Printzlau 1827-28, 1830. Since in the origi-
nal 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 repro-
duction 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: Gylden-
dal 1947-49; vol. 2, pp. 213-215.
 Johan Ludvig Heiberg and his Audience in Nineteenth-Century Denmark 345

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 liv-
ing either in Copenhagen or in the provinces, the most reasonable sup-
position is that they were non-academics outside Heiberg’s circle of
regular friends and acquaintances but known to him nonetheless as sup-
porters of his journal. Some uncertainty about the proper spelling and
precise occupation of these individuals would not have disturbed Hei-
berg since he presumably assumed that Schubothe would make a thor-
ough 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 con-
tinuation 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 cen-
tury, most Danish publishers used subscription lists only in situations
where a projected work’s reception was uncertain. Heiberg’s reputa-
tion 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 ques-
tion its significance for analyzing the purchasing public of Golden
Age writers. Therefore, it is perplexing why Kristensen relied so heav-
ily on subscription lists in his study, given his awareness of their limita-
tions 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 particu-
lar issues. Individual subscribers constituted less than 10% of printed
copies.4 Exact printing figures for Copenhagen’s Flying Post when
3 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 1834-
37, Generalpostdirektionens Arkiv, Resolutionsprotokol, I:191 (Rigsarkivet).
4 Schubothes Hovedjournal, 1827-1837 (Håndskriftafdelingen, Det kongelige Bibli-
otek), especially 32, 40, 76a, 88-89.
346 Peter Vinten-Johansen

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 Hei-
berg’s plays and essays intended primarily for mass-market audiences.
For example, Schubothe published Heiberg’s 1844 talk on the Swed-
ish 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 pur-
chasing public included both academic and non-academic readers, he
hoped that Copenhagen’s Flying Post would also reach the non-pur-
chasing 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 for-
eign newspapers, journals, and books. Total membership in the socie-
ties 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 car-
ried 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 prom-
ised that he would pass the journal on to other interested readers.7
Heiberg himself regularly dispatched personal copies of his writings

5 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 Abonnen-
terne 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].
6 “Om Tegnérs Frithiof” in Kjøbenhavns flyvende Post no. 81, 1827, column 2 [p. 333].
7 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.
 Johan Ludvig Heiberg and his Audience in Nineteenth-Century Denmark 347

to friends and relatives in the provinces and abroad. In addition, busi-

ness 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 grow-
ing 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 back-
grounds 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 theo-
logical, philosophical, and aesthetic issues to their essential components

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

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, there-
fore, 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 Fly-
ing 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 well-
educated readers.”12 In addition to 4,000 or so studenter, plus their
immediate families, Heiberg could have counted on a regular aug-
mentation 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 voca-
tion 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, reli-
gion, singing, and gymnastics. In Copenhagen and the larger provin-
cial towns, private burgher schools offered this core curriculum as
well as scientific-pragmatic subjects (the real curriculum) to approxi-
mately 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 “Til Subskribenterne” in Kjøbenhavns flyvende Post no. 51, 1827, column 8 [p. 216].
13 “Digter-Misundelse” in Kjøbenhavns flyvende Post no 12, 1834, column 3 [p. 54].
 Johan Ludvig Heiberg and his Audience in Nineteenth-Century Denmark 349

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 vari-
ous occupational groups for two reasons: (1) Heiberg began his popu-
larizing efforts during the initial stages of the implementation of uni-
versal compulsory education; and (2) little consolidated educational
data exists for periods prior to the mid-1830’s. Of the fifteen occupa-
tions 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 edu-
cational 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 From the review “Recensenten og Dyret” in Kjøbenhavns flyvende Post no. 18, 1827,
column 7 [p. 84].
15 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 sep-
arately by Larsen in Bidrag til Kjøbenhavns offentlige Skolevæsens Historie, Copen-
hagen: 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 Daugh-
ters, Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanums Forlag 1996, and Statistisk Tabelværk vols.
1-21, Copenhagen: Bianco Luno 1835-52; Ældre Række, vol. 5 (1842), pp. xx-xxi.
16 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.
350 Peter Vinten-Johansen

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 edu-
cational 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 imple-
mentation; 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 vaude-
villes 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 transla-
tion. 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 liter-
acy 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 over-
lapped considerably.
Heiberg’s overtures to this expanded public began with the per-
formance of his first vaudeville, King Salomon and Jørgen the Hatter,
in the fall of 1825 and continued for more than one and one-half dec-
ades.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 vaude-
villes varied from purely entertaining situation pieces to scathing cri-
tiques of social problems, such as status consciousness among provin-
cial 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.)
 Johan Ludvig Heiberg and his Audience in Nineteenth-Century Denmark 351

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 non-
academic 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. Sev-
eral 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 inter-
minable engagement between a minor customs official and a drug-
gist’s daughter.21 The setting, like the characters, were often environs
familiar to most Copenhagen burghers – Rosenborg Gardens, stereo-
typical 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 non-
academic 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 full-
time 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 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.)
19 Aprilsnarrene, eller Intriguen i Skolen, Copenhagen 1826. (Reprinted in Heiberg’s
Poetiske Skrifter, op. cit., vol. 6, pp. 3-129.)
20 Recensenten og Dyret, Copenhagen 1826. (Reprinted in Heiberg’s Poetiske Skrifter,
op. cit., vol. 6, pp. 131-239.)
21 De Uadskillelige, Copenhagen 1827. (Reprinted in Heiberg’s Poetiske Skrifter, op.
cit., vol. 6, pp. 347-478.)
352 Peter Vinten-Johansen

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 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 lyr-
ics 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.
23 “Brevvexling imellem Abonnenterne og Redactionen” in Kjøbenhavns flyvende Post
no. 21, 1827, columns 4-5 [p. 94f.].
 Johan Ludvig Heiberg and his Audience in Nineteenth-Century Denmark 353

burgher ranks, a ground plan to the Royal Theater establishes the

upper limits on the size and the typical composition of his theater-
going 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, how-
ever, 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-nat-
uralistic 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 sing-
spiele, 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 per-
formances of 42 plays. Oehlenschläger, the dean of elite Golden Age
writers, had 694 performances of 37 works. Heiberg’s thirteen origi-
nal 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, espe-
cially 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 popu-

