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K. E. Løgstrup: Controverting Kierkegaard
Selected Works of K. E. Løgstrup
Series editors: Bjørn Rabjerg and Robert Stern

Kierkegaard’s and Heidegger’s Analysis of Existence and Its Relation to Proclamation

The Ethical Demand
Controverting Kierkegaard
Ethical Concepts and Problems
K. E. Løgstrup
Controverting Kierkegaard

Translated by Hans Fink and

Kees Van Kooten Niekerk

Introduced by Bjørn Rabjerg, with notes by

Bjørn Rabjerg and Robert Stern
Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, OX2 6DP,
United Kingdom
Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford.
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© the Estate of K. E. Løgstrup 1971
Translation © Hans Fink and Kees van Kooten Niekerk 2023
Introduction © Bjørn Rabjerg 2023
Editorial notes © Bjørn Rabjerg and Robert Stern 2023
The moral rights of the authors have been asserted
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Contents

Translators’ Preface vii

Acknowledgements xv
A Chronology of Løgstrup’s Life and Works xvii
Introduction xix
Bjørn Rabjerg

Controverting Kierkegaard lxiii

German Foreword lxv
Foreword lxvii

Part I: Christianity without the Historical Jesus 1

1. The Christian Message Is Derived from Paradoxicality, and
Jesus’s Proclamation and Works Are Not Integral to Christianity 1
2. The Question of the Occasion for Faith According to Kierkegaard 3
a. Paradoxicality Makes Pressing the Question of the Occasion
for Faith 3
b. The Question of the Occasion for Faith and the Attempt to
Legitimize Faith 3
c. The Answer to the Question of the Occasion for Faith 4
3. The Approximation Problem 9
4. An Alternative to Kierkegaard’s View 11
5. The Paradoxicality 15
6. The Interpretation of the Crucifixion 21
7. Following Christ 23
Part II: The Sacrifice 26
1. Suffering 26
a. Christianity’s Interpretation of Suffering 26
b. The Self-Imposed Martyrdom 30
c. The Alternative to Kierkegaard 31
d. Jaspers’ Non-Christian Version of Kierkegaard’s Specifically
Christian Suffering 32
e. Demand and Salvation 35
2. Christianity and the Naturally Generated and Culturally Formed
Communities 39
a. Self-Denial and Martyrdom 39
b. The Extensive vs Intensive Understanding of Evil 42
c. A-Cosmic Ethics of Love 43
d. Suffering and Misfortune 45
e. The Admission 47
vi 

Part III: The Movement of Infinity 49

1. The Infinite Movement of Resignation 49
2. Taking over Concrete Existence 56
3. The Abstract and Negative Self 60
4. Sartre’s and Kierkegaard’s Portrayal of Demonic
Self-Enclosedness 62
a. Sartre’s Le diable et le bon dieu 62
b. Drama of Ideas and Drama of Characters 64
c. Kierkegaard Illustrated through Sartre, Sartre Interpreted through
Kierkegaard 67
d. The Sovereign Expressions of Life 69
5. The Absolute Good 79
6. Conformity and the Collision between Faith in God and the
Neighbour 83
7. The Sovereign Expressions of Life and the Question of the
Freedom or Bondage of the Will 85
8. Taking over the Situation through the Sovereign Expressions
of Life 89
9. How the Ethical Life of the People Is Lost, Conformism,
and How the Relation of Spirit Is Doubled 92
10. Morality is the Provision of Substitute Motives for
Substitute Actions 96
11. The Levelling Down of Finitude 100
12. Consciousness of Guilt 105
a. Eternity’s Vertical Understanding of Guilt 105
b. Time’s Horizontal Understanding of Guilt 106
13. Action and Attitude of Mind 108
Part IV: Nothingness 117
1. Knowledge as It Is Understood in Transcendental Philosophy,
and Existence 117
2. The Synthesis between Infinity and Finitude, between Eternity
and Temporality 121
3. The Doubling of the Relation of Spirit 124
4. Nothingness and Action 126
5. Knowledge and Reflection 133

Editors’ Notes 137

Select Bibliography 149
Index 153
Translators’ Preface

This translation is based on the edition of Opgør med Kierkegaard published

by Klim, Aarhus, in 2013. Except for the correction of a few typos, the text of
this edition is identical with the original edition published in 1967 by
Gyldendal, Copenhagen. In the Klim edition the original references to
Kierkegaard’s works have been supplemented with references to Søren
Kierkegaards Skrifter [Søren Kierkegaard’s Writings], a critical edition pub-
lished by the Søren Kierkegaard Research Centre, University of Copenhagen
(Copenhagen: Gads Forlag, 1997–2013). In our translation, references to
Kierkegaard’s Danish works are to this edition, marked as SKS followed by
the volume’s number and page number(s), for example SKS 4: 258–9. The
German Foreword is a translation of Løgstrup’s foreword to a series of three
books entitled Kontroverse um Kierkegaard und Grundtvig [Controversy
Concerning Kierkegaard and Grundtvig], edited by Götz Harbsmeier and
K. E. Løgstrup. Løgstrup’s foreword was published in the first volume of
this series entitled Das Menschliche und das Christliche [Humanity and
Christianity].
We were able to base our translation of Part I on a draft by Tom Angier,
which has lightened our job considerably. The section that deals with ‘the
sovereign expressions of life’ (Part III, 4 (d) ‘The Sovereign Expressions of
Life’ to 10. ‘Morality is the Provision of Substitute Motives for Substitute
Actions’) had been translated previously by Susan Dew, published in
K. E. Løgstrup, Beyond the Ethical Demand. We have benefited greatly from
this translation. Yet, we have not merely copied it. Whereas Dew’s translation is
free and elegant, we have attempted to keep as close as possible to Løgstrup’s
formulations. The main reason is that Løgstrup practised a kind of phenom-
enology that builds on the specific meaning of words and expressions in
everyday language. This suggests that he chose his formulations with great
precision, at least with regard to central concepts. Therefore, we have tried to be
as consistent as possible in our use of the English words for these concepts. This
has the further advantage that there is a substantial consistency in the transla-
tion of these concepts across the different volumes in the Oxford University
Press series. Our attempt to keep close to Løgstrup’s formulations could easily
have resulted in dubious English, were it not for a meticulous linguistic revision
viii  ’ 

by the editors. We are greatly indebted to them for this. We are also grateful to
Michael Au-Mullaney for his helpful comments on a late draft.
In order to enable our translation to be checked against the original, we have
included page numbers in square brackets from the new critical edition of the
text in Danish: Opgør med Kierkegaard (Aarhus: Klim, 2013). We have
followed the practice of the Oxford University Press edition of The Ethical
Demand with regard to gendered language. That is to say, except when
Løgstrup clearly refers to a man, we have used third-person plural pronouns
to refer to individual human beings.
As Løgstrup points out in his foreword, Opgør med Kierkegaard is an
interpretation and critique of Kierkegaard’s understanding of Christianity
and offers an alternative understanding. Løgstrup underpins his interpretation
with a large number of quotations from Kierkegaard’s works. We have ren-
dered these quotations on the basis of the standard translation by Howard
V. Hong and Edna H. Hong, published in Kierkegaard’s Writings in 26
volumes (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1979–2009). This trans-
lation is referred to as KW, followed by volume number and page number(s),
for example KW 7: 56–7. References to Kierkegaard’s journals and papers are
to Søren Kierkegaard’s Journals and Papers, edited and translated by Howard
V. Hong and Edna H. Hong, 7 volumes (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University
Press, 1967–78), by volume and page number(s) and abbreviated as JP, for
example JP 1: 271–2. In some cases, we have deviated from the translation
given by the Hongs, especially when we judged that their version could
hamper the understanding of Løgstrup’s use of the quotation. Major devi-
ations are explained in a note. We have also changed the quoted texts into
gender neutral language. References to works by Luther in the Introduction
and in the Editors’ Notes are first to D. Martin Luthers Werke: Kritische
Gesamtausgabe, 73 vols. (Weimar: Hermann Böhlau, 1883–2009) abbreviated
as WA, and then to Luther’s Works, American edition, 55 vols. (St Louis and
Philadelphia, PA: Concordia and Fortress Press, 1958–86; new series, vols.
56–75, 2009–) abbreviated as LW, by volume number and then page number.
When Løgstrup quotes from a Danish text of which there is no English
translation, we have just given our own translation. Sometimes he quotes from
French or German sources, but then he always gives his own translation into
Danish. In these cases, we have translated his translation into English, adapted
it to a standard English translation if available, and noted if our translation
departs significantly from it.
We have followed Danish practice in capitalizing only the first letter in titles
of works published in Danish after 1948, but have followed English practice in
  ’  ix

capitalizing all significant words for English titles; and in the Select
Bibliography and the Index we have followed the Danish system of putting
the special characters ‘æ’, ‘ø’, and ‘å’ at the end of the alphabet, so that for
example ‘Luther’ is listed before ‘Løgstrup’.
For some of Løgstrup’s central concepts it has been difficult to find English
terms that precisely capture their meaning. Therefore, it may be useful to say
something about that meaning, as we understand it, and explain why we have
translated as we did.

to believe/faith (at tro and tro): In a religious context, the Danish verb ‘at
tro’ and the corresponding substantive ‘tro’ are the usual translations of
pisteuein and pistis in the Greek New Testament. These concepts com-
bine the epistemic notion of regarding something as true with the notion
of trust in that which is regarded as true (sc. the Gospel and God/Jesus).
In English, the noun pistis is normally translated as ‘faith’. However, in
English ‘faith’ has no corresponding verb. This is why the New Revised
Standard Version of the Bible usually translates pisteuein as ‘to believe’
(e.g. Rom 3:22). It would be natural to follow this translation and render
‘at tro’ as ‘to believe’. The question arises, however, if the specific
meaning of ‘at tro’ does not risk getting lost, because ‘to believe’ is
normally understood in a merely epistemic sense. To avoid this misun-
derstanding an alternative option could be ‘to have faith’. Yet this
translation is not satisfactory, because it misses the idea of the verb ‘at
tro’ as an act, not as something you have. This is important for the way it
is understood in both Kierkegaard and Løgstrup. To maintain its char-
acter as an act we have decided to take over common theological usage
and translate the verb ‘at tro’, when used in a clearly religious context, as
‘to believe’. Finally, we have translated ‘den troende’ (the believing
person) as ‘the believer’ when we judged that the emphasis lay on the
epistemic notion, and as ‘the faithful’ when we judged that the emphasis
lay on the notion of trust.
bourgeois/bourgeois life (spidsborger/spidsborgerlighed): The Danish terms
(sometimes translated as philistine/philistinism) are clearly pejorative
and express contempt for the narrowness of mind taken to be charac-
teristic of citizens who are preoccupied with their own self-righteous
conception of what is right and wrong. Spidsborgerlighed can thus be
found in all social classes.
compassion (barmhjertighed): Løgstrup’s use of this word is closely con-
nected to the biblical story of The Good Samaritan, in Danish: Den
x  ’ 

barmhjertige samaritaner (Luke 10:37). ‘Barmhjertighed’ is the Danish

translation of Greek eleos which Luther translated as ‘Barmherzigkeit’,
and which traditionally in English has been translated as ‘mercy’.
However, the problem with ‘mercy’ is that it is primarily shown when
sparing someone from punishment; but this does not correspond with
Løgstrup’s understanding of the Samaritan story, which instead involves
the desire to relieve other people’s suffering and acting accordingly. For
this reason, ‘compassion’ is arguably a more suitable translation than
‘mercy’, although previously in Løgstrup literature and translations,
‘mercy’ has been used as the preferred translation, for example when
translating the sovereign expression of life ‘barmhjertighed’.
A worry could be that ‘compassion’ sounds too passive and thus, unlike
mercy, is more of a merely emotional state; but it is of crucial importance
to both the Samaritan story and to Løgstrup’s use of ‘barmhjertighed’
that action is also involved: ‘Go, and do likewise’, as Jesus replies. In this
respect, Løgstrup draws a distinction between ‘medlidenhed’, which is
merely passive (and so more like ‘sympathy’ or ‘fellow-feeling’), and
‘barmhjertighed’, which involves action. However, in English ‘compas-
sion’ also usually involves acting, so a person who merely felt compassion
but did not act would arguably not count as compassionate. Therefore,
Løgstrup’s important distinction is captured by the use of ‘compassion’
rather than ‘mercy’, ‘pity’, or ‘sympathy’, and so is adopted here.
controversion (opgør): As Bjørn Rabjerg says in his Introduction, the word
opgør has a very dramatic meaning involving a showdown or face-off, but
it also means something quite undramatic—or at least not terribly
exciting—as a term from accounting, where it means to settle an account
or a balance sheet. To have an opgør involves engaging in a controversy
with someone, where the matter dealt with is to be properly settled; it
involves a confrontation and is intended to ‘set the record straight’, so to
speak, so the expression ‘to settle a score’ comes close. For this reason,
Showdown with Kierkegaard, or Settling the Score with Kierkegaard would
have been more exciting options when translating the title, as would
probably Controversy with Kierkegaard. However, we have chosen to
stick with Controverting Kierkegaard, mainly because it is accurate, mean-
ing that it involves an ongoing dispute with someone where one engages
in a controversy, but also because this translation has been used in the past
and is thus now standard throughout the Anglophone Løgstrup literature.
definitive (definitiv): With this word Løgstrup designates one of the main
characteristics of the sovereign expression of life. On the one hand he
  ’  xi

explains this term in contrast to an indeterminate (‘ubestemt’) kind of

spontaneity, so it refers to a determinate content. Yet it is no accident
that he uses the word ‘definitiv’ and not the word ‘bestemt’ (‘determin-
ate’ or ‘definite’), because ‘definitiv’ designates also that the sovereign
expressions of life impose a claim on us that we act in a specific way (see
72–3/99–100). Therefore, we have translated ‘definitiv’ in this context
with the English counterpart ‘definitive’, referring to both the definite
character of the sovereign expressions of life and the unconditionality of
their claim.
demand (fordring): This is one of the most central concepts for Løgstrup as
can be seen from his use of it in the title of his main work Den etiske
fordring. The Danish term involves someone being asked, required,
demanded, claimed, or called to do something. Kierkegaard speaks of
the ‘infinite demand’ (den uendelige fordring) and also of ‘love’s demand’
(kjerlighedens fordring) (see e.g. SKS 9: 189/KW 16: 189, where the
Hongs have ‘love’s requirement’). Løgstrup employs the term to cover
the idea that something is being demanded of you without this being a
command given by someone in particular. His use of the word implies
that the reason to act is taking care of the other rather than the authority of
a commander. In the KW translation, ‘fordring’ is rendered as ‘require-
ment’, which might obscure the connection between Kierkegaard and
Løgstrup at this point. In his treatment of the sovereign expressions of
life, Løgstrup speaks of a ‘krav’ involved in them (72–3/99–100). ‘Krav’
could well be translated as ‘demand’, but we have translated it as ‘claim’ to
maintain the verbal distinction Løgstrup makes between the ethical
demand and the ‘demand’ involved in the sovereign expressions of life.
expression of life (livsytring): This word can also be translated as ‘mani-
festation of life’ or ‘life manifestation’ (e.g. in Metaphysics II, part V).
Løgstrup’s use of it has its background in Danish versions of German
Lebensphilosophie. This type of philosophy stresses the non- or pre-
rational aspects of human existence and is characterized by Herbert
Schnädelbach as follows: ‘Life, in the sense of that which is always
there to sustain and embrace spirit, culture, and also the individual
consciousness, is the fundamental notion of life-philosophy in all its
different aspects.’¹ In his doctoral dissertation, Løgstrup adopts this idea
and adapts it theologically by stating that life, as God has created it, is the

