Kierkegaard had hesitated a long time before publishing the "Preparation for a Christian Life." Authority-loving as he was, he shrank from antagonizing the Church, as it was bound to do; and more especially, from giving offense to its primate, the venerable Bishop Mynster who had been his father's friend and spiritual adviser, to whom he had himself always looked up with admiring reverence, and whose sermons he had been in the habit of reading at all times. Also, to be sure, he was restrained by the thought, that by publishing his book he would render Christianity well-night unattainable to the weak and the simple and the afflicted who certainly were in need of the consolations of Christianity without any additional sufferings interposed—and surely no reader of his devotional works can be in doubt that he was the most tender-hearted of men. In earlier, stronger times, he imagines, he would have been made a martyr for his opinions; but was he entitled to become a blood-witness—he who realized more keenly than any one that he himself was not a Christian in the strictest sense? In his "Two Religious Treatises" he debates the question: "Is it permissible for a man to let himself be killed for the truth?"; which is answered in the negative in "About the Difference between a Genius and an Apostle"—which consists in the Apostle's speaking with authority. However, should not the truth be the most important consideration? His journal during that time offers abundant proof of the absolute earnestness with which he struggled over the question.
When Kierkegaard finally published "The Preparation for a Christian Life," the bishop was, indeed, incensed; but he did nothing. Nor did any one else venture forth. Still worse affront! Kierkegaard had said his last word, had stated his ultimatum—and it was received with indifference, it seemed. Nevertheless he decided to wait and see what effect his books would have for he hesitated to draw the last conclusions and mortally wound the old man tottering on the brink of his grave by thus attacking the Church. There followed a three years' period of silence on the part of Kierkegaard—again certainly a proof of his utter sincerity. It must be remembered, in this connection, that the very last thing Kierkegaard desired was an external reorganization, a "reform," of the Church—indeed, he firmly refused to be identified with any movement of secession, differing in this respect vitally from his contemporaries Vinet and Grundtvig who otherwise had so much in common with him. His only wish was to infuse life and inwardness into the existing forms. And far from being inferior to them in this he was here at one with the Founder and the Early Church in that he states the aim of the Christian Life to be, not to transform the existing social order, but to transcend it. For the very same reason, coupled to be sure with a pronounced aristocratic individualism, he is utterly and unreasonably indifferent, and even antagonistic, to the great social movements of his time, to the political upheavals of 1848, to the revolutionary advances of science.
As Kierkegaard now considered his career virtually concluded, he wrote (1851) a brief account "About my Activity as an Author" in which he furnishes his readers a key to its unfolding—from an æsthetic view to the religious view—which he considers his own education by Providence; and indicates it to be his special task to call attention, without authority, to the religious, the Christian life. His "Viewpoint for my Activity as an Author," published by his brother only long after his death, likewise defines the purpose of the whole "authorship," besides containing important biographical material.
At length (January, 1854) Mynster died. Even then Kierkegaard, though still on his guard, might not have felt called upon to have recourse to stronger measures if it had not been for an unfortunate sentence in the funeral sermon preached by the now famous Martensen—generally pointed out as the successor to the primacy—with whom Kierkegaard had already broken a lance or two. Martensen had declared Mynster to have been "one of the holy chain of witnesses for the truth (sandhedsvidner) which extends through the centuries down from the time of the Apostles." This is the provocation for which Kierkegaard had waited. "Bishop Mynster a witness for the truth"! he bursts out, "You who read this, you know well what in a Christian sense is a witness for the truth. Still, let me remind you that to be one, it is absolutely essential to suffer for the teaching of Christianity"; whereas "the truth is that Mynster was wordily-wise to a degree—was weak, pleasure-loving, and great only as a declaimer." But once more—striking proof of his circumspection and single-mindedness—he kept this harsh letter in his desk for nine months, lest its publication should interfere in the least with Martensen's appointment, or seem the outcome of personal resentment.