24 On Heiberg’s translations, see Arthur Aumont and Edgar Collin Det danske National-
teater, 1748-1889 vols. 1-3, Copenhagen 1896-99. For dates of individual perform-
ances, see also Arthur Aumont, J.L. Heiberg og hans Slægt paa den danske Skue-
plads, Copenhagen: Jørgensen 1891.
25 If one employs the maximum estimate of 1,500 viewers/performance, the total cumu-
lative audience for Heiberg’s vaudevilles performed between 1825 and 1835 could
have been as high as 345,000.
354 Peter Vinten-Johansen

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 pub-
lic 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 publica-
tions whenever possible, especially his early journals which reflect his

26 “Til Kjøbenhavnspostens Redation” in Kjøbenhavns flyvende Post no. 12, 1827, col-
umn 6 [p. 59].
27 From the review “Recensenten og Dyret” in Kjøbenhavns flyvende Post no. 18, 1827,
column 6 [p. 83].
28 “Til Læseren” in Intelligensblade vol. 1, no. 1, Copenhagen: Reitzel 1842-44; p. 1f.
29 “Forhandlinger med Redactionen af Maanedsskrift for Litteratur” in Kjøbenhavns
flyvende Post no. 113, 1837, column 4 [p. 458].
30 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.
 Johan Ludvig Heiberg and his Audience in Nineteenth-Century Denmark 355

popularizing project, whether he was the author of a particular piece

or had only vetted it. Among other unfortunate consequences, the rel-
atively 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 aca-
demic 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 radi-
cal. 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 citi-
zenship. Although Heiberg failed to organize a political party of aris-
tocratic radicals, several of his younger followers established a Hegel-
ian 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 princi-
ples in particular obscure his philosophical indebtedness to Heiberg.
Nor is it generally recognized that the intellectual origins of the Radi-
cal Left Party and the Danish liberal-socialist tradition derived as
much from Heiberg as from French and English positivism or Ger-
man 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 ten-
dency to evaluate Heiberg’s impact solely in terms of an “actual” audi-
ence 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 Hei-
berg’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 bat-
tles 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 Oehlen-
schläger, 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 Mar-
tin Møller, the poet and philosopher), in 1845 attacked Søren Kierke-
gaard, he, too, paid for it, but the famous Corsair feud also made Kier-
kegaard 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 criti-
cism 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 357

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 lit-
erary situation.
Born 1814 in Aalborg, Jutland, Møller arrived in Copenhagen as an
undergraduate, for some years – typical of this age of transition – ram-
bling between medicine, theology and aesthetics. He joined the stu-
dent 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 enter-
prising Lieutenant Georg Carstensen – the founder of Tivoli in
Copenhagen – he started a number of weekly reviews, imitating con-
temporary 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 despot-
ism 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. Hav-
ing won the gold medal of the University of Copenhagen for a prize
essay on modern French poetry, and having gradually gained a consid-
erable authority as a critic, he – according to the myth – dreamt of suc-
ceeding 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, Aare-

1 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.
358 Hans Hertel

strup, Hertz, Oehlenschläger, and Goldschmidt, were first published

here, illustrated by leading young artists, and Møller himself contrib-
uted 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 psychologi-
cal 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 con-
tinue his work, and to regard existence, including other people’s exist-
ence, as an intellectual experiment. Møller, probably building on bio-
graphical evidence of Kierkegaard’s treatment of Regine Olsen, was for
good reasons prevented from seeing that “higher right” which Kierke-
gaard 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 “ster-
ile dialectics” and “system building” in Kierkegaard’s work and over-
looked 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 cari-
catures of Kierkegaard with trouser legs of unequal length and situ-
ated 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 P.L. Møller “Et Besøg i Sorø” in Gæa, æsthetisk Aarbog 1846, ed. by P.L. Møller,
Copenhagen 1845, pp. 144-187.
3 Ibid., pp. 176-177.
4 The most balanced account of the fight is Elias Bredsdorff’s Goldschmidts “Cor-
saren”. Med en udførlig redegørelse for striden mellem Søren Kierkegaard og “Cor-
saren”, Aarhus: Sirius 1962. 2nd edition: Corsaren, Goldschmidt og Kierkegaard,
Copenhagen: Corsarens Forlag 1977. See also Helge Toldberg “Goldschmidt og Kier-
kegaard” in Festskrift til Paul V. Rubow, ed. by Henning Fenger et al., Copenhagen:
Gyldendal 1956, pp. 211-235.
5 COR, p. 46 / SV1 XIII, 431.
 P.L. Møller and Romanticism in Danish Literature 359

– although Kierkegaard knew, like everybody else, that Møller was

only one of many correspondents to the Corsair and had only offici-
ated 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 girl-
friend, 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 inci-
dent, 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 iron-
ically 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 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.
7 Peter Ludvig Møller Kritiske Skizzer vols. 1-2, Copenhagen 1847.
8 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.
360 Hans Hertel

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 politi-
cal affairs and Danish literature, in newspapers, in encyclopedias
(Biographie universelle and Nouvelle Biographie générale), and trans-
lated, 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 cul-
tural life in France, and through correspondence and visits he main-
tained 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 Den-
mark,9 strengthened his prestige at home: he was offered a post as edi-
tor 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 indi-
rect and ironical way that Møller, who was the first to criticize Kierke-

9 Peter Ludvig Møller Det nyere Lystspil i Frankrig og Danmark, Copenhagen 1858.
10 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 Jes-
sen, Copenhagen: C.A. Reitzels Forlag 1936-38; vol. 2.1, p. 191.
 P.L. Møller and Romanticism in Danish Literature 361

gaard’s ethics, has become the victim of the explicit as well as the
implicit moralism of much Kierkegaard scholarship which has uncriti-
cally 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 real-
ity 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 rea-
sons, 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 treat-
ment of Møller has been based only on the most easily accessible
printed material. But fortunately we have both a vast amount of man-
uscripts, brought to Denmark after Møller’s death, and a largely
unknown mass of printed material: articles and translations from peri-

11 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.
12 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”!
13 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.
14 Breve til og fra Meïr Goldschmidt vols. 1-3, op. cit.
15 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.
362 Hans Hertel

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, Win-
ther, 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 lit-
erature 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 “naturalis-
tisk,” 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 eman-
cipation, 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 convul-
sions 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.
 P.L. Møller and Romanticism in Danish Literature 363