¹ Herbert Schnädelbach, Philosophy in Germany 1831–1933, translated by Eric Matthews

(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), p. 142.
xii  ’ 

pre-condition for culture. In this connection he designates culture’s

different areas, including knowing, as ‘Livs-Ytringer’.² Here ‘livsytring’
is used in the wide sense of encompassing all culture insofar as it is the
product of pre-cultural life. However, Løgstrup continues by focusing on
the ethical content of pre-cultural life, which is revealed in Jesus’s
spontaneous acts of love.³ It is this aspect of life which later determines
his conception of the ‘suveræne/spontane livsytringer’. These are spon-
taneous other-regarding impulses or ways of conduct such as trust,
sincerity, and compassion. Because ‘expression’ seems to capture the
spontaneous and dynamic nature of these phenomena best, we have
translated ‘livsytring’ as ‘expression of life’, thereby also following what
seems to have become the standard translation in Anglophone discus-
sions of Løgstrup’s ethics.
immediate (umiddelbar): Løgstrup can use this word in the common sense
of ‘direct’ or ‘without intermediary’, but often it refers for him more
specifically to the property of being self-forgetfully engaged in the task at
hand or the relationship with other people. In this sense ‘umiddelbar’ is a
key term for Løgstrup as it is for Kierkegaard, and therefore we have
translated it as ‘immediate’ as is normal in the Kierkegaard literature. In
Løgstrup’s view the sovereign expressions of life belong to the sphere of
immediacy. Hence, he can use ‘umiddelbar’ in connection with them
too, and then the term is used in a sense close to that of ‘spontaneous’.
knowing/knowledge (erkendelse): The Danish term can mean both the
knowledge one possesses and the process of coming to know. In this
respect it is like the English ‘cognition’; but this word is more technical
sounding than ‘erkendelse’ is in Danish. We have therefore translated it
by either ‘knowledge’ or ‘knowing’, depending on context.
Schwärmerei (sværmeri): Luther used this German term as a derogatory
characterization of those evangelical movements that aimed at establish-
ing God’s Kingdom on earth. In a Lutheran context, this term is often
translated as ‘enthusiasm’ or sometimes as ‘fanaticism’, but neither term
is ideal in English, so we have decided to use the German word, which is
also used in English and appears in the Oxford English Dictionary,
where ‘Schwärmerei’ is defined as follows: ‘Religious zeal, fanaticism,
extravagant enthusiasm for a cause or a person.’ In the present work

² K. E. Løgstrup, Den erkendelsesteoretiske Konflikt, §22. For full bibliographic details, see the
Select Bibliography.
³ K. E. Løgstrup, Den erkendelsesteoretiske Konflikt, §24.
  ’  xiii

Løgstrup uses the term as the designation of an over-enthusiastic ideal-

ism that aims at establishing God’s Kingdom on earth, which he, like
Luther, regards as unrealistic, because it does not take account of the
wickedness and limitations of human nature. The corresponding adjec-
tive is ‘schwärmerisch’, and a ‘Schwärmer’ is a person who cherishes
such idealism.
taking over (overtagelse): By the expression ‘at overtage sig selv’ (to take
over oneself ) Kierkegaard means relating consciously to and accepting
one’s concrete, real self and its history, including its unfavourable
aspects, in order to lead a responsible life on these conditions. In Part
III, Chapter 8 Løgstrup uses this expression polemically against
Kierkegaard, when he writes: ‘the task is not to take over existence and
its conditions with the abstract and negative self, but to take over the
interpersonal situation with the sovereign expressions of life’ (89/119).
That is to say, one should not relate reflectively to oneself but, turned
outwards towards others, one’s acts should be guided by the sovereign
expressions of life. In order to maintain the verbal similarity with
Kierkegaard’s expression, we have translated ‘overtagelse/at overtage’
in this context as ‘taking over/to take over’ respectively.
the universal (det almene): The Danish term can mean the universal, the
general, the ordinary, the public and what is common for all. In
Kierkegaard, the term is used in accordance with the Hegelian under-
standing of ethics as the objective spirit as realized in concrete institu-
tions like marriage and the state. Kierkegaard can thus speak about being
married as ‘realisere det almene’ in the sense of realizing that which
applies to everyone. We have chosen to use ‘the universal’ throughout,
because this seems the best way to retain this Kierkegaardian conception.
Acknowledgements

We are very grateful to the following for their helpful comments on previous
versions of this translation: Alexander Altonji, Tom Angier, Michael Au-
Mullaney, David Bugge, Svein Aage Christoffersen, and Bo Kristian Holm.
We are also grateful to Simon Thornton for editorial assistance.
A Chronology of Løgstrup’s Life and Works

1905 (2 September) Born in Copenhagen, Denmark

1923–30 Studies theology at the University of Copenhagen while also fol-
lowing lectures on philosophy, in particular Frithiof Brandt’s series
of lectures on Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason
1930–35 Research visits at various universities, mainly in Germany, but also
in France, Switzerland, and Austria
1932 Awarded the gold medal for his prize essay (similar to a PhD
dissertation) on Max Scheler’s phenomenological approach to
ethics: En fremstilling og vurdering af Max Scheler’s: ‘Der
Formalismus in der Ethik und die materiale Wertethik’ [An
Exposition and Evaluation of Max Scheler’s: ‘Formalism in Ethics
and Material Ethics of Value’] (published 2016)
1935 Marriage to Rosemarie Pauly (1914–2005); they had five children
1936–43 Returns to Denmark. Lutheran pastor on Funen. Becomes part of
the Tidehverv movement
1943 Defends his higher doctoral dissertation Den erkendelsesteoretiske
Konflikt mellem den transcendentalfilosofiske Idealisme og Teologien
[The Epistemological Conflict between Transcendental Idealism
and Theology], which was published in 1942 (new Danish critical
edition published 2011). Becomes professor of ethics and philoso-
phy of religion at Aarhus University, Denmark
1944 Goes underground for the remainder of World War II due to his
involvement in the resistance movement
1948 Earliest signs of disagreement with Tidehverv
1950 Gives a series of lectures on Kierkegaard and Heidegger at the Freie
Universität Berlin, published the same year as Kierkegaards und
Heideggers Existenzanalyse und ihr Verhältnis zur Verkündigung
[Kierkegaard’s and Heidegger’s Analysis of Existence and Its
Relation to Proclamation] (Danish publication 2013)
1952 Kants filosofi I [Kant’s Philosophy I] (reprinted in 1970 as Part 1 of
Kants kritik af erkendelsen og refleksionen [Kant’s Critique of
Knowledge and Reflection])
xviii    ø ’    

1956 Den etiske fordring [The Ethical Demand]

1961 Breaks with Tidehverv (final break in 1964) Kunst og etik [Art and
Ethics] Becomes a member of the Danish Academy
1965 Kants æstetik [Kant’s Aesthetics]
1968 Opgør med Kierkegaard [Controverting Kierkegaard]
1970 Kants kritik af erkendelsen og refleksionen [Kant’s Critique of
Knowledge and Reflection]
1971 Etiske begreber og problemer [Ethical Concepts and Problems] pub-
lished as a contribution to an anthology on ethics and Christian
faith (published as a book in 1996)
1972 Norm og spontaneitet [Norm and Spontaneity]
1974 Awarded the Amalienborg Prize. This prize was inaugurated in
1972, and is awarded by the Queen of Denmark to an outstanding
Danish scholar or writer
1976 Vidde og prægnans [Breadth and Concision], the first volume of the
Metafysik [Metaphysics] I–IV series
1978 Metafysik IV: Skabelse og tilintetgørelse [Creation and Annihilation]
1981 Dies on 20 November in his home in Hyllested, north-east of
Aarhus
1982 System og symbol [System and Symbol]
1983 Metafysik II: Kunst og erkendelse [Art and Knowledge]
1984 Metafysik III: Ophav og omgivelse [Source and Surrounding]
1984 Det uomtvistelige [What Is Incontrovertible]
1987 Solidaritet og kærlighed og andre essays [Solidarity and Love and
Other Essays]
1988 Udfordringer [Challenges]
1992 Kære Hal—Kære Koste [Dear Hal—Dear Koste] (letter correspond-
ence, reprinted and expanded in 2010 in Venskab og strid
[Friendship and Strife])
1995 Prædikener fra Sandager-Holevad [Sermons from Sandager-
Holevad]
1996 Martin Heidegger
1999 Prædikenen og dens Tekst [The Sermon and Its Text]
2010 Venskab og strid [Friendship and Strife] (letter correspondence)
 Introduction
Bjørn Rabjerg

1. Controverting Kierkegaard
The Danish title of the present book, Opgør med Kierkegaard, is difficult to translate
into English. The word opgør has a very dramatic meaning involving a showdown or
face-off, but it also means something quite undramatic—or at least not terribly
exciting—as a term from accounting, where it means to settle an account or a
balance sheet. To have an opgør involves engaging in a controversy with someone,
where the matter dealt with is to be properly settled; it involves a confrontation and
is intended to ‘set the record straight’, so to speak, so the expression ‘to settle a score’
comes close. For this reason, Showdown with Kierkegaard, or Settling the Score with
Kierkegaard would have been more exciting options when translating the title, as
would probably Controversy with Kierkegaard. However, we have chosen to stick
with Controverting Kierkegaard, mainly because it is accurate, meaning that it
involves an ongoing dispute with someone where one engages in a controversy,
but also because this translation has been used in the past and is thus now standard
throughout the Anglophone Løgstrup literature.
Controverting Kierkegaard (published in very late 1967 and for that reason
usually dated 1968)¹ is Løgstrup’s second main work after The Ethical
Demand.² Almost simultaneously (in 1968), it was published in German as
Auseinandersetzung mit Kierkegaard,³ the second volume of a series of three
books (1966, 1968, and 1972) under the joint title Kontroverse um Kierkegaard

¹ The book came out just before Christmas in 1967, but for technical reasons books published
this late in the year were recorded as published in the following year. Therefore, Opgør med
Kierkegaard is officially a 1968 release and is generally referred to as such.
² Knud Ejler Løgstrup was born in Copenhagen in 1905 and died in 1981 in his home outside
Aarhus, where he had spent most of his life as Professor of Ethics and Philosophy of Religion. For
further biographical details, please consult the chronology of Løgstrup’s life on pp. xvii–xviii. It
may also be useful to read the section ‘The Ethical Demand in Context’ from the ‘Introduction’ to
Løgstrup’s The Ethical Demand, pp. xx–xxv.
³ In his ‘Afterword’ to the Danish 2013 edition of Opgør med Kierkegaard, Svein Aage Christoffersen
gives a detailed account of the differences between the Danish and the German editions. Most notable
are the additions to the German edition of (1) a chapter on Rudolf Bultmann’s view on the historical
xx 

und Grundtvig [Controversy Concerning Kierkegaard and Grundtvig].⁴ It is a

theological work in a much more obvious way than The Ethical Demand,
which becomes clear already in the first sentence where Løgstrup emphasizes
that what he is interested in is ‘the general tendency and implications of his
[Kierkegaard’s, BR] understanding of Christianity’ (lxvii/9).⁵ This impression
is only strengthened in Part I, which deals with Løgstrup’s view on the role of
‘the historical Jesus’, which is tied to his concept of revelation. However, in Part
III, Løgstrup introduces the key concept of the sovereign expressions of life (and
their contrary term, our circling thoughts and emotions), which—although they
do play an important theological role—can be taken as philosophical terms and
thus do not have to rely on Løgstrup’s theological position. Moreover, as it turns
out, Løgstrup’s thoughts concerning the historical Jesus are not without philo-
sophical importance either, because they show how Løgstrup can make the
transition from theology (revelation) to philosophy (reason) without ending up
in ‘obscurantism’, as he calls it in The Ethical Demand.⁶ It is thus worth pointing
out that although Løgstrup’s thoughts in the following have interesting philo-
sophical perspectives, his controversy targets Kierkegaard’s theology, and as
such it does not involve the more philosophical aspects of Kierkegaard (e.g. his
critique of Hegel). However, Løgstrup does also engage with contemporary non-
religious existentialism through discussions with Sartre and Jaspers, and when
taking this together with the fact that his engagement with Kierkegaard is firmly
tied to contemporary Kierkegaardianism, it shows that Løgstrup’s engagement
with Kierkegaard in the book is first and foremost aimed at the contemporary
intellectual debates rather than at Kierkegaard himself.

