"Selections From the Writings of Kierkegaard" - читать интересную книгу автора (Kierkegaard Soren)

the batteries of his ridicule on the personality of his erstwhile idol.
And for the better part of a year the Copenhagen public was kept
laughing and grinning about the unequal trouser legs, the spindle
shanks, the inseparable umbrella, the dialectic propensities, of
"Either Or," as Kierkegaard came to be called by the populace; for,
owing to his peripatetic habits acquired in connection with the
Indirect Communication he had long been a familiar figure on the
streets of the capital. While trying to maintain an air of
indifference, be suffered the tortures of the damned. In his Journal
(several hundred of whose pages are given over to reflections on
this experience) we find exclamations such as this one: "What is it
to be roasted alive at a slow fire, or to be broken on the wheel or,
as they do in warm climates, to be smeared with honey and put at
the mercy of the insects what is that in comparison with this
torture: to be grinned to death!"

There could be no thought now of retiring to a peaceful charge in
the country. That would have been fleeing from persecution.
Besides, unbeknown perhaps to himself, his pugnacity was
aroused. While under the influence of the "Corsair Feud" (as it is
known in Danish literature) he completes the booklet "A Literary
Review." This was originally intended as a purely Сsthetic
evaluation and appreciation of the (then anonymous) author of the
Hverdagshistorier "Commonplace Stories" that are praised by him
for their thoughtful bodying forth of a consistent view of life
which however different from his own yet commanded his respect.
He now appended a series of bitter reflections on the Present
Times, paying his respects to the Press, which he calls
incomparably the worst offender in furnishing people with cheap
irony, in forcibly levelling out and reducing to mediocrity all those
who strive to rise above it intellectually words applicable, alas! no
less to our own times. To him, however, who in a religious sense
has become the captain of his soul, the becoming a butt of the
Press is but a true test. Looking up, Kierkegaard sees in his own
fate the usual reward accorded by mankind to the courageous souls
who dare to fight for the truth, for the ideal for Christianity,
against the "masses." In a modern way, through ridicule, he was
undergoing the martyrdom which the blood witnesses of old had
undergone for the sake of their faith. Their task it had been to
preach the Gospel among the heathen. His, he reasoned, was in
nowise easier: to make clear to uncomprehending millions of
so-called Christians that they were not Christians at all, that they
did not even know what Christianity is: suffering and persecution,
as he now recognizes, being inseparable from the truly Christian
life.

First, then, the road had to be cleared, emphatically, for the truth
that Christianity and "the public" are opposite terms. The
collection of "Edifying Discourses in Diverse Spirits" is thus a
religious parallel to the polemic in his "Review." The first part of