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 let-
ters of the important figures, works, theories and motives of “romant-
isme”: 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 “lib-
eralism in literature” mean revolt against all authorities – literary,
philosophical, moral, religious and political.
By the same token the Danish opposition to “romantisme” is sur-
prisingly 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 nihil-
ism, 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 tran-
scendental 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 his-
tory,”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 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.
18 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 Lit-
teraturforskning,” 1947, Archive of the University of Copenhagen.
19 See Erik M. Christensen “Guldalderen som idéhistorisk periode: H.C. Ørsteds opti-
mistike dualisme” in Guldalderstudier. Festskrift til Gustav Albeck, ed. by Henning
Høirup, et. al., Aarhus: Universitetsforlaget 1966, pp. 11-45.
20 Henning Fenger Georg Brandes’ læreår. Læsning, ideer, smag, kritik 1857-1872,
Copenhagen: Gyldendal 1955, p. 275.
364 Hans Hertel

The translations of the period are generally characterized by selec-

tion, 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 ques-
tion. 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 ideolog-
ical – 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 Romanti-
cism 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 Erik Lunding “Biedermeier og Romantismen” in Kritik no. 7, 1968, pp. 32-67.

22 Christian Winther Fire Noveller, Copenhagen 1843.
23 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.
 P.L. Møller and Romanticism in Danish Literature 365

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 con-
ception 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-rea-
son,” 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 for-
malism and aesthetic systematization, but his own attitude to the pub-
lic 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 dan-
dies 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 Henrik Hertz Gjenganger-Breve, Copenhagen 1830.

25 Tom Kristensen “Kritiker eller anmelder” in Politiken, September 30, 1940. Re-
printed in Til dags dato, ed. by Carl Bergstrøm-Nielsen, Copenhagen: Gyldendal
1953, p. 309.
366 Hans Hertel

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 culmi-
nation 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 Dan-
ish literature – for instance when Carl Bagger is praised for his “key-
note of deep melancholy, indeed despair…freshness, energy and pas-
sion 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 polit-
ical opponents here made common cause with the bourgeois, one was somewhat reluc-
tant 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 Peter Ludvig Møller Kritiske Skizzer, op. cit., vol. 2, p. 209. 2nd edition, p. 211.
27 Ibid., vol. 2, p. 282.
28 Ibid., vol. 1, p. 132. 2nd edition, p. 92.
29 Carl Ludvig Emil Aarestrup Digte, Copenhagen 1838.
 P.L. Møller and Romanticism in Danish Literature 367

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 Mid-
dle Ages, Møller translates Dante and Petrarch; he praises, for exam-
ple, Shakespeare, Goethe and Hauch for their “psychological analy-
sis”; and his views result in interesting reinterpretations of eighteenth-
century 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 littér-
aires.” 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 artis-
tic 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. Histori-
zation 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 cor-
pus 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 Ibid., vol. 2, p. 232. 2nd edition, p. 227.

31 Ibid., vol. 1, p. 179. 2nd edition, p. 121.
32 Ibid., vol. 1, pp. 2-4. 2nd edition, pp. 10-11.
368 Hans Hertel

It is the new so-called “critical liberalism,” on the face of it unprin-

cipled, but with a clear methodological effort: to detect the processes
of causation behind literature. Another consequence of the inspira-
tion 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 Crit-
ical Sketches (1847). Here one finds a motto from Sainte-Beuve, and
there the launching of the term “the psychological-biographical criti-
cism.”33 And now again the critic regarded as “the aesthetic patholo-
gist”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 un-
usual understanding of women in society. They attack religion, church
and the stupidity of the press, express solidarity with the poor (includ-
ing artists). Above all, they expose the bourgeoisie with its callousness
and boisterous, self-sufficient materialism. It is, as in Brandes’ criti-
cism, the old romantic contempt for the philistines, colored by idio-

33 Ibid., vol. 2, p. 4. 2nd edition, p. 129.

34 Ibid., vol. 2, p. 219. 2nd edition, p. 219.
35 Ibid., vol. 1, p. 1. 2nd edition, p. 9.
 P.L. Møller and Romanticism in Danish Literature 369

syncratic aggressiveness, and converted into a sort of political involve-

ment. And at the same time these articles are exercises in literary
styles and genres: when Møller sketches the women of Paris, the fash-
ionable somnambulisme, the stockjobbing and the new rich, it is in
incitation of Balzac and Gavarni, and the sardonic tone seems influ-
enced 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 Mid-
dle 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 hori-
zon”40 and “madness for industry and money.”41 There is quite a dis-
tance from Møller’s sarcasm to the objectivity of a Taine wanting to

36 Peter Ludvig Møller Franske Folkesagn, ed. by V. Møller, Copenhagen 1871.

37 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.
38 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 Oeh-
lenschläger. Et Erindringsblad, ed. by F.L. Liebenberg, Copenhagen 1876. New edi-
tion with introduction by Hans Hertel, Copenhagen: Hasselbalch 1964.
39 Peter Ludvig Møller Det nyere Lystspil i Frankrig og Danmark. Et med Universitet-
ets Guldmedaille lønnet Prisskrift, Copenhagen 1858.
40 Ibid. p. 156.
41 Ibid. p. 176.
370 Hans Hertel

verify and explain, not to pardon or proscribe. It is the positivist aes-

thetics utilized for polemics against the bourgeoisie, against the wor-
ship 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 play-
ing 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 uni-
versity 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 nat-
uralists 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 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 Littera-
tur fra februarrevolutionen til verdenskrigen, p. 324.
43 Peter Ludvig Møller Adam Oehlenschläger, op. cit., pp. 73-74. 2nd edition 1964,
pp. 64-65.
 P.L. Møller and Romanticism in Danish Literature 371

Yet step by step Møller attains greater understanding of the more rad-
ical 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 peo-
ple 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 crea-
tive 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 under-
stand 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-historical-
sociological 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.
372 Hans Hertel

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, effec-
tive 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 harmoniza-
tion, 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, dur-
ing the years 1866-75, printed some of his posthumous articles in
books and in their reviews, Figaro, Nyt dansk Maanedsskrift and Flyv-
ende 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. Per-
haps 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 Henning Fenger Georg Brandes’ læreår, op. cit., p. 275.