Jesus followed by a discussion on this; (2) texts from the ‘Polemical Epilogue’ of The Ethical
Demand that had been omitted in the German 1958 translation; and (3) a new epilogue, ‘Epilog
über die Existenztheologie’ [‘Epilogue on Existence Theology’], relating the book more explicitly
to contemporary theological Existentialism; cf. Svein Aage Christoffersen, ‘Efterskrift’
[‘Afterword’]. When not given in the text, full bibliographical details are given in the ‘Select
Bibliography’. Any abbreviations that are used are explained in the Translators’ Preface.
⁴ Løgstrup wrote a short ‘Vorwort’ [‘Foreword’] to the German edition, explaining the context
to the non-Danish reader (Kontroverse um Kierkegaard und Grundtvig, Volume I: Das
Menschliche und das Christliche [The Human and the Christian], Götz Harbsmeier and Knud
Ejler Løgstrup (eds.) (München: Chr. Kaiser Verlag, 1966), pp. 10–11). The German foreword
has been included in this translation because Løgstrup here clarifies how the book is not just a
critique of Kierkegaard, but also of contemporary Existentialism, and how he sees an alliance
between nihilistic tendencies in Positivism and Kierkegaardian Existentialism. The three German
volumes frame the Danish theologian N. F. S. Grundtvig as an important voice against these
tendencies (for more on Grundtvig, see §2.1).
⁵ Unattributed references in the text are to the present book, followed by a reference to the
Danish edition. Other references to books by Løgstrup are given first to English translations
where available, and then to the Danish originals.
⁶ The Ethical Demand, p. 4/Den etiske fordring, p. 10.
  xxi

We will take a closer look at the main ideas of the book below (§3), but as
its background and context are both complex and important we will turn to
this first.

2. Background and Context

Controverting Kierkegaard is the climax of a dispute between Løgstrup and
contemporary Kierkegaardianism, which had begun already twenty years
before its publication; but the relationship between Løgstrup and Kierkegaard
was not always one of conflict. When Løgstrup began his studies in Theology at
the University of Copenhagen in 1923, Kierkegaard had only just very recently
become the centre of attention. In fact, it was a publication the year before,
namely the second edition of Karl Barth’s The Epistle to the Romans in 1922,
which brought Kierkegaard to the theological and philosophical centre stage
(even in his native country Denmark), and therefore Barth and Kierkegaard
were main topics when Løgstrup entered the university.
Two people were particularly significant to the reception of Kierkegaard in
the 1920s in Copenhagen, who also came to be highly influential on Løgstrup.
Among the professors, the newly appointed (1921) Professor of Systematic
Theology, Eduard Geismar (1871–1939), had read Kierkegaard as early as the
late 1880s, and he had spent two years abroad primarily in Germany in
1897–99, where he became acquainted with Rudolf Eucken (1846–1926) and
his idealistic philosophy, studying with him in Jena for a year.⁷ In 1922, the
year following his appointment, Geismar travelled to Germany with the main
purpose of establishing contact with those German theologians who were
taking an interest in Kierkegaard, visiting Karl Barth in Göttingen and
Friedrich Gogarten in Munich, both of whom were at the heart of what
became known as dialectical theology and of the journal Zwischen den
Zeiten [Between the Times]. Geismar soon picked up on the thoughts in
Barth’s anti-idealistic theology, and from the beginning of his university
career, he encouraged his students to read both Barth and Kierkegaard. His
first substantial work on Kierkegaard came in 1923, Det etiske Stadium hos
Søren Kierkegaard [The Ethical Stage in Søren Kierkegaard], and in 1926–28

⁷ Put very briefly, idealism in general was conceived of as a humanism centred on the idea that
human beings should and could live up to the moral ideals, and Christian idealism saw faith as a
crucial tool in this cultivation of the individual person’s moral character. Eucken was a prime
proponent and received the Nobel Prize for literature in 1908 for his contributions within
idealistic philosophy of life (Lebensphilosophie).
xxii 

came his six-volume monograph, Søren Kierkegaard, Livsudvikling og

Forfattervirksomhed [Søren Kierkegaard: His Personal Development and His
Work as an Author]. Geismar found himself in a difficult position of tension
between an Eucken-inspired idealism and Barth’s anti-idealism. His
Kierkegaard studies can be characterized as an attempt to mediate between
the two by focusing on Works of Love and the edifying discourses rather than
on the late works of Kierkegaard, which he found to be too hostile towards life
in finitude, or the human as he calls it.⁸
The other important figure was a student at The Faculty of Theology.
Kristoffer Olesen Larsen (1899–1964) had read Kierkegaard since he was a
teenager, and in 1923 he handed in a prize dissertation manuscript
under the title Søren Kierkegaards Lære om Paradoxet og denne Læres etiske
Konsekvenser med særligt Hensyn til Forholdet til Hegel [Søren Kierkegaard’s
Teaching on the Paradox and the Ethical Consequences of This Teaching with
Special Reference to the Relationship to Hegel], for which he was awarded the
gold medal.⁹ In his prize dissertation, Olesen Larsen’s Kierkegaard reading is
clearly influenced by Geismar, but only a few years later, beginning in 1926 when
Geismar’s first volume on Kierkegaard appeared, Olesen Larsen started to voice
a severe criticism of Geismar’s more idealistic interpretation of Kierkegaard.
Olesen Larsen’s critique of Geismar was part of a wider Danish theological
youth uprising against idealism, and piety in general, which came to be known
under the name of the journal at its centre, Tidehverv [Turn of the Times]—
clearly inspired by German dialectical theology and Zwischen den Zeiten.
Where Geismar had sought to connect Kierkegaard with a version of idealism,
Olesen Larsen and the Tidehverv movement based their theology on a dis-
tinctly anti-idealistic reading of Kierkegaard, with the young Karl Barth as an
important source of inspiration.¹⁰ As it turned out, Olesen Larsen’s critique of
Geismar (which, given the tone set by the Tidehverv members, often took the
form of downright ridicule) was to triumph to such an extent that Olesen

⁸ For more information on Geismar, see Jens Holger Schjørring, ‘Barth—Geismar—

Tidehverv’, Dansk Teologisk Tidsskrift, 39 (1976), pp. 73–105; and ‘Geismar og Brunner’
[‘Geismar and Brunner’], Dansk Teologisk Tidsskrift, 39 (1976), pp. 166–95.
⁹ The prize dissertation was a call for students to write a dissertation on a specific topic and
with a set title over a period of fourteen months. After submitting the anonymized manuscript, a
committee assessed it, and the winner received the gold medal. Løgstrup won a similar prize in
1932, as discussed below.
¹⁰ ‘The young Karl Barth’ refers to Barth’s writings from the first half of the 1920s. Later on, in
the late 1920s and early 1930s, major differences between Barth and Tidehverv became obvious.
This led to a harsh critique by Tidehverv of Barth’s new and more dogmatic path when Barth
visited Denmark in 1933, but also to an important alliance between Tidehverv and Rudolf
Bultmann, who attended many of Tidehverv’s summer meetings.
  xxiii

Larsen became widely perceived as the leading Kierkegaard scholar in

Denmark in the 1930s through to the 1960s, and as such Geismar came out
on the losing side. In fact, it could be argued that Olesen Larsen succeeded in
an almost total assassination of Geismar’s character and of Geismar as an
intellectual, leaving him more or less ousted after his death in 1939 and largely
forgotten even today.¹¹ Therefore, Kierkegaard’s importance and impact on
Danish intellectual life through most of Løgstrup’s life was intimately con-
nected to Tidehverv and Olesen Larsen. For this reason, Olesen Larsen’s
Kierkegaard-inspired theology plays a major role in Løgstrup’s controversy
or showdown with Kierkegaard and thus requires a closer inspection.¹²

2.1 Tidehverv: Luther, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, and Danish Protestantism

To start out by putting it briefly, Olesen Larsen’s reading of Kierkegaard has
what Kierkegaard called the infinite qualitative difference between the human
being and God as its foundation.¹³ In his Epistle to the Romans, Barth had
stated that this motif was the systematic foundation of his dialectical the-
ology,¹⁴ but to Olesen Larsen it was clear that Barth did not in fact remain
committed to the absoluteness and radicality of the opposition between God’s
infinity and human finitude. Therefore, Olesen Larsen’s main project was to
reaffirm the absolute difference, seeing the word of God as a radical contra-
diction of everything human and finite.¹⁵

¹¹ However, one of Løgstrup’s main objections, namely that Kierkegaard’s view of

Christianity is hostile towards life in finitude (the purely human), probably originates in
Geismar’s Kierkegaard reading and can thus be said to have lived on.
¹² Here we also need to mention the influence coming from Løgstrup’s colleague and
Kierkegaard expert Johannes Sløk (1916–2001). Much like Olesen Larsen, Sløk read Kierkegaard
as a theological existentialist. However, Løgstrup preferred to avoid public discussions with Sløk,
and so Olesen Larsen plays a much more visible role in Løgstrup’s work, although Sløk’s reading of
Kierkegaard certainly plays a role in the background. For more on Løgstrup’s disagreement with
Sløk, see Christoffersen, ‘Efterskrift’ [‘Afterword’], pp. 183–4 and 187–92.
¹³ Cf. Practice in Christianity, SKS 12: 132/KW 20: 128.
¹⁴ Cf. Karl Barth, Der Römerbrief, 2nd edition (Munich: Chr. Kaiser Verlag, 1922), p. xiii; and
The Epistle to the Romans, translated by Edwyn C. Hoskyns (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1968), p. 10.
¹⁵ There are clear parallels to Bultmann, which help explain why Bultmann visited Tidehverv’s
summer meetings and was a popular speaker. However, Olesen Larsen and Tidehverv should not be
seen as mere Bultmann disciples, as many of the central points in Tidehverv’s theology developed
before they engaged with Bultmann and thus developed independently and with important
differences. In a letter to Gogarten dating from 4 November 1928, Bultmann praises Olesen
Larsen emphatically as a theologian and Kierkegaard scholar, referring to him as an ‘überragende
Gestalt’ [‘outstanding figure’] (Hermann Götz Göckeritz, Rudolf Bultmann—Friedrich Gogarten,
Briefwechsel [Correspondence] 1921–1967 (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2002), p. 144).
xxiv 

As already stated, theology in Denmark prior to the founding of Tidehverv in

1926 was at its core idealistic, the dominant theological current being Liberal
Theology (or Liberal Protestantism), which put an emphasis on personal con-
version and commitment to Christian faith and moral improvement, seeing
Jesus as a moral ideal and faith as founded in a personal relationship with
Jesus.¹⁶ As such, Liberal Theology in Denmark was based on an optimistic view
on the possibilities for improvement of each person’s moral character and for
culture (a term used to focus on human-made society such as political institu-
tions and social life) to develop and grow (moral and cultural perfectionism).
Another important Christian current in Denmark at the time was the Danish
Christian Student Federation (Danmarks kristelige studenterforbund), which was
connected to the YMCA and inspired by John Mott’s (1865–1955) World’s
Student Christian Federation. Along with a third important current, the Danish
Inner Mission, it was more conservative and sceptical in its view of culture than
Liberal Theology, but common to all three was their focus on piety and morality
as deeply rooted in Christian faith. Finally, Grundtvigianism, based on the
theology of N. F. S. Grundtvig (1783–1872), was a fourth major influence.
One of Grundtvig’s main points was to focus on human life here and now
and see Christianity in the light of this, and thus not as mainly concerning
transcendence and a hereafter. This view is encapsulated in his dictum: ‘Human
first, and Christian thereafter’ (‘menneske først og kristen så’).¹⁷
Even though these currents within contemporary Christianity took them-
selves to be Lutheran, Tidehverv saw its attack on them as a return to a more
fundamental Lutheranism. Central to the attack is the aforementioned
Kierkegaardian notion of the infinite qualitative difference between God and
the human, which had at least three important consequences:
Firstly, to Olesen Larsen (and Tidehverv) the infinite qualitative difference
was understood as a direct rejection of idealism (perfectionism) of all kinds,
because it precisely emphasized the total impossibility for any human striving
in trying to connect with or come closer to God. If the difference is infinite, no
finite human striving or attempt at establishing a connection could succeed. In
Lutheran terms, God is Majesty while we humans are sinners and we are
therefore unable to rise above our nature and station. In fact, to Tidehverv, the

¹⁶ The term ‘liberal’ refers to the liberal stance taken towards many of Christianity’s dogmas,
such as the virgin birth of Jesus, where liberal theology focused on ethics and the inner religious
feeling instead.
¹⁷ N. F. S. Grundtvig, ‘Menneske først og Christen saa’, translated in his Selected Writings:
N. F. S. Grundtvig, edited by Johannes Knudsen, Enok Mortensen, and Ernest D. Nielsen
(Philadelphia, PA: Fortress Press, 1976), pp. 140–1.
  xxv

very striving to rise above sin—that is, the striving for moral improvement and
the ambition to grow through faith, which was so prevalent in idealistic
theology—was understood as sin in its clearest form. As N. O. Jensen
(Luther expert and one of the main voices in early Tidehverv) expressed it:
‘[our attempts to improve ourselves, BR] only entangle us even more deeply in
sin. For indeed, real sin is the unwillingness to settle for being mere sinners
before God’.¹⁸ This theological move was perceived of as a radicalization of the
concept of sin. Where sin had previously been seen as gradual by the pious and
moralistic Christians, something you could be entangled in to various degrees
depending on your moral character and your degree of faith, it was now
understood radically as the fundamental category of human existence. Here
Nietzsche’s critique of Christianity—especially the concepts of neighbour love,
morality, and pity—was an important inspiration for Tidehverv, and in this
light they saw radical sin as radical egotism, where this egotism is something
we are powerless to escape from, and where every attempt to escape from it is
always already egotistically motivated. If I want to be good, then it is always
already something I want; and the concern with what I want and who I want to
be is always already a self-centred and self-concerned enterprise and thus
deeply entangled in self-centred motivation. We find this very clearly formu-
lated by Løgstrup in one of his early articles from 1936, ‘Enhver moralsk
Tanke er en Bagtanke’ [‘Every Moral Motivation Is an Ulterior Motivation’]:

Christian Ethics is purportedly a so-called ethics of attitude [sindelagsetik, BR].

