July 12
When I think of the evil things people have said to me and I realize how scarred I have been by them, I understand how important it is to refrain from negative judgment—all judgment if possible, but especially to keep one’s condemnation to oneself. My master is so kind to me and yet so insulting to his peers—even those who praise and support his work, those who would learn from him. There are those who find him perverse.
I am not well this evening. Perhaps it is the heat, or the topic, or something I ate. I need to drink more water to keep up with what I have lost—and the headache, since yesterday afternoon.
Matt 21:12–17. Jesus cleans house. Funny how the mind plays tricks when one is lightheaded. I read “house of prayer” as “house of begging.”49 Those not yet of age50 and infants are more likely to say something praiseworthy than those honored by ordination and academic status. Is it the training that turns men’s heads, or the honors, or both? Perhaps my master’s sharp words are justified. How is anyone seeking truth to second-guess what appears to him, upon careful observation and long reflection, to be true? Jesus, one assumes, took it all in in an instant. Looking and listening were one and the same with understanding. He did not have to visit the Jerusalem temple for five or ten or twenty years to get a feel for what was holy, what was corrupt, and what was reasonable human accommodation. My master has had his long loving look at the Christianity of Copenhagen and come away disenchanted, not with Christ, but with the international cartel that seeks to profit from his sacrifice. When I look such awful truths in the eye, oddly enough I am less angry about the mess men have made of religion, and simply very sad. And determined not to be fooled. Poor Margarete, a child in the hands of the devil—and Marthe, a married woman but none the wiser.51 I have a fever. I will lie down.
July 13
I come to the last page of this journal. The destruction of the Bastille was fifty-eight years ago tomorrow: a lifetime ago. How much has changed? Very little, I think, which is why another much larger wave now threatens. Is Christianity—never mind Christianity—is Christ on the side of those who foment rebellion against the established order? Does he favor Jeremiah, who scorned the preaching of peace where there was none? Does he reject the gospel of submission? For the German mind (and this may include the Danes, broadly speaking), there is no love without order, though certainly there can be order without love. And not merely the Northern Europeans, but the Medievals—Dante represents this so well, this impulse to order in every facet of human and divine love and retribution. I hesitate to call what Dante gives us in his Inferno divine justice, for it is one very brilliant man’s bitter response to exile—justifiable in human terms, but not altogether just.
Matt 21:18–22. Jesus curses the fig tree and it withers on the spot. Only leaves of trees or paper, but no fruit—an offense to our Lord. True faith picks up mountains—mountains of poetry, or theology, or human structures of any kind, and heaves them into the sea. “And everything that you ask for in prayer, if you believe, you will receive.”
Faust and Mephistopheles in the street. Faust eagerly awaits this evening’s arranged meeting with Margarete in her neighbor’s garden. Mephistopheles questions the sincerity of Faust’s feeling for Margarete. Faust cannot find the right word for it—he burns, he glows—is this passion purely instinct, or something eternal?
2. Stichwörter. The German (Stich: prick) conveys a contempt for received notions, not rising to the level of ideas, that the English does not.
3. Lectio Divina. Our journalist employs the Latin term for the practice of slowly and repeatedly reading and reflecting on brief passages of Scripture.
4. Weib, a woman or (colloquially) wife, as opposed to Frau, a lady or married woman.
5. The first “Night” scene in Faust I, set in a “high-vaulted narrow Gothic room.” As Karl Barth has noted, Goethe classed Christianity among “the four annoyances, ‘tobacco-smoke, bugs, garlic, and +’” (Barth, CD 3/2:240). Unlike Nietzsche though, Goethe is credited by Barth with knowing “when to stop” criticizing Christianity (Barth, CD 3/2:232).
6. Faust I, “In Front of the [City] Gate.”
7. The English idiom is “out of the frying pan into the fire.”
8. Magda’s pun is carried over from the German Wohlstand (prosperity) and Wohlsein (well-being).
9. Beschimpfung (insult or affront) and Unverschämtheit (impudence or effrontery).
10. Faust I, “In Front of the Gate.” The German Bürger is a citizen or city-dweller, bourgeois in French.
11. Luke 18:1–8, the parable of the persistent widow. The theme of perseverance in prayer is picked up by Paul (Rom 12:12; Col 4:2; 1 Thess 5:17).
12. William Congreve, The Mourning Bride (1697).
13. Herod Antipas, first-century Tetrarch of Galilee, was the son of the Idumenean Herod the Great and a Samaritan woman, Samaria being the former capital of the Northern Kingdom of Israel—thus Magda’s assertion that Herod Antipas had some Jewish ancestry.
14. “O du Kleingläubiger, warum zweifeltest du?” (Matt 14:31b, BLRT).
15. In her eagerness to poke fun at Peter’s name, which is Greek for stone, Magda has overlooked the fact that Jesus called Peter out of the boat (albeit at Peter’s prompting), and she has mistakenly attributed to Peter the ambition of James and John revealed in an episode from Matt 20 and Mark 10.
16. Kierkegaard called his frequent trips out of town in hired coaches, going at “an extremely fast pace,” “air-baths” (Garff citing Israel Levin, Kierkegaard, 478). The Hongs list thirty-six such outings in 1847, mostly day trips, not including visits to the home of his brother Peter Christian (Kierkegaard, Journals 5:548).
17. Faust I, “[Faust’s] Study.”
18. Ibid.
19. Karl Barth has commented on this interaction as an exemplary instance of “taking Jesus at his word” (Barth, CD 1/1:177).