46 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 Videnskabs-
mænd, 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 altar-
piece 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 fol-
lowing, 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
376 Else Kai Sass

Rome convinced that he had first of all to study the works of antiq-
uity. 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 hun-
dred 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 pre-
served 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 Thorvald-
sen 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 infer-
ence, 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 excava-
tions 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
 Thorvaldsen: An Introduction to his Work 377

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 com-
position 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 contradis-
tinction to the first group, something of that genuine pathos which
only the very greatest art possesses. It is also for this group that Thor-
valdsen made a series of magnificent sketches, now in the Thorvald-
sen 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 dis-
covers 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 draw-
ing 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.
378 Else Kai Sass

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
 Thorvaldsen: An Introduction to his Work 379

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 cre-
ation 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.
380 Else Kai Sass

and famous fellow artist, Canova, had been, when in 1801 he had cre-
ated 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 Per-
seus. 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 program-
matic 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 peo-
ple, “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 lib-
erate himself from the paradigms of antiquity and his attempt to cre-
ate 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 mir-
ror of the nectar beaker. The round group has become flat. Thorvald-
sen 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.
 Thorvaldsen: An Introduction to his Work 381

Figure 3. Sketches for

Cupid and Psyche (ca.
1807). Thorvaldsen’s
Museum.

Figure 4. Cupid and

Psyche Reunited in
Heaven (1807). Thor-
valdsen’s Museum.
382 Else Kai Sass

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 con-
tour 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 feel-
ing 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 uncom-
plicated 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 antiq-
uity, of the Middle Ages, and later of the Orient, is part of the roman-
tic 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 ele-
ment in the total effect of the work of art. This “something,” call it poetry
or Stimmung, is Thorvaldsen’s way of expressing the romantic move-
ment 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 fol-
lowing sensitive characterization of it with special reference to statues of
the type considered above: “Behind many of Thorvaldsen’s figures it is
 Thorvaldsen: An Introduction to his Work 383

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 1804-
1807, 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 oppor-
tunity 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. Thorvald-
sen was certainly very responsive to the beauty of nature. In his collec-
tion of paintings, now in the Thorvaldsen Museum in Copenhagen, land-
scape 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 stat-
ues. There certainly cannot be any doubt that Thorvaldsen ranks high
in his composition of reliefs. Here the best qualities of his artistic per-
sonality 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.

384 Else Kai Sass

Figure 5. Cupid Stung by a Bee Complains to Venus (1809). Thorvaldsen’s Museum.

and Omphade, Cupid and Bacchus, Cupid Received by Anacreon, Her-

cules 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 classi-
cal 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 Thorvald-
sen’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 char-
coal 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,
 Thorvaldsen: An Introduction to his Work 385

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 art-
ist’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 idyl-
lic. 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 com-
pleted 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 Thorvald-
sen’s many reliefs, it would be Priam Pleading with Achilles for the
Body of Hector (figure 6), rather than the Alexander frieze. Thorvald-
sen modelled the Priam relief in 1815 to the order of the Duke of Bed-
ford, and executed it in marble for Woburn Abbey. The Danish archae-
386 Else Kai Sass

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 pres-
entation of the same scene on the classical marble chronicle, the tabula
iliaca, of which Thorvaldsen owned a cast. Besides the two main fig-
ures, 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 Thorvald-
sen 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 Mer-
cury about to Kill Argus (figure 8), modelled in 1818. The marble copy

4 K. Friis Johansen “Om Thorvaldsens ‘Priamos og Achilleus’” in Kunst og Kultur vol.

11, no. 4, 1923, p. 244.
5 Carsten Hauch Minder fra min første Udenlandsreise, Copenhagen 1871, p. 238.
 Thorvaldsen: An Introduction to his Work 387

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 conversa-
tion 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 exe-
cuted 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.
388 Else Kai Sass

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 god-
desses. 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
 Thorvaldsen: An Introduction to his Work 389

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 spa-
tial composition with three figures enclosed in the imaginary elliptic
space suggested by the plinth with a relief in which the subtle rhyth-
mical 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 aspir-
ing 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.
390 Else Kai Sass

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 Ester-
házy, 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 danc-
ers whom Thorvaldsen never tired of watching. It may be one of
those tarantella dancers that came into Thorvaldsen’s mind when he
 Thorvaldsen: An Introduction to his Work 391

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 play-
ing 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.
392 Else Kai Sass

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 tran-
sition 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 cop-
ied from the drama or pictorial art. Hence no one would find it sur-
prising 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 Napo-
leon’s mother, Madame Létizia Bonaparte; she is shown sitting in
 Thorvaldsen: An Introduction to his Work 393

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 Thor-
valdsen 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.
394 Else Kai Sass

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 meas-
ure up to the large dimensions of the most splendid ecclesiastical inte-
rior 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, Coperni-
cus (1822), in bronze in Warsaw, and, above all, the splendid eques-
trian monument of Prince Józef Poniatowski, the hero of the Napo-
leonic 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 War-
saw. 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 exist-
ence, 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 sur-
prising to learn that in 1819 Thorvaldsen had nearly forty helpers in
 Thorvaldsen: An Introduction to his Work 395

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 work-
shop for some time, but who never gave up his independence as an
artist to accommodate himself to Thorvaldsen’s style. There were Pie-
tro 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 stim-
ulating 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 Thor-
valdsen 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 misun-
derstanding 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, unfor-
tunately, 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 Thorvald-
sen 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 collabora-
tors 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 Thor-
valdsen 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.
396 Else Kai Sass

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 Thorvald-
sen that the master himself went to Carrara to make the final correc-
tions 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 occupa-
tion 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 The Letter Archive at the Thorvaldsen’s Museum, letter from Pietro Bienaimé from
Carrara to Thorvaldsen in Rome, August 23, 1828.
10 Quoted from a letter to P.O. Brøndsted, published in Breve fra P.O. Brøndsted 1801-
33 (Memoirer og Breve, vol. 47), ed. by Julius Clausen and Peter Frederik Rist,
Copenhagen 1926, p. 145.
 Thorvaldsen: An Introduction to his Work 397

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 care-
less, 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 reputa-
tion more than these mechanically executed marble copies, all the more
so as they often make their appearance in the salesroom or with art-
dealers, 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 plas-
ter-casts which he had bequeathed his hometown, the city of Copenha-
gen, 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, scat-
tered throughout the world, in the possession of those who had ordered
them made or in the possession of their heirs. The result of this provi-
sion 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 histori-
ans which became prevalent in the 1870’s and has lasted until today.
398 Else Kai Sass

Mario Krohn succeeded in having the fund for the copying of Thor-
valdsen’s marble statues converted into a fund for acquiring the origi-
nals as these came on the market. He himself made a splendid begin-
ning 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 excel-
lent 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 posses-
sion 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.

