I remark in the Preface that this last work of Kierkegaard aptly comes last, or almost last, in the English edition. I dwell here rather upon the significance of the fact that it was not published first in English, as it was in German, and, so far as I know, in every other language into which Kierkegaard has been translated. The Instant was published at Hamburg in 1861, and the whole of the Agitatorische Schriften u. Aufsätze, translated admirably by Dorner and Schrempf, was published in Stuttgart in 1896. (I say "admirably" to make amends for the reproaches I have leveled against Schrempf's later translations — but it may be significant that Dorner's name appears first on the tide page.) It was obviously an anticlerical if not an anti-Christian interest which prompted the early publication of these works. And of course they were misapprehended in lands where S. K.'s works were unknown and little or nothing was known about the man. Very few were aware that this fierce attack upon "Christendom" was written from within the Church. I dwell here upon the fact that nothing of the sort has occurred in England or America, where S. K.'s last work is properly published almost last — and that not as a result of wise planning, but simply because no one has felt an urge to make it known...to the discomfiture of the Church.
This observation, however, is not perhaps unequivocally cheerful; for may it not be that in our time, still more than in the days of Kierkegaard, "there is nothing to persecute"? The world does not persecute world when it discovers it in the Church. And even if it be not true, as S. K. affirms, that Christianity no longer exists, yet surely the fond belief in "Christendom" has been shattered by this present war. Apart from the war, and viewing my country as it was in the period preceding it, I did not need the satire of Kierkegaard to suggest to my mind the doubt whether it can rightly be called a "Christian land." I note that in our last census 48 per cent of the population preferred to say that they were Christians; but it is sure that many, nobody knows how many, made this answer only because they could think of no other religion to name; and the leaders of all the Christian groups reckon that, alas, hardly half that number have any connection whatever with any Church. It is well understood, too, that in intellectual circles the percentage of professing Christians is far smaller. It is a curious coincidence that in "atheistic" Russia exactly 48 per cent reported themselves in the last census as "believers." But we must understand that this figure is a minimum, seeing that in Russia it is inconvenient if not perilous to call oneself a Christian. Having just now returned from Mexico I am impressed by the fact that in this state which is politically non-Christian 98 per cent would profess themselves Christians. I do not need Kierkegaard to tell me that it is a muddled world in which we live. Gertainly the notion of "Christendom," "a Christian world," "Christian lands," under "Christian rulers," is now far more problematical than it was a century ago when S. K. wrote. For me, unlike many of my more distinguished contemporaries, it was not only within the last ten years my world has been profoundly shaken and has proved to be simply "the world."
There is, however, some consolation in the fact that both in England and America S. K.'s devotional discourses have lately received a degree of attention they have been accorded nowhere else. S. K. complained that while he held out the Edifying Discourses with his right hand and the pseudonymous works in his left, everyone grasped with his right hand what he held in the left. The Discourses have not been translated in France, where a good beginning has been made with the pseudonymous works. They were translated very tardily in Germany, in spite of the vogue which Kierkegaard enjoyed, and it is likely that they would not all be available even now, were it not that the enterprising publisher of the Complete Works felt obliged to make his edition complete. Their fate in English has been very different; for whereas only five translators and two publishers have had a hand in the publication of the aesthetic and philosophical works, eight persons have worked on the Discourses, and five publishers have undertaken to disseminate them.
In the Scandinavian countries the Instant made, of course, a prodigious impression, although it effected no immediate change in the established order. S. K., instead of being persecuted as he expected, attained again a high degree of popularity. This little brochure was printed in the Swedish newspapers as soon as each copy was issued. It did not need to be translated for Norway. But in both these lands it was of course misunderstood, for no one had apprehended the implications of S. K.'s previous works. It was misunderstood by the zealous young Norwegian priest who furnished the theme for Ibsen's Brand. S. K.'s motto was "Either/or"; it never was "All or nothing." Neither was it understood by many people in Denmark, for of course the Journals were not yet made public; and this attack upon the established order, made by a man who had always been known as a conservative in Church and State, and as a devoted supporter of the late Bishop Mynster, produced the utmost amazement. Inasmuch as S. K. died in the midst of the strife, of an ailment which was very vaguely diagnosed, people were disposed to believe that the whole thing was morbid, that disease accounted for this sudden change. Now when we know his works and can read his Journals such a notion cannot honestly be maintained, the Attack cannot be discounted in this way, unless one would claim that his works as a whole can be discarded because (as he was the first to assert) there was something morbid about his life as a whole. At all events, it is clear to us now that the Attack was the consistent conclusion of his life and thought.