[ . . . ] But in the name of morality to take an interest in one’s attitude of mind brings
about a self-centredness, a pharisaism, which totally corrupts the attitude.¹⁹

Therefore, Løgstrup can conclude, ‘pharisaism is the transcendental condition

of any ethics of attitude’, and so—if ethics involves being judged by our
attitude, will, and intentions—human beings are powerless to do the good.²⁰

¹⁸ N. O. Jensen ‘Retfærdiggørelse og helliggørelse hos Luther’ [‘Justification and Sanctification

in Luther’], Tidehverv 8 (1936), pp. 127–36; reprinted in Luthers Gudstro [Luther’s Faith in God]
(Copenhagen: G.E.C. Gads Forlag, 1959), p. 93 (my translation).
¹⁹ ‘Enhver moralsk Tanke er en Bagtanke’, p. 431 (my translation). ‘Sindelagsetik’ is difficult
to translate to English. It is the same word as the German ‘Gesinnungsethik’, which refers to the
attitude of mind and thus the intentions of an agent in a moral situation, and so whether they
have a good (i.e. a morally praiseworthy) will. However, Løgstrup’s objection (along with
Tidehverv) is that the will is never good, because to (will to) take an interest in the moral
praiseworthiness of one’s will or attitude of mind is by definition tantamount to being self-
interested. However, importantly, later on when Løgstrup introduces the sovereign expressions
of life, he provides a way of freeing the will to actually will the good of the other person.
²⁰ ‘Enhver moralsk Tanke er en Bagtanke’, p. 432 (my translation).
xxvi 

Secondly, the infinite qualitative difference and the radical conception of sin
imply that also on an epistemic level we are completely cut off from God. Just
as we cannot do what is good, we are unable to know what is true (i.e. to have
knowledge about the highest truth, knowledge of God and God’s being).
Reason, as Luther (in)famously put it, is the Devil’s whore,²¹ and thus is
entirely unfit for relating to God. Knowledge and reason only concern our
relative world of finite truths and ends, such as calculating your wage increase,
planning how to escape back home from your in-laws in time for Champions
League football, or predicting that three tablespoons of salt in a Yorkshire
pudding would ruin it. Therefore, the human relation to God, that is, to
absolute truths and ends, takes place in a completely different category,
namely in faith. For this reason, revelation became the crucial category in
Tidehverv’s Lutheran theology, because revelation is God’s word and message
to us, to which we can only respond in faith (or lack of faith), as opposed to
everything we ourselves can say to each other, and where we can respond
through our own words and reasoning. The Christian proclamation²² is God’s
Word to us revealed through Christ, and only in our hearing this message,
only in our being addressed by God through his Word, do we ‘meet’ God.
Here, Tidehverv’s roots in the writings of the young Karl Barth are plain to see:
God is the wholly other and thus completely different from everything else.
Therefore, his word sounds not from anything relatable in our finite world, but
it resonates to us perpendicularly or directly from above (senkrecht von oben),
from God’s radical transcendence. God’s word is alien to anything in this world,
because this world is infinitely different from God and thus marked by God’s
absolute absence. Indeed, the absolute nothingness of this world is a central
theme in Olesen Larsen’s theological existentialism—and (as we shall see) a
central theme in Løgstrup’s confrontation with both him and Kierkegaard.
Thirdly, when all human striving for moral improvement through piety is
both impossible (due to the infinite qualitative difference) and condemned
because it is self-centred (the radical conception of sin), the task for us as human
beings is to live our life in finitude faithful to the Earth (‘være jorden tro’),

²¹ WA 18: 164/LW 40: 174.

²² Which in all its vagueness (precisely what is included in ‘the Proclamation’?) became a
standard phrase in both Tidehverv and for Løgstrup, cf. as examples Løgstrup’s ‘Introduction’ in
The Ethical Demand and his lectures on Kierkegaard’s and Heidegger’s Analysis of Existence and
its Relation to Proclamation. The Danish word for ‘proclamation’ (forkyndelse) also means the
act of preaching, that is, to proclaim the word of God. For a discussion on proclamation in
Løgstrup, see Bennett, Faulkner, and Stern, ‘Indirect Communication, Authority, and
Proclamation as a Normative Power: Løgstrup’s Critique of Kierkegaard’.
  xxvii

which was one of the classical Tidehverv slogans.²³ Put in Lutheran terms, we
must live our lives where we are and as we are, without striving beyond
the earthly realm, but live our life in our calling and station (‘livet i kald og
stand’), here and now. Again, the inspiration from Nietzsche is clear, for
example from his critique in Thus Spoke Zarathustra of the ‘Backworldsmen’
or the ‘Hinterworldly’ (‘die Hinterweltler’), namely those who cast their fancy on
a world beyond this world.²⁴ Another inspiration is Kierkegaard’s final text from
Either/Or: ‘Ultimatum’, the Pastor’s sermon on ‘The Upbuilding That Lies in the
Thought That in Relation to God We Are Always in the Wrong’. The upbuild-
ing element consists precisely in that when we realize that we are never right, but
always fail entirely in the (loving and forgiving) eye of God, we are set free from
our striving and our worry about God’s disapproving eye, and thus set free to
live ‘just as humans’, as Olesen Larsen puts it again and again in his writings.
Therefore, according to Olesen Larsen, Christianity means to love the world:
‘We love the world because it is earthly, nothing but earthly, and human
existence because it is human, nothing but human, and if we are to love
human ideals they must be anything but divine.’²⁵ Humanly speaking, the
world is a joy to live in, but Christianly speaking it is mere nothingness: ‘And
yet we understand that for God, this world is nothing but dust and ashes, and
the human being is a sinner through and through.’²⁶
But if this is the truth about the Christian message and our existence, that
we cannot do the good and cannot improve, why then bother at all about
whether we are doing the right thing or not? If God is dead then everything is
permitted, as is famously said, but does Tidehverv’s theology not in fact lead to
exactly the same conclusion: if God exists (in this way) is everything then
permitted? Luther’s response would come in the shape of his doctrine con-
cerning the uses of the law.²⁷ The Lutheran idea is that the law is God’s law, a

²³ Inspired by Nietzsche: ‘I beseech you, my brothers, remain faithful to the earth and do not
believe those who speak to you of extraterrestrial hopes! They are mixers of poisons whether they
know it or not’ (Friedrich Nietzsche, Also sprach Zarathustra, Kritische Studienausgabe, Volume
4 (München: De Gruyter 1999), p. 15/Thus Spoke Zarathustra, translated by Adrian Del Caro
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), p. 6).
²⁴ Nietzsche, Also sprach Zarathustra, pp. 35–8/20–2.
²⁵ Kristoffer Olesen Larsen, 1927, ‘Et Stykke Krigspsykose’ [‘A Fragment of War Psychosis’],
Tidehverv, 1 (1927), pp. 129–36; reprinted in Kristoffer Olesen Larsen, At være mennske:
Udvalgte Arbejeder I, edited by Johannes Horstmann and V. Olesen Larsen (Copenhagen: Gad
Forlag, 1967), p. 38 (my translation).
²⁶ Kristoffer Olesen Larsen, 1927, ‘Et Stykke Krigspsykose’ [‘A Fragment of War Psychosis’],
p. 38 (my translation).
²⁷ As we shall see in Part II of Controverting Kierkegaard, Løgstrup makes the claim that in
fact Tidehverv (and Kierkegaard) are unable to respond to the problem of passivity. The problem
is that they do not follow Luther in juxtaposing the two uses of the law, because they and
Kierkegaard end up subordinating the first use to the second use: cf. 44–5/64–5.
xxviii 

natural ethical law (lex naturalis) which we know because it is written in our
hearts and is thus available to us through reason and conscience.²⁸ Thus, we
know what is right and wrong, meaning that we know what we ought to do
even though we are unable to comply due to our selfishness. We are required
to love our neighbour, but our inability to actually love them does not set us
free from all ethical requirements, but rather it places us under the demand
that we should act as if we actually loved them.²⁹ This is why Luther distin-
guishes between two uses of the law:³⁰ The first use of the law (usus civilis),
also called the political use of the law, is when the law is used as a cultural
codification which regulates society through either fear of punishment or the
benefit of rewards so that citizens act according to the law (this involves both
the actual judicial laws of the legal system and social norms where perpetrators
are socially ostracized, while those who live up to the standards are praised).
Here, our actions are central, and the law is thus used to contain sin and to
keep the wickedness at bay, so as to protect the neighbour. However, to act
according to the law does not amount to fulfilling the law, because the real
function of the law is spiritual, which is the second use of the law (usus
theologicus). The spiritual use is focused on our spirit or attitude of mind
(German: Gesinnung, Danish: sindelag), because what the law really demands
is unselfish love for the neighbour. However, this is an impossibility, because
while we may act as if we loved, the law cannot make us love the neighbour,³¹ and
thus the law in its second use (also called its convicting use) confronts us with our
own inadequacy, our sin, and serves as a guide, chastening our self-indulgence
and directing us towards Christ and the Gospel.³² So, we are unable to fulfil the
spirit of the law (second use), but the laws, norms, and regulations of society can
make us perform the actions required by the letter of the law (first use).
Thus, these three aspects of the infinite qualitative difference (namely the
impossibility of both moral improvement and knowledge of God, and the need

²⁸ This is, of course, something Luther bases on Paul, cf. Rom 2:15: ‘They show that what the
law requires is written on their hearts, to which their own conscience also bears witness; and their
conflicting thoughts will accuse or perhaps excuse them’ (New Revised Standard Version).
²⁹ Cf. Løgstrup’s position on ethics in The Ethical Demand, where the demand is a demand to
love the neighbour, but as such also in a radical sense an unfulfillable demand, because the demand
for love precisely shows that love is absent, which is why we ultimately, and in a radical way, fall short
of what is demanded. Here we clearly see the influence from Tidehverv on Løgstrup’s position.
³⁰ Cf. WA 40.I: 479–80/LW 26: 308–9.
³¹ Again, we see how this lies in the background of Løgstrup’s work, cf. The Ethical Demand,
pp. 124–6/Den etiske fordring, pp. 164–7, where the presence of the demand precisely shows us
the absence of love, and where also the demand as a demand cannot bring love about, and we
must therefore act merely as if we loved. Or, as Løgstrup puts it in Controverting Kierkegaard:
‘Morality is the Provision of Substitute Motives for Substitute Actions’ (96/127).
³² Yet again Luther relies on Paul, cf. Gal. 3:24: ‘Therefore the law was our disciplinarian until
Christ came, so that we might be justified by faith’ (New Revised Standard Version).
  xxix

to remain faithful to the Earth) all point in the direction of human impotence
versus God’s omnipotence, which lie at the core of Tidehverv’s theology. We
are powerless to do the good and to meet and know God, and the law faces us
with our inability to do what is really demanded of us; by contrast, God has the
power to speak to us and thus to meet us—making himself known to us.
Tidehverv’s theological uprising against the prevailing understanding of
Christianity in Denmark was undertaken in a highly polemical rhetoric and
aimed at the most prominent and respected representatives of ‘the old’
idealistic, pious, and moralistic theologians, with Olesen Larsen’s attack on
Geismar as a prime example.³³ As a result, an unknown author sarcastically
coined the supposed ‘Tidehverv Credo’ as God is everything, I am nothing, and
you are an idiot!

2.2 Løgstrup, Tidehverv, and Kierkegaard

The journal Tidehverv surfaced in October 1926, almost precisely at the
halfway point of Løgstrup’s theological studies from 1923 to 1930. He was
thus at the centre of events although he was not at first part of the Tidehverv
movement. On the contrary, he came from a background typical of the pre-
Tidehverv times, where idealistic Christianity heavily influenced his childhood
home, and he was part of the Danish YMCA. He would later refer to this part
of his life, including his childhood Christianity, as his ‘pietist phase’,³⁴ and he
did not openly detach himself from Liberal Theology and YMCA-Christianity
until after returning to Denmark to become a Lutheran Pastor in 1936.³⁵
However, his Prize dissertation on Max Scheler’s phenomenological ethics,
written while in Strasbourg and Göttingen in 1930–32, shows quite clear signs
of early Barthian influence and brings him close to Tidehverv, although he did
not speak at their summer meeting until 1939 and only had his first publica-
tion in Tidehverv in 1940. Løgstrup’s position was undoubtedly a difficult one
on a personal level. Geismar had done much to help him over several years and
had written very highly of Løgstrup both in his evaluation of his Prize
dissertation and concerning the manuscript Løgstrup submitted in his first
attempt to be awarded the higher doctoral degree in 1933. Løgstrup was thus

³³ In this way, Tidehverv can be said to repeat in their own time Kierkegaard’s polemic against
the complacency of Christendom in his.
³⁴ Solidaritet og kærlighed [Solidarity and Love], p. 147.
³⁵ Løgstrup spent most of the time from 1930–35 at universities in Germany, but also in
France, Austria, and Switzerland.
xxx 

stuck in a tricky situation, with loyalty to Geismar on the one hand, but with
clear sympathies for Tidehverv and thus the new anti-idealism on the other
hand (while Løgstrup was also probably for some time unsure about his own
theological position). In addition, Olesen Larsen’s rhetoric against Geismar
certainly did not make it any easier for Løgstrup to switch sides. However,
Geismar died in May 1939 (three months before Løgstrup’s first appearance at
a Tidehverv summer meeting), and when World War II broke out, Løgstrup
joined the resistance movement along with many Tidehverv sympathizers.³⁶
When he became a Professor in Aarhus in 1943, he was as much a part of
Tidehverv as anyone, and the same year he famously wrote in a letter that
‘there are only very few people from whom you can learn so much just from
speaking with them as you can from Olesen Larsen’.³⁷
As we can see from the course of events, Kierkegaard was progressive in the
1920s and in the following decades. Although Geismar had tried to turn
Kierkegaard into an ally of idealism, Olesen Larsen had wrenched him out
of Geismar’s hands and used him as a fierce weapon aimed at Geismar himself
and anyone connected to his theology—and those found to be even more
idealistically starry-eyed than him. However, when World War II ended, and
the common enemy had been vanquished, it did not take more than a few years
before the relationship between Løgstrup and Tidehverv started to show cracks.
It began around 1947 and erupted in 1961, followed by an aftershock in 1964
and a culmination in 1967 with the publication of Controverting Kierkegaard,
so it took a long time for it to develop. Løgstrup later wrote that the break was
difficult for him, and up to a point incomprehensible, because he cared a great
deal for many of the people associated with Tidehverv,³⁸ and after the culmin-
ation of the conflict they did not speak again (this included Olesen Larsen for
very obvious reasons, as he died in 1964). We will take a brief look at these
events, before we turn to the main parts of the book itself.

