ABSTRACT
Though it hardly seems a pressing scholarly matter today, there was a time when Kierkegaard’s relation to Catholicism was a vital question. Kierkegaard himself had raised the issue, not only with his so-called “attack” on Denmark’s established Lutheran Church, but also with a number of favorable comments about Catholicism. For instance, in an 1851 journal entry, Kierkegaard writes, “There is more significance in Catholicism [than in Protestantism] simply because ‘imitation’ has not been relinquished completely.”1 Two years later he put it even more strongly: “[T]here is always present in Catholicism this element of good-namely, that imitation of Christ is demanded, imitation with all that this means remains firm.”2 Such statements took on new importance in the first decades after Kierkegaard’s death. Some of Kierkegaard’s most notable Danish interpreters, including Georg Brandes (18421927) and Harald Høffding (1843-1931), suggested that Kierkegaard’s thought steers persons toward a peculiar crisis: either to turn to Catholicism, or to embrace the emergence of secular humanism.3 Another prominent Dane, the novelist, pastor, and champion of Kierkegaard, Hans Peter Kofoed-Hansen (1813-93), arrived at a similar either-or. Yet, while Brandes rejected the “black abyss” of Catholicism and elected to seek “the point from which freedom beckons,”4 Kofoed-Hansen evaluated the options differently. He was received into the Catholic Church in 1887.