There is nothing in the Attack which cannot be matched by many entries in the Journals which were written after 1850. It has often been said that S. K. during these last years accumulated in his Journals the material for the open attack. This is true in a sense. He stored up ten times as much material as he needed to use — but, strangely enough, he did not use it, except in the very few cases which are indicated here in the notes. This is the more surprising to us because many of the entries in the Journal were written so perfectly that they compare favorably with anything that appeared in the Instant. A considerable number can be read in Dru's Selections; I have quoted fifteen of them here on the backs of the title pages, and several more are to be found in my Kierkegaard (which from p. 495 to the end may serve as an introduction to the Attack) '• I call attention especially to "Endeavour, or a North Pole Expedition," "Star-gazing," "The Tame Geese," "The Professor," which has Martensen in view, and the twin parables, "The Captain of the Ship" and "The Fieldmarshal," which illuminate S. K.'s relation to Bishop Mynster. But S. K. had something else in reserve, nothing less than a complete book, Judge for Yourself, which he wrote in 1852 — and had kept in his desk all this while. We can understand why he did not publish it at once, for it was an undisguised attack upon the established order. But why not when the open attack had commenced ? Why not when the second edition of Training in Christianity was published? The only answer is that when he was "working in the instant" the weapons must be short as well as sharp. It is true, the appropriate passages we find in the Journals were short; but S. K. was so amazingly copious that he did not need to use the treasures he had accumulated.
The last number of the Instant remained unpublished because when it lay upon his desk completely finished he fell paralyzed in the street and was carried to the hospital. That may be regarded as a sufficient reason. And yet we may wonder that during the forty days he was dying he did not give order that it be sent to the printer. The whole character of the Instant, No. X, marks it as an appropriate conclusion of the Attack. But S. K. seemed to have no interest in it. Undoubtedly he thought that his death was the only appropriate conclusion. In my Short Life of Kierkegaard I picked out, rather arbitrarily, what I was pleased to consider S. K.'s "last words." Yet the last words he actually wrote have perhaps a better claim to be thus signalized. Especially his pathetic confession of a lifelong suffering, and his address to the "plain man," deserve to be treasured as the last words of an intellectual tragic hero.
S. K.'s Attack upon "Christendom" will be interesting to many who have no interest in Christianity — not even enough to wish to attack it. Historically it is noteworthy as one of the most prominent examples of popular diatribe, not less worthy of attention than any of the most famous political broadsides.
S. K. was well armed for such an undertaking, for during his years in the university he spent a great deal of time preparing to write a treatise on the use of satire by the Greeks and Romans. That book was not written, but there can be no doubt that S. K. learned much from his study of the subject. It is certain, however, that this "thoroughly polemicalized" young man had a natural bent for satire. He knew also that satire necessarily involves exaggeration. For this reason he held completely in check his rare dialectical ability to see both sides. In the Instant this very dialectical man was no longer dialectical. That his satire of the "priests" was vigorously one-sided, he recognized in his conversation with Pastor Boisen, which I have quoted on a title page of the first number of the Instant, along with a passage about the "corrective" which justifies such exaggeration.
Some men, and perhaps most Christians, will think that satire ought not to be employed against the Church. That is not my opinion. I believe that the Church has need of it, and I conceive that God is above the Church as well as in it. Moreover, S. K.'s criticism was not directed against the Church as such, but against "Christendom," the established order of things in a presumably "Christian land" and "a Christian world."
His diatribes, particularly those against the priests in an established Church, are often outrageous. In some respects they are not strictly applicable to our day, and least of all to the free Churches in America. And yet it is discomfiting to recognize how often they do apply, and how often they apply with greater force to our age. The economic situa- tion of the ministers of the Gospel is by no means so flourishing now as S. K. depicts it. And yet perhaps the question of money looms larger and is more distracting from Christianity in the free Churches than where the priests are paid by the State and that's the end of it. At least this question is now pressed more importunately than ever it was before. In my Communion, what is called the "Every Member Canvass" has grown to be a cloud which obscures the sun, amounting often to a total eclipse of the Gospel.
Outrageous as S. K.'s criticism often is, I am sure that where it wounds most deeply the effect is most salutary. To me it has proved to be a wholesome diet, and most wholesome when I might be expected to be allergic to such food — for I too am a "priest."
Apart from the profit one may derive from criticism, that is, from the negative factors in the Instant, one surely will not fail to notice how much there is that is positive and positively edifying. This may not be the first impression, but I could not fail to observe it as I was slowly translating these pages. The Attack would not be so effective as it is, if it were not written from within the Church, if the criticism were not prompted and supported by a positive faith. S. K.'s central and most ardent beliefs are summarily expressed in the Instant, even where they are not definitely expressed they glimmer through the criticism, and the thought of the majesty of God illuminates many a page. S. K. carried on this controversy with the New Testament in his hand, and for that reason the "priests" found it so difficult to reply. Even the stinging charge that the priests are perjurers could not easily be rebutted. One should recognize that this whole attack was essentially directed against the beginnings of what we know as Modern Liberal Theology. Only after a century, when that has finally collapsed, can S. K.'s satire be read with sympathy and comprehension. The priests might have said in their defense that they had taken the oath upon the New Testament in the sense everybody then attached to it, and that everybody was actuated by the laudable motive of making Christianity more acceptable to the people. But that was what no one could say openly.
It is a curious and a rather ironical reflection that many who would condemn the Attack as a whole will find parts of it very much to their liking. Free churchmen will find S. K.'s criticism of an established Church more forceful than their spokesmen have produced; the many Baptist sects will welcome his criticism of infant baptism (although in fact S. K. was not disposed to discard it) ; Quakers will relish the diatribe against a "hireling ministry"; and Catholics (Roman Catholics at least) will sympathize with his outspoken preference for a celibate clergy. But I should think that everybody must now be ready to listen with a chastened spirit to his passionate contention against the idea of "Christendom." And that was his central theme.