 Thorvaldsen: An Introduction to his Work 399

All of these original marble copies show Thorvaldsen’s style in

marble as it really was, and from its best side. Now when these mar-
ble copies have taken the place of the interior copies in the Thorvald-
sen 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. Thor-
valdsen’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 Thor-
valdsen’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 Thorvald-
sen the finest qualities of a work of art were beauty, calmness, har-
mony. 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
400 Else Kai Sass

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 clas-
sical 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 gain-
ing 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.

 Thorvaldsen: An Introduction to his Work 401

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 mod-
els of the statue of Napoleon’s mother and of the monument in mem-
ory of Alfieri when he saw them exhibited in Rome in 1804. How-
ever, he did not care for Canova’s reclining statue of Paolina Borgh-
ese, 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 relation-
ship 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 fel-
low-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 Den-
mark they were able to smooth his way in Rome.
It did not take long for Thorvaldsen to gain international patron-
age. The Russian Countess, Irína Vorontsóva and Prince Malthe Put-
bus 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 rec-

12 Quoted from Just Matthias Thiele Thorvaldsens Biographi. Efter den afdøde Kunst-
ners Brevvexlinger, egenhændige Optegnelser og andre efterladte Papirer vols. 1-4,
Copenhagen 1851-56; vol. 1, Thorvaldsens Ungdomshistorie. 1770-1804, p. 181.
402 Else Kai Sass

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 antiqui-
ties 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 prob-
ably be sought in the working rhythm which he had made for him-
self, 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 chil-
dren, 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 Thor-
valdsen 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
 Thorvaldsen: An Introduction to his Work 403

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 oth-
ers. 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: Berling-
ske Forlag 1938, p. 131.
404 Else Kai Sass

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 char-
acter as handed down to posterity. Several people drew attention to
 Thorvaldsen: An Introduction to his Work 405

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 hon-
orary citizen of Copenhagen. During the following years the architect,
M.G. Bindesbøll, built the unique polychrome museum on Slots-
holmen, 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 paint-
ing A Bleaching Ground (1844-45). The poetic existence of Kierke-
gaard 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 care-
fully prepared paintings (fortunately A Bleaching Ground was imme-

1 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 res-
urrection 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 Dag-
bog 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.
1 FSE, Supplement, p. 229 / Pap. X 6 B 2, p. 9.
2 Johan Thomas Lundbyes Dagbog, op. cit., entry from February 27, 1845.
3 EO1, p. 19 / SKS 2, 27.
 Golden Tears: Johan Thomas Lundbye and Søren Kierkegaard 407

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 contem-
porary age: his sarcasm about the superficiality of the age, “easy reli-
4 See Karl Madsen Johan Thomas Lundbye 1818-1848, Copenhagen: Kunstforeningen
1895, p. 258.
5 Johan Thomas Lundbyes Dagbog, op. cit., entry from March 2, 1845.
6 There is no evidence for this either in Lundbye or in Kierkegaard. However, Kierke-
gaard 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.
408 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 har-
mony with his time, in his existential considerations, and in his for-
mulation of the experience of anxiety, melancholy, physical desire,
“self-centeredness” (in contrast to Christian self-denial) and resig-
nation. Doubt on all levels never left Lundbye, but in the last few
years of his life, he transferred much of his doubt and his conflict-
ridden 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 pub-
lished 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, mock-
ing, tone is dominant in it….I have only glanced briefly through the
 Golden Tears: Johan Thomas Lundbye and Søren Kierkegaard 409

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 Kierke-
gaard then takes on a new, more intimate role for Lundbye. He “steals
in…through every nook in a human disposition, even to the most hid-
den, 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 evi-
dent from the word choice and the metaphors he uses how a Kierke-
gaardian sadness is mixed into his writing to such a degree that Lund-
bye 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 quota-
tion” 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 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. Kierke-
gaard, 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 mas-
ter’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).
8 Lundbye to Svend Grundtvig, July 31, 1847. The Royal Library. NKS 3388.4. The ref-
erence is to the so-called Corsair affair in 1846.
9 Lundbye to Svend Grundtvig, June 23, 1847. The Royal Library. NKS 3388.4.
10 See, for example, Lundbye to Frederik Krebs, July 5, 1847. The Hirschsprungske
Collection. Letter Archive, Box 4.
11 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.
410 Ragni Linnet

writings as “a receiving, a discovering, but also a bringing forth.”12

Kierkegaard, like Socrates, leaves the answers to his discussion part-
ners, 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 con-
trary, 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 sen-
tences in Kierkegaard’s texts. In the summer of 1847 he told the phy-
sician 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 EUD, p. 59 / SKS 5, 69.

13 Lundbye to Svend Grundtvig, June 23, 1847. The Royal Library. NKS 3388.4.
14 Lundbye to Svend Grundtvig, June 23, 1847. The Royal Library. NKS 3388.4.
15 Lundbye to Frederik Krebs, June 22, 1847. The transcript is found in Karl Madsens
Papirer. The Royal Library, NKS 3579 II, 4.
16 Lundbye to Svend Grundtvig, June 23, 1847. The Royal Library. NKS 3388.4.
 Golden Tears: Johan Thomas Lundbye and Søren Kierkegaard 411

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 man-
hood, 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 pri-
vate sketchbook Magic and Cave-Thoughts from 1846-48 some of his
women (the fantastical mermaids are thought-provoking) are, by con-
trast, 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 Lundbye to Svend Grundtvig, June 23, 1847. The Royal Library. NKS 3388.4.
18 As Ib Ostenfeld does, op. cit. p. 86.
19 For Kierkegaard’s use of this concept in connection with Johannes the Seducer, see
CUP1, p. 298 / SKS 7, 272.
20 Johan Thomas Lundbye Et Aar af mit Liv, Copenhagen: Foreningen for Boghaand-
værk 1967, p. 54, entry from April 4, 1842. Original in the Royal Library. NKS 4201 I, 4.
412 Ragni Linnet

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 Ibid., p. 147, entry from February 12, 1843.

