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ianism was its popularized form, current in 1840's (the reformist
theories of the Young Germany movement, for instance) which
smugly assumed that all important matters could be settled around
conference tables and through gradual improvements.
Kierkegaard criticised official religion as vehemently as he
criticised official philosophy. The established church-"shallow
worldliness" or "hypocritical sanctimoniousness"-is proclaimed
to be worse than paganism: "It has transformed God of the spirit
into ridiculous twaddle," it "makes God an imbecile." Not Chris–
tianity but "profit" is its "truth." " From clergymen one often
hears the objection" that it is impossible for them to "live on
nothing"; Kierkegaard replies that "this trick is precisely what
the clergymen perform: Christianity is nothing and they live on
it." Declare the death of Christianity, he demands, rather than
continue with this disgusting comedy-either - or.
II
Now, assuredly Job is eternally right as against Hegel, let
alone his shallow disciples. Job, Kierkegaard and his follower
Leon Shestov point out, refused to be comforted by the moral plati–
tudes of his friends, insisting that what he had lost be restored
to him. But was restitution actually made? Did God give back that
which had been taken? Did Kierkegaard really overcome abstract
thinking and attain the reality of concrete existence.
Fortunately for the professors, philosophers, moralists and
priests, who for two thousand years have enjoyed the privilege
of preaching the exact opposite of what they practiced, it turns
out that Kierkegaard was by no means such a monster, so morbid
and reprobate, as actually to live his thought. For though present–
ing the demand for a iife equal to one's " thinking," he met that
demand in a manner which far from interfering with the tradi–
tional habits of professors, philosophers, moralists and priests,
provides a new justification for them. The existence into which
he invites them to plunge is not so far from "thinking" after all!
It is only a kind of theoretical existence. It turns out that Kierke–
gaard was not so vulgar as to succeed in his quest, and that one
can be a Kierkegaardian without trying to change either oneself
or the world. In his
l
oumal
Kiergegaard himself expressed the
fear that his "intellectual capital" would be inherited by "that