³⁶ Løgstrup had in fact been publicly critical of Hitler and the idea of a Führer from the very
beginning, which led to three feature articles in the Danish newspaper Dagens Nyheder in 1936. In
the first of these, The Nazi’s Philosopher (English translation by Bjørn Rabjerg and Robert Stern
available at https://ethicaldemand.wordpress.com/resources-and-link/), he criticizes Heidegger’s
faith in the notion of the need for a Führer to liberate the German people from the inauthentic
existence of ‘das Man’ (being just a member of the crowd). Løgstrup’s perspective is that following
a Führer is just another way of being inauthentic, of turning oneself into a part of the crowd. The
feature articles are discussed and analysed at length in Hans Hauge, Bjørn Rabjerg, and Sasja
E. M. Stopa, Førerskab og folkestyre [Führerhood and Democracy] (Copenhagen: Fønix, 2021).
³⁷ K. E. Løgstrup and Hal Koch, Venskab og strid [Friendship and Strife], p. 159. We also find a
testimony to Løgstrup’s sympathies towards Tidehverv in the students’ annual Theological Revue in
the 1940s, where Løgstrup was caricatured as Professor Tidestrup, Tide(hverv) + (Løg)strup.
³⁸ Løgstrup discusses this in a letter to the Swedish pastor Margaretha Brandby-Cöster, dated
18 July 1981 (four months before he died). The letter is kept in the Løgstrup Archive, Aarhus
University.
  xxxi

In 1947, Johannes Sløk submitted his higher doctoral dissertation where

among many other things he emphasizes the role of the paradox in
Kierkegaard and thus the total incommensurability between reason/know-
ledge and existence, or in Christian terms: between understanding and
faith.³⁹ Løgstrup’s response (found in his opposition to Sløk’s defence) was
that it is an untenable position to alienate faith and understanding completely
from each other, because surely reason and knowledge must be necessary for
us in an ethical existence, just as surely as Christianity and faith must involve
understanding at least at a very basic level—and therefore the two cannot be
completely at odds.⁴⁰
A few years later, in January 1950, Løgstrup delivered a series of lectures at
the Freie Universität in Berlin on Kierkegaards und Heideggers Existenzanalyse
und ihr Verhältnis zur Verkündigung [Kierkegaard’s and Heidegger’s Analysis
of Existence and Its Relation to Proclamation]. In these lectures, he criticizes
making the idea of Kierkegaard’s incommensurability too radical, stating
explicitly that to eradicate reason, knowledge, and understanding completely
from Christianity will turn Christianity into mere superstition.⁴¹ Rather
than removing philosophy (reasoning, understanding, and knowledge) from
theology, they should be seen as relating to each other in a very important way;
important enough for philosophy (namely to keep it from alienating itself from
its existential basis), but entirely crucial for theology:

The difference between proclamation—the Word in the broadest sense—and

philosophy consists also in the fact that the proclamation is not the result of an
analysis; it cannot be demonstrated; from the standpoint of philosophy, proclam-
ation seems to be nothing but assertions.
But that does not mean that the content of the proclamation is incomprehensible.⁴²

A few sentences later, he produces a key formulation, which he repeats

verbatim six years afterwards in The Ethical Demand: ‘Faith without

³⁹ Johannes Sløk, Forsynstanken: et Forsøg paa en dogmatisk Begrebsbestemmelse [The Idea of

Providence: An Attempt at a Dogmatic Conceptual Analysis] (Hjørring: Expres-Trykkeriets
Forlag, 1947).
⁴⁰ ‘Eksistensfilosofi og Theologi’ [‘Existence Philosophy and Theology’], pp. 15 and 8 (English
translation by Hans Fink and Robert Stern available at https://ethicaldemand.wordpress.com/
resources-and-link/).
⁴¹ Kierkegaard’s and Heidegger’s Analysis of Existence and Its Relation to Proclamation, p. 74/
Kierkegaard og Heideggers eksistensanalyse og dens forhold til forkyndelsen, p. 108.
⁴² Kierkegaard’s and Heidegger’s Analysis of Existence and Its Relation to Proclamation, p. 74/
Kierkegaard og Heideggers eksistensanalyse og dens forhold til forkyndelsen, p. 107.
xxxii 

understanding is not faith, but coercion.’⁴³ Christianity cannot be reduced to

being a proclamation of a completely alien word to us from God as the wholly
other, but ‘it must correspond to something in our existence’, or else become
irrelevant and in the end coercive.⁴⁴
Løgstrup attended many of Tidehverv’s summer meetings through the
1950s, just as he published articles in Tidehverv, which ended up being
included as parts in The Ethical Demand when it appeared in 1956. Nothing
indicates a break between Tidehverv and Løgstrup at this stage, and thus the
discussion took place internally in Tidehverv, rather than as a polemic
between Løgstrup (as an outsider) and Olesen Larsen as Tidehverv’s repre-
sentative. However, this changed at the summer meeting in 1961, when
Løgstrup left immediately after he had given his talk, marching off with his
wife and luggage before the meeting had ended. He felt excommunicated
because his talk was treated with seeming indifference when the chair
(Tidehverv’s main figure, N. I. Heje) had declared that it did not need any
discussion, proceeding immediately to the next speaker, something that was
entirely without precedent in Tidehverv circles.
In 1964, Løgstrup returned to fire a final broadside at the summer meeting,
giving a talk on ‘Two Kinds of Christianity’, where the one was a radical
fideistic and nihilistic Kierkegaardianism (his description of Tidehverv’s and
especially Olesen Larsen’s theology), and the other was Løgstrup’s own pos-
ition. A few years later, Controverting Kierkegaard came out as a much more
elaborate exposition of the same schism: Kierkegaardianism vs. Løgstrup’s
own alternative.
To conclude the background and contextualization of the present book,
Controverting Kierkegaard obviously deals with Kierkegaard, but as we have
seen, it is Kierkegaard in a specific context, namely the existentialist reception
of him primarily by Olesen Larsen and the Tidehverv movement (and cer-
tainly also Sløk, although he never associated himself with Tidehverv, which
could be due to the fact that Sløk and Heje disliked each other, and that Sløk
didn’t want to be part of a movement). This is important to bear in mind,
because it is easy to leap to Kierkegaard’s defence by trying to show that
Løgstrup’s critique is eclectic and thus based on a too narrow reading and
selection of Kierkegaard’s works.⁴⁵ To this we can respond that it is indeed

⁴³ The Ethical Demand, p. 4/Den etiske fordring, p. 10.

⁴⁴ The Ethical Demand, pp. 3–4/Den etiske fordring, pp. 9–10.
⁴⁵ Examples of this can be found both at the time when Controverting Kierkegaard was
published (cf. Malantschuk, ‘Løgstrups Opgør med Kierkegaard’) and more recently Ferreira,
  xxxiii

true, but that the selection was not merely undertaken by Løgstrup but was
heavily influenced by his adversaries, as it was mainly their reading he
attacked. Løgstrup recognized Olesen Larsen as the leading authority on
Kierkegaard (and with him also Sløk), which is probably why he refrains
from using phrases such as ‘according to Olesen Larsen, Kierkegaard . . .’,
and instead to a great extent reads Kierkegaard as Olesen Larsen reads
him.⁴⁶ If one is looking for evidence that it is in fact Olesen Larsen and the
Tidehverv movement that Løgstrup is criticizing and polemicizing against,
one need look no further than the ‘Foreword’, where Løgstrup clearly states his
intent. Here Løgstrup speaks of ‘those who are convinced that he [Kierkegaard,
BR] is the only Church Father and read him for their own edification’, and a bit
further down he draws the distinction between Kierkegaard as a genius opposed
to the ‘[ . . . ] epigones, whose systems are thin and non-contradictory’. The last
sentence suggests that although Løgstrup recognized Olesen Larsen as the
leading authority on Kierkegaard, he remains aware of the fact that Olesen
Larsen turned Kierkegaard’s thought into a kind of a system by leaving things
out. But, as he states, he is not ‘interested in an internal critique’, suggesting that
he does not want to engage in how one ought to read Kierkegaard and also does
not want to discuss the coherence in Kierkegaard’s own ‘system’ (such as
possibly the role of the pseudonyms), cf. pp. lxvii/9. In the following, I will
therefore refrain from going in depth with the question of the accuracy of
Løgstrup’s critique and just point out that Kierkegaard’s work is multifaceted
and polyphonic and therefore interpretations can vary greatly based on where
one puts the emphasis. This means that there are other possible interpretations
than the one Løgstrup attacks, but the elements Løgstrup emphasizes and
criticizes can be found in Kierkegaard’s work—and indeed were central to the
Kierkegaardianism of his contemporaries.

Love’s Grateful Striving. Ferreira writes: ‘Kierkegaard does not, as Løgstrup suggests, make any
stark or illegitimate dichotomy between earthly, material help and helping the neighbour to love
God; he does not see them as mutually exclusive’, p. 81.
⁴⁶ There are, however, certain disagreements, the most important ones being Løgstrup’s
accusation that Christianity according to Kierkegaard is anti-social, hostile to life in finitude,
and perversely focused on suffering. Here Løgstrup’s position seems to be that Olesen Larsen
does not sufficiently acknowledge the severity of the hostility to life in finitude in Kierkegaard.
Another influence on Løgstrup’s critique of Kierkegaard is Knud Hansen (1898–1996). Hansen
was a pastor near Løgstrup’s parish when Løgstrup was himself a pastor, and the two knew each
other well. Hansen’s article ‘Søren Kierkegaards kristendomsforståelse [‘Søren Kierkegaard’s
Understanding of Christianity’] (Heretica, 1 (1951), pp. 83–107) and his book Søren
Kierkegaard: Ideens digter [Søren Kierkegaard: Poet of the Idea] (Copenhagen: Gyldendal,
1954) mirror many of Løgstrup’s points of argument.
xxxiv 

3. Controverting Kierkegaard: The Main Themes of

the Book
3.1 Part I The Historical Jesus, and Løgstrup’s Concepts of Ontology and
Revelation
In Løgstrup’s critique of Kierkegaard, the first main point of debate is the
question concerning what Løgstrup calls ‘the occasion for faith’: ‘When the
god has made himself unrecognisable in the form of a servant, this raises
the question of how it is even possible that human beings arrive at the idea that
the servant is the god’ (2/12).⁴⁷ Kierkegaard’s answer, according to Løgstrup, is
twofold: that Jesus performed miracles and that he said of himself that he was
the son of God. Focusing on the latter, Løgstrup now emphasizes that to
Kierkegaard, Jesus’s claim to be the son of God is not something that can be
reasoned with and thus be made into a question reason can solve for us. On the
contrary, it is a paradox and thus it cannot be ‘tempered by understanding’
(4/14), which is why it must be accepted in (or rejected through lack of ) faith.
In Kierkegaard, faith and understanding are each other’s opposites.
When focusing on the paradox, Kierkegaard puts all the weight on what we
could call the formal aspect that God became human, infinity became finite,
the absolute became relative etc., and in doing so he completely disregards
Jesus’s historical life, the historical Jesus:⁴⁸ his words and works (apart from
the miracles and his claim to be the son of God). This is the reason why
Climacus, in Philosophical Fragments, can claim that:

Even if the contemporary generation had not left anything behind except these
words, ‘We have believed that in such and such a year the god appeared in the

⁴⁷ Concerning the somewhat odd phrase ‘the god’, see editorial note to Part I, note i, p. 137
below.
⁴⁸ The quest for the historical Jesus (originally associated with David Friedrich Strauss,
1808–74) consists in various approaches to establishing what can be said historically–critically
about the actual historical person Jesus: did he exist? was he crucified? where was he born? etc.
However, although Løgstrup clearly cites the historical Jesus as essential to Christianity, he is in
fact not talking about these historical data. Instead, he is focusing on Jesus the human being and
the life he lived in the (hi)story of Jesus’s life, words, and works. Therefore, when Løgstrup speaks
of ‘the historical Jesus’ and how Christian faith connects with this, he is not really interested in
the data. Rather, he is making the claim that not just the birth, death, and resurrection, but also
the life (and words) of Jesus and the way he lived his life, is Gospel. It is what is revealed in this
story (or narrative) that is essential to Christianity and the occasion for faith: history’s Jesus,
rather than the historical Jesus. Interestingly, Løgstrup’s objection that Kierkegaard disregards
Jesus’s historical life is found already in Geismar’s reading of Kierkegaard, cf. Geismar, Søren
Kierkegaard. Livsudvikling og Forfattervirksomhed [Søren Kierkegaard: His Personal
Development and His Work as an Author], vol. 3, p. 79.
  xxxv

lowly form of a servant, lived and taught among us, and then died’—this is more
than enough. (SKS 4: 300/KW 7: 104; cited 2/12)

In other words, this paradox alone—to believe that the infinite and immortal
God became human and died—is the core of Christianity, and nothing more is
necessary for it to survive. But what can this statement tell us that is so
important? It tells us that the life of the God-human was utterly incompre-
hensible, that he was infinitely misunderstood, because no misunderstanding
could be greater than to be taken for a human while actually being God; and
since being misunderstood is painful it also follows that being infinitely
misunderstood involves infinite suffering.
Løgstrup returns to suffering as a central concept in Part II, but before this
he objects to Kierkegaard’s focus on paradox and misunderstanding as essen-
tial to Christianity, claiming that rather than being paradoxical, Jesus’s exist-
ence was in fact the only non-paradoxical existence. In making this claim,
Løgstrup has to rely on an argument both for what it means that life is created
and for what we should understand by revelation.
That life is created, Løgstrup writes while referring to Descartes’ Third
Meditation (11/22), means that God’s power is everywhere, both in the
individual human’s power to be and in the world’s power to remain in
existence. This power is not only the power to exist, but it is also the power
in how it exists. As created, life and the world are created as something specific,
something definite, which means that we cannot alter the fundamental struc-
ture of life. Life (or the world) has an ontological structure, and precisely
because it is ontological, it eludes our grasp and power. We cannot change
the ontological structure, although we can act against it. But what does
Løgstrup mean by ‘ontology’, and what precisely is he referring to when
speaking of this basic ontological structure in our existence? In an article
from 1956,⁴⁹ Løgstrup discusses the difference between an ‘understanding of
life’ and ontology: an understanding of life is historical (it comes into being as
a cultural phenomenon at a certain time) and it has the human being at its
centre (meaning that an understanding of life is an anthropocentric interpret-
ation of life from a perspective where we view life and the world as our home);
by contrast, ontology is an attempt to see life and the world for what it is, as