22 See Ostenfeld, op. cit. Ostenfeld quotes a letter to Lorenz Frølich dated March 13,
1842. The passage is not included in Hendriksen, op. cit.
23 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.
 Golden Tears: Johan Thomas Lundbye and Søren Kierkegaard 413

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 pro-
posed 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 multifac-
eted 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 rel-
atively 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 Johan Thomas Lundbyes Dagbog, op. cit., entry from March 2, 1845.
25 Ibid., entry from February 26, 1845.
414 Ragni Linnet

“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 can-
not be accepted from a bourgeois perspective. What is special in Kier-
kegaard 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 “inau-
thenticity,” a neither/nor. The novel “Diary of a Seducer,” which con-
cludes 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 actu-
ally not interested in possessing Cordelia. His attitude is that of the
aesthete, who finds – as it is written elsewhere – “possibility more

26 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) pro-
voked 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.
27 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.
28 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.
29 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.
 Golden Tears: Johan Thomas Lundbye and Søren Kierkegaard 415

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 concep-
tions of women are exchanged: the hateful, the disdainful and the con-
suming; the view that, proceeding from the slogan, “in a negative rela-
tion 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 JP 3, 3340 / SKS 18, 156, JJ:46.

31 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 ex-
ample, Joakim Garff “Victor Eremita – og Kierkegaard. ‘Det Æsthetiske er overhove-
det 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.
32 EO2, p. 138 / SKS 3, 136.
33 SL, p. 30f. / SKS 6, 35.
34 CUP1, p. 298 / SKS 7, 272.
35 CUP1, p. 299 / SKS 7, 272.
36 SL, p. 59 / SKS 6, 60.
37 SL, p. 140 / SKS 6, 132.
416 Ragni Linnet

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 expla-
nation, which can give meaning to his unhappy love relation and his
uncertainty in relation to an actualization of the new love. Appar-
ently, 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 Theaterdirec-
tors.”38 Here the suffering is placed in the context of religion. The
word “suffering” (lidelse) today has an unpleasant sound and is asso-
ciated with something passive, as in the grammatical term “the pas-
sive 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 Abso-
lute. 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 CUP1, p. 288 / SKS 7, 262.

39 JP 4, 4688 / Pap. X 4 A 593. Translation slightly modified.
40 Johan Thomas Lundbyes Dagbog, op. cit., entry from October 27, 1848.
41 CUP1, p. 288 / SKS 7, 246.
 Golden Tears: Johan Thomas Lundbye and Søren Kierkegaard 417

and determination, loves Quaedam (a certain woman), who lacks

“religious presuppositions,” but, moreover, is “kept altogether ordi-
nary,”42 i.e. friendly and not artificial. And she loves him. But because
of his religious seriousness and his melancholy he breaks the engage-
ment with her. In order to save his beloved from an impossible mar-
riage 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 Chris-
tian 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 SL, p. 399 / SKS 6, 370.3.

43 SL, p. 178 / SKS 6, 166.3-4.
44 SL, p. 181 / SKS 6, 168.26.
45 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.
46 Johan Thomas Lundbyes Dagbog, op. cit., entry April 12, 1845.
47 Ibid., entry October 31, 1847 (my italics).
418 Ragni Linnet

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 every-
thing, 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 But there is here, as in other places in the entries from winter 1847, a clear overlap-
ping 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.
49 Johan Thomas Lundbyes Dagbog, op. cit., entry from October 31, 1847.
50 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.
51 WL, p. 107f. / SV1 IX, 105.
52 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 Kierke-
gaard Research, who helped to search for this quotation.
 Golden Tears: Johan Thomas Lundbye and Søren Kierkegaard 419

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 varia-
tion 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 other-
wise 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.
420 Ragni Linnet

world, a Grundtvigian advent mood and its (earthly) sense of opti-

mism (Kierkegaard never drove Grundtvig from Lundbye’s universe)
and then the Kierkegaardian Christian self-denial. Said with Kierke-
gaard’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 inde-
pendence 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 articu-
late 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 lack-
ing 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 cre-
ates instead of lives.
In an otherwise benevolent and moderate manner, Lundbye is cer-
tainly in agreement with Kierkegaard in his mocking ridicule of the

54 WL, p. 194f. / SV1 IX, 185.

55 Johan Thomas Lundbyes Dagbog, op. cit., entry October 27, 1847.
56 Ibid., entry October 30, 1847.
57 Cf. Jørgen Dehs “‘Ikke Phantasiens kunstrige Væven, men Tankens Gysen.’ Kierke-
gaard og bruddet med idealismens æstetik” in Slagmark no. 4, 1985, pp. 46-59.
 Golden Tears: Johan Thomas Lundbye and Søren Kierkegaard 421

aesthetic form of existence, such as it is unfolded in the 1840’s uni-

form, 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 exist-
ence when, sunk in the “melancholy which is the certain, dear prop-
erty 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 Lundbye to Svend Grundtvig, September 20, 1845 (my italics). The Royal Library.
NKS 3388.4.
59 Cf. his letter to Svend Grundtvig, July 31, 1847. The Royal Library. NKS 3388.4.
60 K.F. Wiborg Konstudstillingen i 1841, Copenhagen: C.A. Reitzel 1841, p. 38.
422 Ragni Linnet

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 Kier-
kegaard 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 icon-
odulic 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 pic-
tures, 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 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.
62 Johan Thomas Lundbye Et Aar af mit Liv, op. cit., entry January 27, 1843, p. 140.
 Golden Tears: Johan Thomas Lundbye and Søren Kierkegaard 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 indi-
vidual this reconciliation is precisely the new split with reality.”66 In
other words, art cannot heal the wounds of either the time or the art-
ist. 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 forma-
tion of meaning inward. The picture, with its exposure of the sub-
stance 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 pic-
tures of modernity, in that the subject finds an expression in the proc-

63 EO1, p. 4 / SKS 2, 12.

64 JP 1, 161 / SKS 20, 118, NB:198.
65 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.
66 LR, p. 12 / SV1 VIII, 14.
67 JP 4, 4587 / SKS 18, 236, JJ:304.
424 Ragni Linnet

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, sur-
prising, 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 treat-
ment.”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 magnifi-
cent person!”69

68 Johan Thomas Lundbyes Dagbog, op. cit., entry January 16, 1847.
69 Lundbye to Frederik Krebs, November 25, 1847. The transcription is found in Karl
Madsens Papirer, op. cit.
 Golden Tears: Johan Thomas Lundbye and Søren Kierkegaard 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 Lund-
bye’s fascination with Kierkegaard and “the staleness” in his later pic-
tures.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 trea-
tise 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 har-
mony with his playing down of Kierkegaard’s significance. What Lund-
bye 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 Lund-