We have reason to take seriously S. K.'s oft reiterated formula: "Especially in Protestantism, and more especially in Denmark." S. K. was at pains to make it clear that his criticism was directed only to that part of "Christendom" which he knew at first hand. It was consonant with the practical aim of the Instant that he there suggested no comparison between Protestantism and Catholicism. But in the later Journals this comparison was more common than any other theme except "Christendom." If "Christendom," as I reckon roughly, is the theme of one thousand entries in the Journals of the last five years, there are nearly one hundred which deal critically with Luther and Protestantism, and express appreciation (comparatively at least) of Catholicism and monasticism. S. K.'s contemporaries, though of course this source of information was closed to them, were disposed to conjecture that, if S. K. had lived longer, he must have felt compelled to take refuge in the Church of Rome, as some of the readers of the Instant did. That was only a guess, but it was at least more plausible that the guess of Georg Brandes, that he would have "leapt over" to free thought. Perhaps, if S. K. had lived to become a Catholic, he might have written another satire, dealing especially with Catholicism, and more especially with Rome. For all that, he may have been essentially a Catholic in his way of thinking. That is what Father Przywara makes out in Das Geheimnis Kierkegaards, by which he was able to convince Karl Barth that, as he put it, "If I were to follow Kierkegaard, I might as well go over there," pointing, as he wrote these words near his window in the Hotel Hassler on the Pincian Hill, to the Vatican on the other side of the Eternal City.
It is very much more important to remark that the severity of S. K.'s attitude is in part explained, and in some measure mitigated, by the consideration that the Moral and the thrice repeated Preface to Training in Christianity (which he retracted, it is true, but did not discard when he published the second edition) suggest plainly enough, though perhaps unwittingly, the Catholic distinction between the universal precepts of Christ and the "counsels of perfection." This distinction the Protestant Reformers expressly and indignantly rejected. And with this rejection went implicitly the Catholic veneration for the heroes of the faith, the "saints," or, as S. K. here calls them, "those glorious ones." To this whole range of ideas Protestantism is still hostile. Everybody resents this as an invidious distinction. The consequence is that, instead of leveling men up, Protestantism has leveled them down, or, as S. K. says, "place No. i has dropped out, and No. 2 has become the first place"; in other words, "Protestantism has become nothing but mediocrity from end to end." Hence his plea that "the ideals must be proclaimed," and the comfort he held out to all, if only they really try, that, failing through human weakness to live up to the ideals, they may flee to grace. Naturally, grace is not made very prominent in the Instant; but it was very prominent in the Journals, and on his deathbed, responding to Pastor Boisen's question, "Do you rely upon grace?" S. K. responded, "Naturally. What else?" Only he would not at any time have allowed that "grace" was an adequate answer to the anxious query, "whether a man can be a Christian without being a disciple."
There is another respect in which S. K. was more evidently and more fundamentally a Catholic — or perhaps it would be better to say, more consciously in revolt against Protestantism. This appears plainly in the Instant by his insistence upon works, and by the fact that here he has nothing to say about faith, except that, according to the New Testament (and the Gospels especially), it must not be "faith alone." He was thoroughly aware that when he insisted upon the imitation of Christ he was stressing a medieval aspect of Catholicism. But his dissent from the Protestant position, especially from the sola fide, went far deeper than that. It is shown by his marked preference for the Epistle of St. James, which Luther dismissed as "an epistle of straw." It is shown more generally by his definition of faith as obedience, as the opposite of sin rather than of unbelief. It is significant that he chose to entitle his biggest volume of edifying discourses "The Works of Love." It is so obvious that love cannot be "with the tongue"! But S.K. was himself so keenly aware that he was controvening a fundamental position of Lutheranism (sola fide) that he was fearful of the offense the publication of this book would give — and greatly surprised that no one raised an outcry. We on the other hand are surprised that he could have entertained such a fear; for now hardly anyone remembers that sola fide is a distinction of Protestantism, notwithstanding that it has left evident traces upon our thought and life, and perhaps more than anything else will make S. K.'s satire of "Christendom" unacceptable in our day, if not unintelligible.
I remark in the last place that in this book I have uniformly translated the Danish word Præst by the cognate English word. This might seem a matter of course. I have to remark upon it because in all my previous translations I have commonly translated it by "parson" instead of "priest." Others prefer to say "clergyman" or "minister." But that obviously will not do in this book; and here I am not ashamed of being inconsistent. I am not sorry that I have to use the word "priest," for neither would I shun its application to me, nor do I wish to spare other priests of the Anglican Communion (or it may be in the Church of Rome) who might profitably be wounded by it. At the same time it does of course apply to the Protestant ministers of any denomination. The fact is, Luther retained the use of the word "priest" (which is merely old presbyter writ small), and the Scandinavian Churches, like the Church of England, have retained it to this day, though of course without any more suggestion of sacerdotal character than the kindred word prete has in Rome and throughout Italy.