⁴⁹ ‘Eksistensteologien og dens skelnen mellem tro og verdensanskuelse’ [‘Existence Theology

and Its Distinction between Faith and World-View’], pp. 44–5 (English translation by Hans Fink
and Robert Stern available at https://ethicaldemand.wordpress.com/resources-and-link/).
xxxvi 

something both alien and inaccessible, and thus an ontology is a-historical and
not a cultural phenomenon. Although he does not say it in the present context,
Løgstrup’s idea is that phenomenology provides the means to pierce the
historical and cultural surface and thus see the phenomena for what they
really are, their fundamental ontological structure (eidos, essence, or nature).⁵⁰
So, what is Løgstrup referring to when speaking of life’s (existence’s) basic
ontological structure? The answer is that in Løgstrup’s view there is a power in
life, but this power is not indifferent to how life is; the power in all that exists
(which maintains existence) also affects how everything exists. It is not
possible for us to simply choose one way of being over another way of being
(e.g. to choose a life of hate over a life of love) and then simply get another kind
of life, as when one chooses whether to be a mechanic over being a baker, but
rather in substituting hate for love we stifle life, because life is essentially a good gift
and should thus be received as such in love and gratitude.⁵¹ What is good in life
belongs to its ontological structure, and evil or wickedness consists in destroying
what is already good. Therefore, according to Løgstrup, there is an ontological
difference between good and evil; there is an ontological ranking or hierarchy,
where evil is secondary to goodness (and cannot be conceived of without
goodness), not vice versa (12/23). This is what ‘creation’ means to Løgstrup: that
we cannot change the basic structure of life without perverting or destroying it.⁵²
This leads us to the second question: what does Løgstrup mean by ‘revela-
tion’? In the article from 1956, Løgstrup (citing Luther) replies:

For revelation means that God makes his omnipresence visible in a definite place.
Beforehand, God is present everywhere. In revelation, his prior presence comes
into view.⁵³

God is always already present everywhere as the power to be in everything that

exists and how it exists, and an important aspect of revelation is thus that it is

⁵⁰ An example is the analysis of trust in The Ethical Demand, chapter 1.

⁵¹ While Løgstrup only touches upon this very briefly in the present work (cf. 30/46), in his
later work Creation and Annihilation, he addresses theodicy and the problem of evil and suffering
directly. A main theme in the book is that life cannot be seen simply as good in itself as there is
annihilation (and thus suffering) built into the structure of creation. Thus, life or creation
becomes more ambiguous in Løgstrup’s late work than it is here. In The Ethical Demand,
Løgstrup also discusses briefly how suffering is part of human existence; cf. The Ethical
Demand, pp. 104–5/Den etiske fordring, pp. 139–40.
⁵² Ole Jensen calls it ‘vulnerable invulnerability’: that life is created as something definite does
not make it indestructible, but it just means that a created phenomenon cannot be manipulated
without it being perverted and thus destroyed, cf. Ole Jensen, Sårbar usårlighed [Vulnerable
Invulnerability] (Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 1994), p. 5.
⁵³ ‘Eksistensteologien og dens skelnen mellem tro og verdensanskuelse’ [‘Existence Theology
and Its Distinction between Faith and World-View’], p. 46 (English translation by Hans Fink and
Robert Stern available at https://ethicaldemand.wordpress.com/resources-and-link/).
  xxxvii

this power, the structure of created life, that is revealed. In this way, revelation in
the shape of the Christian proclamation corresponds ‘to something in our
existence’, as Løgstrup writes the same year in the very first sentence in The
Ethical Demand. The proclamation can correspond to things we are already aware
of, speaking about them in a particular way and with a particular message, but

the proclamation can also correspond to something in our existence which we

were completely unaware of—until the proclamation disclosed it by addressing it.
It is quite conceivable that a particular proclamation is necessary for us to become
alerted to it, for example, a contradiction in our existence, which we could not
have been conscious of before the proclamation in question became historically
available.⁵⁴

The Christian proclamation, according to Løgstrup, is not simply an other-

worldly revelation, speaking of a world beyond the world (cf. Nietzsche’s
critique of the Backworldsmen in §2.1 above), but it also speaks the truth
concerning our existence here and now, and in doing so it draws attention to
these truths or basic ontological structures in our interpersonal (interdepend-
ent) existence, shining a light on them and thus revealing them, so that they
come into focus.⁵⁵ However, once they are revealed at a specific point in the
course of history, they remain revealed (because they become part of our
culture, for example in literature and in our philosophical and theological
writings) and are thus available to our understanding of life and the world
(i.e. philosophical reasoning):

But once the proclamation has shown us this feature of our existence, then we are
able to recognize it by ourselves without the need for the proclamation. It is also
possible that we may accept this feature of our existence, while at one and the same
time rejecting the proclamation itself and all that it involves.⁵⁶

⁵⁴ The Ethical Demand, p. 3/Den etiske fordring, p. 9.

⁵⁵ Here it is important to say that Løgstrup does not eliminate all eschatological elements from
the Christian proclamation. Revelation also contains an eschatological message about restoration
and resurrection, of eternal love and forgiveness; but as Løgstrup points out, even the eschatological
content reflects back on our life, as is the case with forgiveness: ‘This is so, because in faith in
forgiveness, and in the preoccupation with the neighbour’s needs that results from forgiveness, sin is
broken—if it is really believed and is not merely an element of an outlook on life’ (37/55).
⁵⁶ The Ethical Demand, p. 3/Den etiske fordring, pp. 9–10. In the ‘Rejoinder’ (Art and Ethics (1961),
translated in Kees van Kooten Niekerk (ed.), Beyond The Ethical Demand, pp. 1–48), Løgstrup
comments on his distinction between ‘the human’ and ‘the religious’ spheres in The Ethical
Demand, admitting that it is misleading. Instead, he suggests distinguishing between ‘the human’
xxxviii 

In opposition to a Barthian concept of revelation, where God’s word is alien to

us and this world, Løgstrup’s understanding is that the Christian proclamation
can make our existence visible to us (revealing its ontological structure),⁵⁷ even
though we might still reject the religious message about this existence. In this
way, returning to the present book, Jesus’s proclamation can be seen from
both a theological and a philosophical perspective. Philosophically, he pro-
vides us with ontological insights or truth-claims (like other philosophers do,
when they make claims about the structure of human reality),⁵⁸ but he also
provides us with a religious message about these truths, and—Løgstrup argues
in Controverting Kierkegaard—the proclamation of Jesus’s life, words, and
works makes us aware of a fundamental difference between him and us.
With this difference we are back where we began, namely with Løgstrup’s
claim, in opposition to Kierkegaard, that Jesus was the only non-paradoxical
existence. Jesus’s existence is non-paradoxical because the life he lived, as
revealed to us in the Christian proclamation, is nothing but fulfilment or
realization of what life truly is. Jesus lived the true human life, and he is
thus the (only) true human being;⁵⁹ his life reveals the truth of existence to us,
namely that life is a gift, and he lives in continuous reception of it. The paradox
is that we, everyone but Jesus, somehow manage to live contrary to the power
to be in everything that exists, and manage to pervert what life really is so that
we manipulate life in a destruction of it. There is no conflict in Jesus’s life
between the power in existence and how that power manifests itself, which is

(which contains what he calls ‘a universal religiosity’) and ‘the specifically Christian’. The former
has to do with our common experience of life (its ontological structures), where human reason and
understanding apply and which thus ‘belong to a philosophical ethics’ (p. 11/Kunst og etik, p. 198),
because here ‘theology has to do with the same reality as philosophy’ (p. 14/p. 201). The latter,
however, concerns ‘something in Christianity that is not accessible to the phenomenological
analysis, namely, everything that is unforeseen’ (p. 13/p. 201), that is, the eschatological content of
the Christian proclamation.
⁵⁷ This is also why Løgstrup begins to call his own ethical position ontological (the first clear
example is in 1960: ‘Ethik und Ontologie’ [‘Ethics and Ontology’, translated by Eric Watkins]), cf.
Ethical Concepts and Problems, pp. 7–8/Etiske begreber og problemer, p. 12: ‘There is also a third
basic view, which could be called ontological. The ethical demand receives its content from the
fundamental condition that we live under and which we are not in a position to change, namely
that the life of one person is entangled with that of the other person, and so it consists in taking care
of the part of the other person’s life which as a result of this entanglement is at our mercy.’
⁵⁸ And for this reason, Jesus can be interpreted as just another moral philosopher (although
Løgstrup himself does not do so). Putting it briefly, this is because (1) Jesus’s message concerning
forgiveness and his proclamation of the ethical demand raise questions about his authority (cf.
21–2/36 and The Ethical Demand pp. 177–8/Den etiske fordring, p. 234) and mission (cf. also p.
181–2/p. 239); and (2) because the way he lived raises further questions concerning who he is due
to his non-paradoxical existence (13–4/25). In this way, Løgstrup can maintain that Jesus’s
proclamation has philosophical content concerning its ontological claims, even though one
might reject its eschatological religious message through lack of faith.
⁵⁹ This is also the title of Møller’s study of the figure of Jesus in Løgstrup’s thought, cf. Maria
Louise Odgaard Møller, The True Human Being.
  xxxix

why his life is non-paradoxical; but our destruction of life is paradoxical,

because we seize the power for ourselves, making life our own possession
rather than living in reception of it. Thus, when faced with Jesus’s life we come
to the double insight that his life is the fulfilment of true life and that we
ourselves fall short of leading this life; and that even when we try to fulfil it,
we end up destroying it, precisely because we try.

3.2 Part II Suffering

In the second part of the book, Løgstrup returns to the question concerning
the role of suffering in Christianity and in Kierkegaard. As already established
in the first part, Kierkegaard sees it as fundamental to Christianity that Jesus’s
life was a life in misunderstanding (due to his paradoxical nature) and that this
led to a life of suffering: ‘Therefore, the god-in-time had to be crucified, and
that not only just at Golgotha, but from the beginning’ (21/35). Thus, accord-
ing to Kierkegaard, to be a Christian (a follower of Christ) must be to seek an
existence that resembles Christ as much as possible. In this connection,
Løgstrup adopts the strategy (repeated many times throughout the book) of
drawing a contrast between Kierkegaard and Luther:⁶⁰ whereas Kierkegaard
believes that being a follower of Christ involves imitating Christ as closely as
possible (imitatio Christi), Luther’s position was entirely different, seeing that
what Jesus did was exceptional, something which was done at a specific point
in history for our sake so that we should benefit from it and so that we do not
have to do it ourselves (historical once-and-for-all significance).⁶¹

⁶⁰ Løgstrup’s practice of putting Luther and Kierkegaard at odds is aimed directly at

Tidehverv and Olesen Larsen, because Tidehverv saw themselves as rooted in both Luther and
Kierkegaard, whereas Løgstrup intended to show them that Kierkegaard and Luther differ
fundamentally, where he would choose Luther’s side.
⁶¹ Here, an objection towards Løgstrup could be that Luther in fact embraces both options,
that there is a historical once-and-for-all significance as well as an idea of imitation. However,
this would be ‘imitation’ in a different sense than found in Kierkegaard, and where ‘imitation’
would seem to be a slightly misleading term, as Luther emphasizes Christ as a gift rather than as
an exemplar, and because the example is not one that can be followed without the historical gift
(cf. e.g. Luther: ‘Ein klein Unterricht, was man in den Evangeliis suchen und gewarten soll’ (WA
10.1, 1, 8–18)/‘A Brief Instruction What to Look for and Expect in the Gospels’ (LA 35: 113–24)).
Furthermore, if we were to take up this as an objection to Løgstrup, then he could respond that
his conception of the sovereign expressions of life has a very similar structure, because they too
can be seen as a gift that sets us free to be like the example (Christ), which simply means to live
the true life; but with the obvious difference between Løgstrup and Luther being that the
sovereign expressions of life can manifest themselves in everybody, non-Christians as well as
Christians. We shall return to this in the discussion of Part IV below.
xl 

Turning to the developments in Part II, Løgstrup raises the objection that,
according to Kierkegaard, being a true Christian is to seek out suffering
through (1) helping others to love God (something which will inevitably be
misunderstood as hatred because it involves turning them away from worldly
ends, which is painful to them), just as Jesus in his own time showed his
contemporaries how to love God (something which in the end led to his
crucifixion), and through (2) detaching oneself from worldly ties, just as
Jesus was ‘ostracized by and from the world’ and ‘attached by birth to no
other human being’ (40/59).⁶² Suffering, as Kierkegaard puts it, is the ‘totality
category’ (28/43) of religiosity, and ‘in suffering, religiosity begins to draw
breath’ (45/66). In opposition to Kierkegaard and again citing Luther (and
here also the Swedish theologian Gustaf Wingren), Løgstrup claims that it is
false to speak of a special kind of Christian suffering, because suffering is the
same category for everyone; the only difference is that as a Christian you can
take up a special interpretation (tydning) of and attitude towards suffering, an
interpretation which tells us that our suffering is not an injustice, but is due to
our mistreatment of life (31–2/48–9).
Kierkegaard’s mistake, according to Løgstrup, is that he tackles the problem
of human wickedness (our self-centredness, including our inclination to praise
our own efforts and accomplishments) by laying waste to everything in
existence. In order to quash our self-centredness (sin), he strikes down every-
thing that could be an occasion for us to commit sin. In doing so, Kierkegaard
adopts an extensive understanding of evil, seeing evil as a metaphysical cat-
egory, namely as everything worldly and temporal (the finite world of merely
relative ends). By contrast, Løgstrup puts forward what he calls an intensive
understanding of evil, where evil is only attributed to human selfish nature, but
therefore does not involve the whole of worldly existence. Taken extensively,
evil permeates everything in human existence, but taken intensively, evil is
limited to just involving our selfishness, leaving room for there to also be
something good in existence, namely the fundamental ontological structures
which, according to Løgstrup, in a Christian context, means the world as it was
created (42/61–2).⁶³
Another aspect of Kierkegaard’s approach to suffering has to do with his
understanding that to be a Christian is to be faced with the dispiriting prospect
that we ourselves can accomplish nothing of real importance, that all our