70 Karl Madsen Johan Thomas Lundbye 1818-1848, op. cit., p. 212ff.

71 Ibid., p. 45.
72 Ostenfeld Johan Thomas Lundbye, op. cit., p. 89.
73 Madsen’s and Ostenfeld’s interpretations have been able to stand virtually uncon-
tested 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.”
74 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-ori-

ented reading of Kierkegaard shows that he did not accept his melan-
choly or his “sick fate”75 as “an oppressive fact,”76 as Ostenfeld claims.
A feature that runs through the diaries (especially “after” Kierke-
gaard) 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 Ib Ostenfeld Johan Thomas Lundbye. En kunstners kamp med sin skæbne. En epilog,
Copenhagen: Rhodos 1977, p. 62.
76 Ibid., p. 61.
77 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 (1743-
1809), 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 es-
sayist 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), Dan-
ish 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 sci-
entist, 77.
Augier, Guillaume Victor Émile (1820-
89), French dramatist, 370.
Baader, Benedict Franz Xaver von (1765-
1841), 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), Dan-
ish 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), Dan-
ish 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), Ger-
man 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), Nor-
wegian writer, 304, 360, 370.
Blanc, Jean Joseph Charles Louis (1811-
82), 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), Dan-
ish Bishop, 153.
Bonaparte or Buonaparte, Marie Létizia
(1750-1836), the mother of Napoleon,
392f.
Börne, Ludwig (1786-1837), German au-
thor, 369.
Bornemann, Frederik Christian (1810-
61), Danish jurist, 131.
Bornemann, Johan Alfred (1813-90),
Danish theologian, 131, 141, 143.
Botten-Hansen, Paul (1824-69), Norwe-
gian librarian and publicist, 360.
Bourneville, Antoine Auguste (1805-79),
Danish dancer, choreographer, and
ballet master, 391.
Boye, Johannes (1756-1830), Danish phil-
osopher, 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 au-
thor, 265.
Brøchner, Hans (1820-75), Danish philos-
opher, 128, 131.
Brøndsted, Peter Oluf (1780-1842), Dan-
ish 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 Mar-
tin 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 (1821-
89), French author, 370.
Christens, Christian Fenger (1819-55),
Danish theologian and educational
theorist, 131.
Christian VIII, (1786-1848), King of Den-
mark from 1839-48, 312.
Clausen, Henrik Georg (1759-1840), Dan-
ish priest, 153.
Clausen, Henrik Nikolaj (1793-1877),
Danish theologian and politician, 11,
149, 154, 155, 156, 161, 196.
Collett, Jacobine Camilla (1813-95), Nor-
wegian author, 360.
Consalvi, Ercole (1757-1824), Italian car-
dinal, 394.
Dahl, Johan Christian Clausen (1788-
1857), Norwegian painter, 383.
Dahlmann, Friedrich Christoph (1785-
1860), German historian, 154.
Daub, Carl (1765-1836), German theolo-
gian, 117, 166, 186.
Davy, Humphry (1778-1829), English
chemist, 265f.
Delavigne, Casimir (1793-1843), French
poet, 303.
Diderot, Denis (1713-84), French encyclo-
paedist, 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 (1783-
1853), Danish painter, 20, 265.
Eiriksson, Magnus (1806-81), Islandic the-
ologian and author, 13, 194, 195, 200,
202.
Esterházy, Prince Miklós (1765-1833), Hun-
garian 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 (1821-
97), 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), Ger-
man philosopher, 6, 8, 15, 43fn., 81, 92,
124, 132, 205, 206, 217.
Flaubert, Gustav (1821-80), French novel-
ist, 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), Dan-
ish sculptor, 20, 395, 405.
Frølich, Lorenz (1820-1908), Danish
painter, 409, 419.
Füssli, Johan Heinrich (1741-1825), Anglo-
Swiss 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 (1749-
1832), 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), Ger-
man 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 theolo-
gian, 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), German-
Austrian theologian and philosopher,
199.
Gyllembourg-Ehrensvärd, Carl Frederik
(1767-1815), Swedish baron and politi-
cian, 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 Wil-
liam Hamilton (1730-1803), 392.
Hansen, Carl Christian Constantin (1804-
80), Danish painter, 20.
Hansen, Jørgen Christian (1812-80), Dan-
ish 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 (1770-
1831), 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), Dan-
ish 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 (1744-
1803), 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), Danish-
Norwegian 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 (1798-
1870), 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 (1767-
1835), 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 (1780-
1867), 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 Rich-
ter (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), Dan-
ish bishop and psalm writer, 224, 227.
Klopstock, Friedrich Gottlieb (1724-
1803), German poet, 206.
Købke, Christen Schellerup (1810-48),
Danish painter, 20.
Koch, Joseph Anton (1768-1839), Ger-
man painter, 382, 383.
Kotzebue, August von (1761-1819), Ger-
man author, 303.
 Index of Persons
Kragh, Boline Abrahamsen (1810-39),
Danish actress, 334, 335.
Krebs, Frederik Christian (1814-81), Dan-
ish physician and author, 410.
Laclos, Choderlos de (1741-1803), French
author, 316.
Lamennais, Hugues Félicité Robert de
(1782-1854), French theologian and au-
thor, 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, Niem-
bsch 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), Dan-
ish painter, 20, 21f., 383, 406-426.
Luthardt, Christoph Ernst (1823-1902),
German theologian, 196.
Mach, Ernst (1838-1916), Austrian physi-
cist and philosopher, 62.
Madsen, Carl Johan Wilhelm (1855-1938),
Danish art historian, 425.
Marheineke, Philipp (1780-1846), Ger-
man 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), Dan-
ish 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 philoso-
pher and economist, 180.
Meier, Emma (1829-90), Danish actress,
339.
Mérimée, Prosper (1803-70), French au-
thor, 313, 364, 366.
Mill, John Stuart (1806-73), English phil-
osopher, 372.
Molbech, Christian (1783-1857), Danish
historian, 7, 220.
Møller, Frederik Vilhelm (1846-1904),
Danish writer, 372.
Møller, Jens (1779-1833), Danish theolo-
gian 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), Dan-
ish 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), Dan-
ish philologist and theologian, 155.
Münter, Frederica Franzisca (Fanny) (1796-
1871), 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), ro-
mantic 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), Dan-
ish actor, 311, 336.
Nielsen, Rasmus (1809-84), Danish phil-
osopher, 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), Dan-
ish 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 Dan-
ish agronomist, 39.
Ørsted, Anders Sandøe (1778-1860),
Danish jurist and statesman, 5, 6, 25,
159.
Ørsted, Hans Christian (1777-1851), Dan-
ish scientist, 5, 6, 7, 9f., 16f., 41fn., 62-77,
107, 217, 262-271, 359.
Ørsted, Sophie Wilhelmin Bertha (1782-
1818), the wife of A.S. Ørsted, the sis-
ter of Adam Oehlenschläger, 25.
Ostenfeld, Ib (1902-95), Danish psychia-
trist, 425, 426.
Paludan-Müller, Frederik (1809-76), Dan-
ish 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), Dan-
ish 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 dra-
matic poet, 370.
Pope Pius VII (1740-1823), Luigi Chi-
aromonte, Pope from 1800-23, 394.
Pram, Christen Henriksen (1756-1821),
Danish poet, 238.
Printzlau, Ferdinand (1794-1865), Danish
publisher, 346.
Pushkin, Alexander Sergejeritsch (1799-
1837), 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), Dan-
ish author and editor, 15, 153.
Rein, Jonas (1760-1821), Norwegian au-
thor, 215.
Reinhart, Johan Christian (1761-1847),
German painter, 383.
Reinhold, Karl Leonard (1758-1823),
German philosopher, 5.
Richter, Friedrich (1807-56), German the-
ologian, 138.
Ritter, Johann Wilhelm (1776-1810), Ger-
man physicist, 72.
Rosenkilde, Adolph Marius (1816-82),
Danish actor and author, 331.
Rothe, Tyge Jesper (1731-95), Danish phil-
osopher, 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 (1804-
69), 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 physi-
cist, 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 (1767-
1845), German critic, 86, 217.
Schlegel, Friedrich von (1772-1829), Ger-
man romantic writer, 59, 92, 93, 94, 95,
103, 104, 217, 316.
Schlegel, Johan Frederik (1817-96), Dan-
ish 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), Ger-
man 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), Swed-
ish sculptor, 375, 377.
Shaftesbury, Anthony Ashley Cooper,
Third Earl of (1671-1713), English phil-
osopher, 225.
Sheridan, Richard Brinsley (1751-1816),
English poet and statesman, 336.
Sibbern, Frederik Christian (1785-
1872), Danish philosopher, 6, 8, 9, 25-
44, 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 (1780-
1819), German philosopher and aes-
thetic theorist, 86, 101fn.
Sonne, Jørgen Valentin (1801-90), Danish
painter, 20.
Staël, Mme de, i.e. Anne Louise Ger-
maine Necker (1766-1817), French au-
thor, 368.
Staffeldt, Adam Wilhelm Schack (1769-
1826), 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), Ger-
man theologian, historian and philoso-
pher, 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 (1788-
1865), Danish archeologist, 407.
434 Index of Persons
Thorvaldsen, Bertel (1768-1844), Danish
sculptor, 20, 21, 228, 375-405.
Thorvaldsen, Gotskalk (1743-1806), Dan-
ish-Icelandic woodcarver, 375.
Tieck, Johann Ludwig (1773-1853), Ger-
man 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), Eng-
lish 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), Danish-
Norwegian poet, 357, 367.
Wiedewelt, Johannes (1731-1802), Danish
sculptor, 375.
Wieland, Christoph Martin (1733-1813),
German poet, 206.
Willemoes, Peter (1783-1808), Danish na-
vel officer, 211, 212.
Winckelmann, Johann Joachim (1717-68),
German art historian and archaeo-
logist, 375.
Winterl, Jacob Joseph (1739-1809), Austro-
Hungarian chemist and botanist, 71.
Winther, Christian, i.e. Rasmus Villads
Christian Ferdinand Winther (1796-
1876), 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 phil-
osopher and theologian, 120, 123.
Zoëga, Georg (1755-1809), Danish archae-
ologist, 376, 395, 401.
 Contributors

