Soren Kierkegaard
Excerpt from Attack Upon "Christendom" (1854-1855)

[Translation by Walter Lowrie, as excerpted in Robert Bretall, ed., A Kierkegaard Anthology (New York: Modern Library, 1946), pp. 455-458.]

THE WEDDING

True worship of God consists quite simply in doing God's will.

But this sort of worship was never to man's taste. That which in all generations men have been busied about, that in which theological learning originated, becomes many, many disciplines, widens out to interminable prolixity, that upon which and for which thousands of priests and professors live, that which is the content of history of "Christendom," by the study of which those who are becoming priests and professors are educated, is the contrivance of another sort of divine worship, which consists in--having one's own will, but doing it in such a way that the name of God, the invocation of God, is brought into conjunction with it, whereby man thinks he is assured against being ungodly--whereas, alas, precisely this is the most aggravated sort of ungodliness.

An example. A man is inclined to want to support himself by killing people. Now he sees from God's Word that this is not permissible, that God's will is, "Thou shalt not kill." "All right," thinks he, "but that sort of worship doesn't suit me, neither would I be an ungodly man." What does he do then? He gets hold of a priest who in God's name blesses the dagger. Yes, that's something different.

In God's Word, the single state is recommended. "But," says man, "that sort of worship doesn't suit me, and I am certainly not an ungodly man, either. Such an important step as marriage [which, be it noted, God advises against, and that not taking this "important step" is the important thing] I surely ought not to take without assuring myself of God's blessing. [Bravo!] That is what this man of God, the priest, is for; he blesses this important step [the importance of which consists in not doing it], and so it is well pleasing to God"--and I have my will, and my will becomes worship, and the priest has his will, he has ten dollars, not earned in the humble way of brushing people's clothes or serving beer or brandy at the bar; no, he was employed in God's service, and to earn ten dollars in that way is--divine worship. (Bravissimo!)

What an abyss of nonsense and abomination! When something is displeasing to God, does it become well pleasing by the fact that (to make bad worse) a priest takes part who (to make bad worse) gets ten dollars for declaring that it is well pleasing to God?

Let us stick to the subject of the wedding. In his Word God recommends the single state. Now there is a couple who wants to get married. This couple, of course, since they call themselves Christians, ought to know well what Christianity is--but let that pass. The lovers apply to--the priest; and the priest is bound by an oath upon the New Testament which recommends the single state. If then he is not a liar and a perjurer who in the basest manner earns paltry dollars, he must act as follows. At the most he can say to them with human sympathy for this human thing of being in love, "My little children, I am the last man to whom you should apply; to apply to me in such a contingency is as if one were to apply to the chief of police to inquire how one should comport oneself when stealing. My duty is to employ every means to restrain you. At the utmost I can say with the Apostle (for they are not the words of the Master), yes, if it comes to that, and you have not continency, then get together, 'it is better to marry than to burn.' And I know very well that you will shudder inwardly when I talk thus about what you think the most beautiful thing in life; but I must do my duty. And for this reason I said that I am the last man to whom you should apply." . . .

Christianly one must say that precisely the fact that the priest takes part is the worst thing in the whole affair. If you want to marry, seek rather to be married by a blacksmith; then it might perhaps (if one may speak thus) escape God's notice; but when a priest takes part it cannot possibly escape God's notice. . . .

What every religion in which there is any truth aims at, and what Christianity aims at decisively, is a total transformation in a man, to wrest from him through renunciation and self-denial all that, and precisely that, to which he immediately clings, in which he immediately has his life. This sort of religion, as "man" understands it, is not what he wants. The upshot therefore is that from generation to generation there lives--how equivocal!--a highly respected class in the community, the priests. Their métier is to invert the whole situation, so that what likes becomes religion, on the condition, however, of invoking God's name and paying something definite to the priests. The rest of the community, when one examines the case more closely, are seen to be egotistically interested in upholding the estimation in which the priests are held--for otherwise the falsification cannot succeed.

To become a Christian in the New Testament sense is such a radical change that, humanly speaking, one must say that it is the heaviest trial to a family that one of its members becomes a Christian. For in such a Christian the God-relationship becomes so predominant that he is not "lost" in the ordinary sense of the word; no, in a far deeper sense than dying he is lost to everything that is called family. It is of this Christ constantly speaks, both with reference to himself when he says that to be his disciple is to be his mother, brother, sister, that in no other sense has he a mother, a brother, a sister; and also when he speaks continually about the collision of hating father and mother, one's own child, etc. To become a Christian in the New Testament sense is to loosen (in the sense in which the dentist speaks of loosening the tooth from the gums), to loosen the individual out of the cohesion to which he clings with the passion of immediacy, and which clings to him with the same passion.

This sort of Christianity was never--no more now, precisely no more than in the year 30--to man's taste, but was distasteful to him in his inmost heart, mortally distasteful. Therefore the upshot is that from generation to generation there lives a highly respected class in the community whose métier is to transform Christianity into the exact opposite.

The Christianity of the priests, by the aid of religion (which, alas, is used precisely to bring about the opposite), is directed to cementing families more and more egotistically together, and to arranging family festivities, beautiful, splendid family festivities, e.g. infant baptism and confirmation, which festivities, compared for example with excursions in the Deer Park and other family frolics, have a peculiar enchantment for the fact that they are "also" religious.

"Woe unto you," says Christ to the "lawyers" (the interpreters of Scripture), "for ye took away the key of knowledge, ye entered not in yourselves [i.e. into the kingdom of heaven, cf. Matthew 23:13], and them that were entering in ye hindered." (Luke 11:52.)