⁶² For more on the suffering connected with helping the neighbour to love God, see Løgstrup’s
discussion in Part 1 of the ‘Polemical Epilogue’ in The Ethical Demand (pp. 185–98/Den etiske
fordring, pp. 244–61).
⁶³ Among these fundamental ontological structures are the sovereign expressions of life, cf. §3.3.
  xli

efforts are ultimately fruitless, and that our achievements are illusory, because
to be obedient to Kierkegaard’s infinite demand is to admit and express that
our works amount to nothing and give all honour to God (26/41). But,
Løgstrup responds, this is to deny the fact that we actually accomplish many
things and that our works can have importance and significance for others.
Our mistake, according to Løgstrup, is that we take credit for our accomplish-
ments, not realizing that everything at our disposal is ‘entrusted to’ us (27/42).
Thus, ethico-cultural works can have meaning and value, and hence they
involve accomplishment, but they do not heighten our own moral standing
in the slightest. Instead of rightly laying the blame on the self-centredness of
the ego (in a denial of the meritoriousness of the self ), Kierkegaard wrongly
lays blame on life in its entirety.
The result is that in Kierkegaard’s conception of Christianity, suffering
becomes a goal for the Christian as a means to salvation. The Christian
must choose to become a martyr, because suffering leads to God. Within
this conception, the other person becomes a mere instrument, their hatred
(caused by their misunderstood interpretation of their suffering resulting
from the Christian’s attempt to help them to love God) leading to ostraciza-
tion and thus to the special case of Christian suffering that is the key to
establishing a relation between the Christian and God. In Løgstrup’s read-
ing, Kierkegaard turns Christianity into law, particular biddings for the
Christian to do, and by putting such emphasis on suffering he makes it
the prime goal for the Christian. In doing so, he breaks this ethical law off
completely from what Løgstrup terms life in ‘naturally generated and
culturally formed communities’ (39/57 passim), whereby he completely
disqualifies all ‘works of one’s vocation’ (36/54), that is, all efforts to help
other people in their worldly life. Kierkegaard’s ethics is worldless, or acos-
mical, because the only thing that matters is for the self to be crushed by
God’s accusation (the second use of the law), but thereby Kierkegaard
disregards the importance of the first use of the law: that we should act for
the sake of the other person. As Løgstrup puts it, rather than juxtaposing
the two uses of the law (acknowledging them both in their own right),
Kierkegaard subordinates the first use under the second use, which in effect
is to disqualify it completely (43–4/62–3). The result is that Kierkegaard can
provide no answer to the problem of passivity: why not just do nothing when
everything we do is worthless? The best he can do is simply to offer a
condemnation, or curse, of it (44/65), whereas Løgstrup can answer citing
Luther: because the first use of the law is rightful in itself, as its purpose is to
serve the neighbour in their worldly life.
xlii 

3.3 Part III The Infinite Movement and the Sovereign Expressions of Life
This attack on Kierkegaard leads Løgstrup to Fear and Trembling and the
so-called double movement of faith, which comes to serve as a focal point.
In Kierkegaard, the double movement consists of two connected move-
ments: the infinite movement of resignation and the finite movement of faith.
The problem Kierkegaard addresses is this: how can faith come into a person’s
life so that they might become a Christian? If we try to translate Kierkegaard’s
theological question into a more philosophical framework, we could see it as
the problem of how we can come to change our perspective on life in finitude
from just an immediate valuation and appreciation of it as it appears to a
consideration of life for what it really is; how do we change our basis for
evaluation of life from its immediate (according to Kierkegaard: false) value to
its real value? The answer is that we must somehow have our immediate
absorption with life broken off; we must come to a point where we pull back
from life in a resignation away from finitude towards infinitude (or God). Only
through this conversion, where we turn away from life ‘in front of us’ towards
God’s light, which shines ‘from behind us’ (so to speak, just as is the case for
the prisoners in Plato’s Cave), can we come to stand in a (proper) relation with
God and thus see life for what it is. This is the first part of the double
movement, the infinite movement of resignation, and it stands as a precondi-
tion for the second movement, the finite movement of faith, where the
person—upon receiving faith as a gift—turns back towards life, embracing
finitude again in a new, second, immediacy: the immediacy of faith. The reason
for this double movement is (following Løgstrup’s presentation of Johannes de
silentio in Fear and Trembling) that there is no way for us to find anything in
finitude that can point us towards God. Finitude, or worldly life, offers us only
objects for our idolization: instances of relative value that we idolize and treat
as absolutes, but where they ought to be treated as merely relative ends of
relative value, as opposed to God, who is an absolute end of absolute value, but
who is precisely not to be found in finitude.⁶⁴ As Johannes de silentio puts it:
‘in the world of time, God and humans cannot talk with each other, they have
no language in common’ (SKS 4: 130/KW 6: 35; cited 49/71). In this way, the
fundamental human mistake is that we misattribute the notion of the absolute.

⁶⁴ The background for Løgstrup’s critique here is Kierkegaard’s dictum from Concluding
Unscientific Postscript to the Philosophical Crumbs: ‘But the maximum of the task is to be able
simultaneously to relate oneself absolutely to the absolute telos and relatively to the relative ends,
or at all times to have the absolute telos with oneself ’ (SKS 7: 376/KW 12.1: 414).
  xliii

Until we have broken off from finitude, we have no proper place for it, which
leads us to absolutize anything and everything, but through the double
movement we gain sight of the absolute so that our perspective changes and
we see finitude as relativity.
To Løgstrup, this only serves to solidify what he sees as a metaphysical dualism
in Kierkegaard (as expressed by Johannes de silentio in Fear and Trembling and
by Climacus in Concluding Unscientific Postscript). Everything finite or worldly is
devalued as mere relativity in favour of an otherworldliness (cf. Nietzsche’s
Backworldsmen), which fits the extensive understanding of evil (sin).⁶⁵ In a direct
confrontation with this metaphysical dualism, Løgstrup puts forward his alter-
native, where life in finitude (our human existence in naturally generated and
culturally formed communities) is not just understood as life in relativity, but
where absolute ends are part of this life’s basic structure or ontological frame-
work. This is where he introduces the sovereign expressions of life.
Although the sovereign expressions of life were to become the new
and central concept in Løgstrup’s metaphysics and ethics (along with their
opposite: the circling thoughts and emotions),⁶⁶ he provides astonishingly
little in terms of a comprehensive presentation and definition. He introduces
them in an article in 1966,⁶⁷ but the phenomena he speaks about exist—
structurally, albeit under different names—in Løgstrup’s theological and philo-
sophical ‘system’ already in the 1930s. Therefore, if we are to fully understand
what they mean and what role they play, we have to take a step backwards.
As discussed in §2.2., Løgstrup departed from his childhood ‘pietist phase’
when he joined ranks with Tidehverv in the 1930s. Crucial to this theological
change of position was the radicalization of the concept of sin (cf. §2.1.), where
Tidehverv—and Løgstrup—saw sin as the basic existential category of human
existence: the problem of human existence is that we are confined within

⁶⁵ This critique of Kierkegaardian (and Tidehverv’s) otherworldliness shows us that although

they spoke of remaining faithful to the earth (cf. Olesen Larsen, §2.1 above), Løgstrup in fact
finds that they fail. Tidehverv attacked idealism for otherworldliness due to its striving for
improvement through piety using the radicalized conception of sin as the prime weapon. But,
Løgstrup objects, when sin is understood extensively as everything within finitude, Kierkegaard
and Tidehverv end up with otherworldliness yet again, just in a different shape: Tidehverv may
not accept striving for perfection, but Christianity in Tidehverv’s Kierkegaardian version of it still
remains firmly fixated on what lies beyond finitude.
⁶⁶ In some places, he also refers to them as obsessive thoughts and movements of emotion
(Danish: tvungne tanke- og følelsesbevægelser). He seems to have never settled for one particular
terminology for them, alternating instead between different variants, which could also explain
why he sometimes uses inexpedient terms (cf. below pp. lvi–lvii on ‘obsessive expressions of life’).
⁶⁷ In the article ‘Sartres og Kierkegaards skildring af den dæmoniske indesluttethed’ [‘Sartre’s
and Kierkegaard’s Portrayal of Demonic Inturnedness’], which is reprinted—almost verbatim,
but with some important corrections—in the present work, 62–77/86–106.
xliv 

ourselves; or more precisely, we confine ourselves through our self-circling

egocentricity and selfishness. However, following Løgstrup, sin (or egotism) is
not just an ethical category, but also an epistemic one, because through being
caught up within ourselves we are also cut off from perceiving life and
existence for what they really are. As Løgstrup writes in 1938:

We all live in the twilight of triviality. Whatever we see and hear, we see and hear
as something worn-out and trite. This is an all-encompassing understanding that
we have beforehand. This understanding is not something we are conscious of, but
it is like a common, unconscious way of engaging with all things.—Therefore, one
cannot say that making everything trivial, worn-out, and trite is something we
actually strive to do. No, the triteness dwells in our spirit and dulls the brightness
of our sight, so that we see only grey. We go through life with triteness’s, with
triviality’s death in us. Everything our thought touches upon withers and turns
into worn-out opinions. Every colour in our sight turns dull through the triteness
that dwells in our eyes. Every word we hear turns shallow, a sign without depth of
meaning in the tonelessness of our ears. We hear as though through cotton wool,
and we see as though through a haze, due to triteness’s death, which lingers in our
spirit—no matter how sharp our bodily senses might be. Therefore, we have not
just forgotten that we live in God’s creation, but we have completely eradicated
any understanding of such a thing.⁶⁸

Hence, the fundamental problem of human existence is twofold, but directly

interrelated: we are cut off from seeing life for what it truly is, and the thing
cutting us off is our own self-absorption. However, Løgstrup’s studies of
Scheler’s phenomenology (cf. Løgstrup’s 1932 prize dissertation briefly men-
tioned above) had turned his attention towards the difference between the
(subjective) value that things have for us and the (objective or) real value of
something. Rather than reducing value to being merely something subjective, a
product constituted by our own desires (feelings), Scheler argues that there is a
more fundamental layer to values, because they are based in an ontological
structure of real value, which can be perceived by us in phenomenological acts
of feeling (Fühlen).⁶⁹ Thus, according to Scheler, phenomenology can enable us

⁶⁸ ‘Guds Skabning’ [‘God’s Creation’] (my translation).

⁶⁹ Although Løgstrup praises Scheler for his phenomenological approach to values, he is
highly critical of his attempt to found an ethics on phenomenology, see Bjørn Rabjerg, ‘Knud
Ejler Løgstrup’s Reception of Max Scheler’s Ethics of 1932 and Beyond’, in Susan Gottlöber (ed.),
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The Project Gutenberg eBook of Frank Reade, Jr.,
with his new steam horse in the great American
desert
This ebook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States
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Title: Frank Reade, Jr., with his new steam horse in the great
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Language: English

Original publication: United States: Frank Tousey Publisher, 1892

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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK FRANK

READE, JR., WITH HIS NEW STEAM HORSE IN THE GREAT
AMERICAN DESERT ***
 Transcriber’s Notes

Obvious typographical errors have been silently corrected. Variations in hyphenation

have been standardised but all other spelling and punctuation remains unchanged.
The table of contents was inserted by the transcriber.

FRANK READE, JR., IN THE GREAT AMERICAN DESERT.

The subscription Price of the Frank Reade Library by the year is
$2.50; $1.25 per six months, post-paid. Address FRANK TOUSEY,
Publisher, 34 and 36 North Moore Street. Box 2730.

FRANK READE, JR.,

With His New Steam Horse in the Great American
Desert;
OR,
THE SANDY TRAIL OF DEATH.

By “NONAME,”
Author of “Frank Reade, Jr., With His New Steam Horse Among
the Cowboys; or, The League of the Plains,” etc.
Table of Contents.
CHAPTER I.
CHAPTER II.
CHAPTER III.
CHAPTER IV.
CHAPTER V.
CHAPTER VI.
CHAPTER VII.
CHAPTER VIII.
CHAPTER IX.
CHAPTER X.
CHAPTER XI.
CHAPTER XII.
CHAPTER XIII.
 CHAPTER I.
THE CASE OF BENJAMIN ASTLEY.