Poul Lübke
KUA Institut for Filosofi
Pædagogik og Retorik
Njalsgade 80
2300 København S
Denmark
luebcke@hum.ku.dk

Peter Thielst
Ingemannsvej 22, 4th.
1964 Frederiksberg C
Denmark

Brian Söderquist
Søren Kierkegaard Research Centre
Store Kannikestræde 15
1169 Copenhagen K
Denmark
kbs@sk.ku.dk

Jon Stewart
Søren Kierkegaard Research Centre
Store Kannikestræde 15
1169 Copenhagen K
Denmark
js@sk.ku.dk

The Rt. Revd Dr. John Saxbee

Bishop’s House
Eastgate
Lincoln LN2 1QQ
England
bishlincoln@claranet.co.uk
436 Contributors

Curtis Thompson
Thiel College
75 College Avenue
Greenville, PA 16125-2181
USA
cthompso@thiel.edu

Flemming Lundgreen-Nielsen
Institut for Nordisk Filologi
KU, Njalsgade 80
2300 København S
Denmark
flemnil@hum.ku.dk

Kathryn Shailer-Hanson
Dean, Continuing Education
University of Winnipeg
346 Portage Ave.
Winnipeg, MB R3C 0C3
Canada
k.shailer@uwinnipeg.ca

Niels Ingwersen
Dept. of Scandinavian Studies
University of Wisconsin, Madison
600 North Park St.
Madison, WI 53706-1475
USA
ningwers@students.wisc.edu

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
katalinnun@mail-online.dk
 Contributors 437

George Pattison
Det teologiske Fakultet
Institut for Kirkekundskab
Aarhus Universitet
8000 Aarhus C
Denmark
pattison@teologi.au.dk

Janne Risum
Institut for Dramaturgi
Aarhus Universitet
Langelandsgade 139
8000 Århus C
Denmark
drajr@hum.au.dk

Peter Vinten-Johansen
Department of History
Michigan State University
301 Morrill Hall
East Lansing, MI 48824-1036
USA
vintenjo@pilot.msu.edu

Hans Hertel
Institut for Nordisk Filologi
KU, Njalsgade 80
2300 København S
Denmark
hertel@hum.ku.dk

Ragni Linnet
Institut for Kunsthistorie og Teatervidenskab
Njalsgade 80
2300 København S
Denmark
ragni@hum.ku.dk