Martensen's reply, which forcefully enough brings out all that could be said for a milder interpretation of the Christian categories and for his predecessor, was not as respectful to the sensitive author as it ought to have been. In a number of newspaper letters of increasing violence and acerbity Kierkegaard now tried to force his obstinately silent opponent to his knees; but in vain. Filled with holy wrath at what he conceived to be a conspiracy by silence, and evasions to bring to naught the whole infinitely important matter for which he had striven, Kierkegaard finally turned agitator. He addressed himself directly to the people with the celebrated pamphlet series Öieblikket "The Present Moment" in which he opens an absolutely withering fire of invective on anything and everything connected with "the existing order" in Christendom—an agitation the like of which for revolutionary vehemence has rarely, if ever, been seen. All rites of the Church—marriage, baptism, confirmation, communion, burial—and most of all the clergy, high and low, draw the fiery bolts of his wrath and a perfect hail of fierce, cruel invective. The dominant note, though varied infinitely, is ever the same: "Whoever you may be, and whatever the life you live, my friend: by omitting to attend the public divine service—if indeed it be your habit to attend it—by omitting, to attend public divine service as now constituted (claiming as it does to represent the Christianity of the New Testament) you will escape at least one, and a great, sin in not attempting to fool God by calling that the Christianity of the New Testament which is not the Christianity of the New Testament." And he does not hesitate to use strong, even coarse, language; he even courts the reproach of blasphemy in order to render ridiculous in "Official Christianity" what to most may seem inherently, though mistakenly, a matter of highest reverence.
The swiftness and mercilessness of his attack seem to have left his contemporaries without a weapon: all they could do was to shrug their shoulders about the "fanatic," or to duck and wait dumbly until the storm had passed.
Nor did it last long. On the second of October, 1855, Kierkegaard fell unconscious in the street. He was brought to the hospital where he died on the eleventh of November, aged 42. The immense exertions of the last months had shattered his frail body. And strange: the last of his money had been used up. He had said what he thought Providence had to communicate through him. His strength was gone. His death at this moment would put the crown on his work. As he said on his death-bed: "The bomb explodes, and the conflagration will follow."
In appraising Kierkegaard's life and works it will be found true, as Hotfding says, that he can mean much even to those who do not subscribe to the beliefs so unquestioningly entertained by him. And however much they may regret that he poured his noble wine into the old bottles, they cannot fail to recognize the yeoman's service he did, both for sincere Christians in compelling them to rehearse inwardly what ever tends to become a matter of form: what it means to be a Christian; and for others, in deepening their sense of individual responsibility. In fact, every one who has once come under his influence and has wrestled with this mighty spirit will bear away some blessing. In a time when, as in our own, the crowd, society, the millions, the nation, had depressed the individual to an insignificant atom—and what is worse, in the individual's own estimation; when shallow altruistic, socializing effort thought naively that the millenium was at hand, he drove the truth home that, on the contrary, the individual is the measure of all things; that we do not live en masse; that both the terrible responsibility and the great satisfactions of life inhere in the individual. Again, more forcibly than any one else in modern times, certainly more cogently than Pascal, he demonstrated that the possibility of proof in religion is an illusion; that doubt cannot be combatted by reason, that it ever will be credo quia impossibile. In religion, he showed the utter incompatibility of the æsthetic and the religious life; and in Christianity, he re-stated and re-pointed the principle of ideal perfection by his unremitting insistence on contemporaneousness with Christ. It is another matter whether by so doing Kierkegaard was about to pull the pillars from underneath the great edifice of Christianity which housed both him and his enemies: seeing that he himself finally doubted whether it had ever existed apart from the Founder and, possibly, the Apostles.
Kierkegaard is not easy reading. One's first impression of crabbedness, whimsicality, abstruseness will, however, soon give way to admiration of the marvelous instrument of precision language has become in his hands. To be sure, he did not write for people who are in a hurry, nor for dullards. His closely reasoned paragraphs and, at times huge, though rhetorically faultless, periods require concentrated attention, his involutions and repetitions, handled with such incomparable virtuosity, demand an everlasting readiness of comprehension on the part of the reader. On the other hand his philosophic work is delightfully "Socratic," unconventional, and altogether "un-textbook-like." Kierkegaard himself wished that his devotional works should be read aloud. And, from a purely æsthetic point of view, it ought to be a delight for any orator to practice on the wonderful periods of e. g., "The Preparation," or of, say, the parable of the coach-horses in "Acts of the Apostles." They alone would be sufficient to place Kierkegaard in the front rank of prose writers of the nineteenth century where, both by the power of his utterance and the originality of his thought, he rightfully belongs.
In laying before an English speaking public selections from Kierkegaard's works, the translator has endeavored to give an adequate idea of the various aspects of his highly disparate works. For this purpose he has chosen a few large pieces, rather than given tidbits. He hopes to be pardoned for not having a slavish regard for Kierkegaard's very inconsequential paragraphing[8] and for breaking, with no detriment, he believes, to the thought, some excessively long paragraphs into smaller units; which will prove more restful to the eye and more encouraging to the reader. As to occasional omissions—always indicated by dots—the possessor of the complete works will readily identify them. In consonance with Kierkegaard's views on "contemporaneousness," no capitals are used in "The Preparation" when referring to Christ by pronouns.