When it became noised about that Frank Reade, Jr., the

distinguished inventor, was about to make a trip to the far West with
his wonderful Steam Horse, public interest became greatly excited.
For those of my readers who may never have read any of the
accounts of his wonderful adventures, I will state that Frank Reade,
Jr., was a wonderful inventor of marvelous things; that his father was
a famous inventor before him, and that Frank, Jr., took to the trade
as naturally as a duck does to water.
Years ago, Frank Reade, Sr., had founded the town of
Readestown, U. S. A.
And there had erected large machine shops, to which the younger
Reade greatly added in later days.
The new Steam Man, invented by Frank Reade, Jr., had made a
great furore.
But apropos of this came the New Steam Horse, and for a marvel
of ingenuity and mechanical skill, it simply could not be surpassed.
For the benefit of certain of my readers, I will give a brief
description of the New Steam Horse; a better idea of which,
however, can be gathered from a study of the artist’s picture upon
the front page of this book.
Then we will proceed to the exciting incidents of this story, which
will describe a most exciting trip into a strange region.
The Steam Horse was the pattern of an ordinary equine done in
steel. The body was made of steel plates, ingeniously fastened with
various joints and bosses.
 It is easy enough to make the likeness of a horse thus, but to
make it mechanical, to gallop and display other evidences of life, is
by no means so easy.
Frank Reade, Jr., realized this, but he was not one to be baffled in
a given undertaking.
He was some while in studying out the problem.
But it came at last.
Of course, to go with the Horse there must be a wagon.
But first Frank designed the mechanism of the Horse.
In the plan which he drew, he located the furnace in the chest of
the Horse, with a door to open so that coal could be thrown in.
The main body of the Horse contained the boiler. It was an easy
matter thus to get up steam.
Upon the saddle was placed the steam gauge and indicator.
Between the Horse’s ears was placed the whistle.
The nostrils contained the escape valve, and the lower jaw of the
Horse connected with the throttle and whistle valves, so that
pressure upon a long pair of reins would regulate the speed of the
Horse.
The most difficult matter, however, was the delicate armatures and
driving rods of the legs.
The cylinders were placed upon the shafts of the wagon.
These propelled the driving rods, which in turn worked heavy
armatures, which caused the Horse’s legs to take a long and quick
stride.
The hind legs were worked in the same manner by means of
driving rods connected with the armature of the forward legs.
 It was astonishing to note with what marvelous rapidity the Steam
Horse would pick up its feet and gallop.
Steel spikes upon his feet enabled him to go all the faster.
We have imperfectly described the Horse; now, let us take a look
at the wagon.
In this the travelers were to ride, and it was necessary that it
should be safe and strong.
It was made with four strong iron wheels with grooved tires of
rubber, so that the roughest ground could be traveled over.
The body of the wagon was of thinly rolled but tough steel.
The interior was quite spacious and vigorously divided up into
various uses.
A coal bunker was provided upon the sides of the wagon.
Over these were cushioned seats, easily made into sleeping
bunks.
Forward by the high dasher was a compartment for the storing of
provisions and any necessary stores.
But the most wonderful of all was the canopy or top which covered
the wagon.
This was made of thin but bullet-proof plates of steel arranged like
a window-lattice, so that by touching a spring the four sides would
promptly roll up, leaving the wagon open on all sides.
When the lattice work was down loopholes were provided in it by
means of which shots could be fired at an attacking foe.
Altogether the new Steam Horse was a wonderful invention and
quite a safe equipage to travel across the plains of the wild West
with.
 At least Frank Reade, Jr., thought so, and did not hesitate to risk
the trip.
His only traveling companions upon his famous trips were two
faithful servants, a jolly Irishman known as Barney O’Shea, and a
comical moke of a negro called Pomp.
Barney and Pomp were unique characters to a certainty.
While the best of friends in reality, they were constantly engaged
in badgering and teasing each other.
One was as well gifted in this direction as the other, so they
generally came out about even.
The object of Frank Reade, Jr.’s proposed trip to the West was a
thrilling one.
His attention had one day been claimed by a singular statement in
a newspaper.
The statement read thus:
“The Mystery of a Marked Bullet.”
“A strange incident for which a man is now languishing in Silver
City jail awaiting the execution of a sentence of death for murder.
“Six months ago a party of prospectors were coming over the
Divide by a rocky foot trail.
“There were twelve in the party, and they were all miners. Some
had had fair luck, and others were going home empty-handed.
“Suddenly one of them espied what he believed was a huge
buffalo grazing in the canyon far below.
“At once the question of marksmanship came up. There were two
expert shots in the party, Bert Mason and Sid Powell.
“A wager was made as to which one could hit the buffalo. It was
arranged that both should shoot at the same time, using marked
bullets.
“The bullet nearest the buffalo’s heart should belong to the winner.
“The trick was quickly made, the stakes put up, and both men
fired.
“The supposed buffalo leaped in the air with a wild yell of pain and
fell to the ground, while a mule cantered away up the canyon.
“The object had not been a buffalo, but a white man with a fur coat
on riding slowly along on a mule.
“Of course Mason and Powell looked at each other with horror.
“‘Great beavers, Sid!’ gasped Mason, ‘we’ve killed a man!’
“‘I swan that’s so!’ agreed Bert Mason, in horror. ‘What’ll we do?’
“Of course there was nothing else to do but to climb down and see
if the victim was really dead.
“The two horrified prospectors did so.
“They found that the man was dead to a certainty. One bullet had
lodged in his brain and the other in his shoulder.
“The bullet in the brain of course was the fatal one, and that bore
Bert Mason’s mark.
“It looked as if he was the real murderer, if the affair could be
called murder. What made the matter worse, however, was the fact
that the man was a prominent citizen of Silver City.
“Neither Mason nor Powell dared to go to Silver City after that.
“Both cut sticks and went into the woods to hide. Sid Powell was
killed by Indians, but Bert Mason became a road agent.
“He was hunted for years for the murder of Clem Johnson.
Suddenly he disappeared and was seen no more in those parts.
 “But six months ago a man was arrested in Silver City who
answered his description to a jot, and who went by the name of
Benjamin Astley.
“He was horrified when accused of being identical with Mason. He
was at the altar with a happy bride-elect when arrested. The shock
nearly killed the bride, who fainted upon the spot.
“Astley is in a terrible state of mind. He has detectives looking for
the real Bert Mason. What makes the case look worse for Astley was
the fact that one of the marked bullets was found upon him, and it
tallied with the one found in Clem Johnson’s skull.
“Astley has been convicted as the murderer and will doubtless
hang. Yet the evidence would look to be purely circumstantial, and
an innocent man may suffer for the crime.”
Frank Reade, Jr., had become deeply interested in the complex
case.
“That man is innocent!” he declared, with firm conviction. “It is too
bad to hang him upon such evidence.”
“Bejabers, I believe yez are roight, sor!” agreed Barney O’Shea.
“I done fink dat man am de victim ob cirkumstances!” declared
Pomp, sagely.
“The real murderer Mason is no doubt at large now,” cried Frank. “I
declare he ought to be found.”
The more Frank thought of the matter the better satisfied he
became that the ends of justice were being defeated.
“That is just the hot-headed way they do things in the West,” he
declared. “Upon my word it is awful.”
Finally a resolution seized Frank.
One morning he came down to the shop and gave orders to have
the Steam Horse made ready for a trip.
 Of course the workmen set about it without asking questions.
But the report got abroad and many and various were the
surmises.
Finally one of the curious ones ventured to approach Frank point
blank.
“Where are you going this time, Mr. Reade? Not to the North
Pole?”
“No,” replied Frank, crisply. “I am going West to find Bert Mason
the true murderer of Clem Johnson. If it is in my power, I mean to
clear up the mystery and set this unfortunate Benjamin Astley right
once more. I shall hope for success.”
 CHAPTER II.
THE QUICKSAND.

There was no other motive on Frank’s part otherwise than to see

justice done.
He was a great lover of fair-play and although Astley and all the
parties concerned were strangers to him, he wanted to see the
wrong righted.
Barney and Pomp had become fully as interested in the case as
he had himself.
“Yo’ kin jes’ bet we’ll stick by yo’ Marse Frank!” cried Pomp. “Yo’
hab got de right ob it.”
“Be jabers, if that Mason was any part av a man, he’d cum forrard
an’ shoulder the blame hisself,” said Barney.
“Ah! but I imagine that he is a big rascal!” declared Frank. “It will
be our work to find him.”
“Shure we’ll do that!”
“I hope so!”
So it happened, that one day the Steam Horse was packed in
sections and shipped to a small station on the verge of the Great
American Desert.
Frank had got a slight clew that Mason was hiding in the desert to
avoid arrest.
If this was true, it would now be in order to find him.
This Frank meant to do if such a thing was possible.
 The Steam Horse had been shipped to the nearest point to the
desert.
Several hundred miles, however, of a wild country had to be
crossed.
The young inventor knew that the deadly Comanche Indians
frequently ranged as far north as this.
To fall in with any of them would be unpleasant, to say the least.
However, Frank was not the one to borrow trouble.
He unloaded the Steam Horse at the little Western station and had
the sections put together by skilled mechanics who had come on the
special train.
Then, getting aboard the wagon with Barney and Pomp, after
steam had been got up, the start was made.
The Steam Horse started away across the desolate plains at a
rapid gallop.
Soon the railroad station and every other sign of civilization was
out of sight.
As far as the eye could reach upon either hand naught could be
seen but an unbroken expanse of plain.
It was a dreary and desolate sight.
For a whole day this sort of thing was encountered. Then at night
a small lake was sighted.
“Begorra!” cried Barney. “We’ll ’ave a dhrink av that water
anyway!”
So the Celt alighted from the wagon when the shores of the lake
were reached, and bending down applied his lips to the water.
He took a deep draught of the liquid, and the next moment he
wished he had not done so.
 With a gasping cry he leaped to his feet.
“Bad luck to the same!” he howled. “Shure it’s the divil’s own kind
av stuff. It’s nigh burned the mouth off me.”
“Why, of course, you silly fellow,” cried Frank. “Don’t you know that
the water in all of the lakes in this part of the country is salt.”
“Shure I know it now, to me sorrow,” cried Barney, holding on to
his mug.
Then a brilliant thought came to him.
The mischievous spirit of the fellow was at once aroused.
Pomp was in the wagon busying himself about the cooking and
had not seen Barney’s experience.
The Celt chuckled.
“Och hone!” he muttered. “I’ll paralyze that naygur now or me
name ain’t Barney O’Shea.”
With this he procured a dipper and filled it with the water from the
lake.
The liquid was as clean and fresh looking as if it had just come
from the best of springs.
Barney held the dipper up and shouted:
“Whurroo! I say, naygur! Wud yez luk this way?”
“What fo’ yo’ want ob me?” cried Pomp, coming to the door of the
wagon.
“Don’t yez want a dhrink? Shure I think yez might be dhry.”
Pomp was very thirsty.
Therefore he replied eagerly:
 “All right, I’ish, yo’ fetch me dat watah an’ I cook yo’ sumfin’ good
fo’ yo’ supper. Dat am a fac’.”
“All roight, bejabers,” cried Barney. “I’ll take ye on that, naygur.”
So Barney went up to the wagon with the dipper filled with the
saline fluid.
Pomp took the dipper and glanced at the water.
It looked to him as pure and delicious as nectar.
Tipping his head back, he proceeded to pour it down his throat in
copious draughts. The effect was terrific.
For a moment he was doubled up like a jumping jack, with awful
contortion of the features.
It was a question for a few moments if he would not actually
collapse with strangulation.
But he managed to get his breath after a moment.
As for Barney, he was turning somersaults in the sand, and fairly
killing himself with laughter.
“Begorra, that’s the funniest I iver seen in me loife yit!” he roared.
“Shure, the fools are not all dead yit, on me sowl!”
“Ki—yi—huh! Golly massy sakes! I’se mos’ dead, yes I is.
Gorramighty, I jes’ kill yo’ fo’ dat, I’ish!”
Pomp, now recovered, made a dash out of the wagon for Barney.
Had he caught the Celt at that moment, he would no doubt have
pitched into him in good earnest.
But the Celt was too quick.
He was away over the plain like a bullet out of a gun.
Pomp chased him for full three hundred yards, when an
astonishing thing happened.
 Suddenly Barney gave a yell, floundered about for a moment, and
seemed to be drawn by some irresistible power downward into the
ground.
He sank to his hips in a jiffy in the clear sand, and seemed likely to
sink much deeper.
In an instant both Barney and Pomp realized the serious truth.
Barney had inadvertently jumped into a prairie quicksand.
The treacherous sand had closed over him with a vise-like grip,
and was every moment drawing him deeper.
Of course to be drawn to the depths of the fatal quicksand meant
death.
At once all thoughts of fooling left the minds of both.
Pomp forgot the trick played upon him, and saw only that Barney
was in most imminent danger of his life.
At once the darky sought steps to relieve his companion.
“Golly sakes! what am de mattah, I’ish?” cried Pomp, in alarm,
halting on the verge of the bed of quicksand.
“Shure the sand is a-suckin’ me in fasther an’ fasther,” cried
Barney. “Shure wud yez help me, Misther Frank?”
But Frank Reade, Jr., had already seen the trouble.
He was coming to the spot as fast as he could.
In his hands he carried his rifle and a lariat.
“Keep cool, Barney,” he cried, as he came up. “Don’t make a move
till I tell you.”
“All right, sor,” cried Barney, readily. “Phwativer is it, sor?”
“Why, it is a prairie quicksand,” replied Frank. “They are not
uncommon hereabouts.”
 “Shure, I’ve no desire to go to the cinter av the airth.”
“We won’t let you,” cried Frank. “Here, pass this under your arm.”
Frank placed the rifle across the space of quicksand and Barney
passed his arm over it.
This arrested the downward process and Barney was safe for the
time.
But he was quite unable to extricate himself.
The question was, how to get him out of the clinging sands. But
Frank Reade, Jr., knew how to do it.
He threw the noose of the lariat over Barney’s shoulders. Then he
said:
“Now hang on. We’ll try and pull you out.”
Frank and Pomp laid hold on the rope and exerted their full
strength.
But they could hardly move the Celt. The sands were so mighty
and clinging that their resistance could not be overcome with that
amount of force.
“Golly, Marse Frank!” puffed Pomp, “I don’ fink we’re gwine fo’ to
git dat chile out ob dat place.”
“Keep cool!” said Frank, quietly. “We will find a way.”
Frank went back and brought the Steam Horse up.
He fastened one end of the lariat to the rear axle of the wagon.
Then he started the Horse slowly.
The result was that Barney suddenly began to emerge from his
imprisonment in the sand.
Slowly but surely he was dragged from his uncomfortable position.
Clear of the clinging sands Frank stopped the Steam Horse.
 Then Barney scrambled to his feet.
He glanced at the treacherous spot from which he had just
emerged and then at his bedraggled person.
“Begorra, naygur, I think we’d betther call accounts square!” he
cried. “Shore it’s mesilf as has the divils ind av the bargain this
toime.”
“A’right, I’ish, I’ll fo’gib yo’ dis time if yo’ don’ try any sich fing on
me agin,” replied Pomp.
“I’ll agree wid yez!”
And this ended the affair.
Camp was made by the saline lake that night, however.
Darkness settled down thickly and to enliven the dullness of the
hour, Pomp brought out his banjo and Barney his fiddle.
They played very well together, and as the melodies from the two
instruments floated forth upon the air, it did much to dispel the
natural feeling of desolation peculiar to the region.
Frank Reade, Jr., thus far had not dreamed of danger.
Nothing had been seen to warrant the assumption that there was
another human being within fifty miles.
Some hungry coyotes came snapping and snarling about the
wagon.
Barney put one of them out of the way with his revolver and this
for a time silenced the rest.
But as the hour of midnight drew nearer Frank began to think of
sleep.
He had hardly stretched himself out upon the bunk, however,
when a startling thing occurred.