I have nothing more to say, but in conclusion I will allow someone else to speak, my poet, who, when he comes, will usher me to the place among those who have suffered for an idea and will say:
“The martyrdom this author suffered can be described quite briefly in this way: He suffered being a genius in a market town.70 The criterion he applied with regard to capabilities, diligence, disinterestedness, sacrifice, absoluteness of thought categories, etc. was much too high for the average of his contemporaries, jacked up the price all too unreasonably, and pressed down their price all too unreasonably. It almost made it seem as if the market town and the majority there did not have absolutum dominium [absolute rule], but that there was a God. So they at first mutually entertained one another for a time; they loquaciously discussed and discussed why he, after all, should have received these extraordinary capabilities, why he, after all, should be independent and thus able to be so industrious, and why be that anyway—they loquaciously discussed this so long (while they also took offense at one or another eccentricity [Særhed] in his mode of living, which actually was not eccentric, but no doubt was very particularly [særligen] calculated to serve his life’s purpose)—until the summa summarum [sum of sums] became: It is his pride; everything can be explained by his pride. Thereupon they went further, from loquacious discussion to action. Since it is his pride, they said, then any hidden opposition, any brazenness toward [XIII 581] him and mistreatment of him, is not only permissible, no, it is a duty to God—indeed, it is his pride that must be punished. O you inestimable market town, how priceless you are when you put on your dressing gown71 and become sanctimonious, when abandoning yourself to every nauseating inclination of envy, coarseness, and rabble barbarism also becomes the expression for doing obeisance to God. But, now, what about ‘his pride’? Was his pride due to the great capabilities? That would be like reproaching the yellow bunting, saying that wearing all its gold ornaments is its pride or is out of pride. Or was it his diligence etc.? If a very strictly brought up child worked together with others in the class, would it not be strange to say that his diligence etc. were pride, even if it was the case that the others could not keep up with him? But such instances rarely occur, because the child is promoted to a new class. But unfortunately the person who in many ways is ready to be promoted to eternity’s class—there is only one class, temporality’s, where he perhaps must remain for a long time.
“This was the martyrdom. But this is why I, his poet, also see the epigram, the satire, not the particular things that he wrote but what his whole life was. I see that now—when all the many ‘real’ people, with whom he by no means could compare favorably, especially when ‘legs’ are supposed to provide the criterion,72 not for what it is to be cattle (animal) but for what it is to be a human being, now when their legs like his have turned to dust in the grave and he has arrived in eternity, where, parenthetically speaking, ‘legs’ do not determine the outcome, neither their thinness nor their thickness, where, parenthetically speaking, he, praise God, is forever freed from the company of the brutish—I see that all these real people furnish an essential appurtenance, a chorus, a priceless market-town chorus, which took its stand on what it understood, his trousers, which became ‘the demand of the times,’ or even more precious, a chorus that wanted to ironize—the ironist. When I merely think of it, I can laugh loudly. But it comforts him in eternity that he has suffered this, that he voluntarily exposed himself to it, that he did not support his cause with any illusion, did not hide behind any illusion, but by suffering with God-fearing sagacity saved up for eternity: the recollection of surmounted sufferings, that he had remained faithful to himself and to his first love, the love with which he has loved only what has suffered in the world. Even though humble, he will not sneakily approach those glorious ones, not sneakily as [XIII 582] if his life on earth had expressed that their lives must have been either an accident or an untruth or an immaturity, since by serving the truth he had won great honor and esteem, had everywhere met spirit and understanding, unlike those glorious ones, who almost everywhere met brutishness and misunderstanding.
“Yet also here in the world he found what he sought: ‘that single individual’; if no one else was that, he himself was and became that more and more. It was the cause of Christianity that he served; from childhood his life was wonderfully fitted for that. Thus he completed the task of reflection—to cast Christianity, becoming a Christian, wholly and fully into reflection. The purity of his heart was to will only one thing.73 What in his lifetime was his contemporaries’ complaint against him—that he refused to scale down, to give in—became posterity’s eulogy on him—that he did not scale down, did not give in. But the imposing undertaking did not beguile him; while he qua author dialectically maintained supervision over the whole, he Christianly understood that for him the whole undertaking meant that he himself was being brought up in Christianity. The dialectical structure he completed, the parts of which are previous separate works, he could not attribute to any human being, even less would he attribute it to himself. If he should have attributed it to anyone, it would have been to Governance, to whom it was indeed attributed day after day, year after year, by the author, who historically died of a mortal disease but poetically died of a longing for eternity in order unceasingly to do nothing else than to thank God.”74