"Essentially I am only a poet who loves what wounds: ideals; what infinitely detains: ideals; what makes a person, humanly speaking, unhappy: ideals; what Oteaches to take refuge in grace': ideals; what in a higher sense makes a person indescribably happy: ideals."--Soren Kierkegaard, Journals and Papers, VI, B 749 For Kierkegaard, poet of ideals and practitioner of the indirect method, ideality also had a direct and polemical side. He revealed this in four episodes: the early criticism of Hans Christian Andersen in From the Papers of One Still Living; the Corsair affair with Meir Goldschmidt on destructive anonymous journalism; the exchange with Andreas G. Rudelbach on the politicizing reformation of the Church; and the subject of the present volume: his "attack on Christendom" against the established ecclesiastical order and the formalism of culture-accommodated Christianity. Kierkegaard was moved to criticize the church by his differences with Bishop Mynster, Primate of the Church of Denmark.Although Mynster saw in Kierkegaard a complement to himself and his outlook, Kierkegaard sought from him a simple and honest confession that would clear the air by acknowledging the emptying and estheticizing of Christianity that had occurred in Christendom.
For three years Kierkegaard was silent, waiting. When Mynster died, his eventual successor, Hans Lassen Martensen, characterized Mynster in his memorial sermon as "an authentic truth-witness" in the "holy chain of truth-witnesses that stretches through the ages from the days of the apostles." This struck Kierkegaard as blasphemous and inspired him to write a series of articles in Fadrelandet, which he followed with ten numbers of the pamphlet The Moment. Nine numbers appeared during the last ten months of Kierkegaard's life; the tenth was awaiting publication when he died. This volume includes the articles from Fadrelandet, all numbers of The Moment, and several other late pieces of Kierkegaard's writing.