KIERKEGAARD, Soren

Christelige Taler [Christian Discourses]

First edition, Presentation state. Includes "The Anxiety of the Heathen," "Exultant Notes in the Conflict of Suffering," "Thoughts Which Wound from Behind -- for Edification," and "Discourses at the Communion on Fridays." Very good or better copy in glossy black presentation issue paper-covered boards with some surface loss to the outer joints and spine. A presentation copy Inscribed by Kierkegaard to Johan Ludvig Heiberg, the philosopher and prominent Hegelian whom Walter Lowrie called "the acknowledged literary arbiter of Copenhagen." He was a close mentor to Kierkegaard who served as one of the official readers of Kierkegaard's dissertation and had an important influence upon his work. Kierkegaard published two appreciations of Heiberg's mother and his wife (both were actresses) and remained close to the older scholar throughout his life. Despite this Heiberg never ceased to represent for Kierkegaard the hypocrisy of contemporary culture and Christianity. An important early work by the great philosopher. According to Lowrie, the third section is the first example of the polemic against a self-satisfied Christianity which was to dominate Kierkegaard's late writings. Among the controversial themes of this third section is Kierkegaard's attack upon the widespread confusion among both laypeople and theologians between the intellectually comforting Platonic notion of the soul's immortality and the Christian doctrine of a resurrection inseparable from judgment, addressed to the will rather than the intellect, and thus rightly a source of fear and trembling. A presentation copy of the first importance. Himmelstrup 110.

[BTC #54791]