Kierkegaard, a poet of ideals and practitioner of the indirect method, also had a direct and polemical side. He revealed this in several writings throughout his career, culminating in "The Moment," his attack against the established ecclesiastical order.
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 challenged Mynster to acknowledge the emptying and estheticizing of Christianity that had occurred in modern Christendom. For three years Kierkegaard was silent, waiting. When Mynster died, he was memorialized 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 "F drelandet," which he followed with ten numbers of the pamphlet "The Moment." This volume includes the articles from "F drelandet," all numbers of "The Moment," and several other late pieces of Kierkegaard's writing.
Kierkegaard left the task of discovering the meaning of his works to the reader, because "the task must be made difficult, for only the difficult inspires the noble-hearted". Scholars have interpreted Kierkegaard variously as an existentialist, neo-orthodoxist, postmodernist, humanist, and individualist.
Crossing the boundaries of philosophy, theology, psychology, and literature, he is an influential figure in contemporary thought.... Show more