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The Darwin debate in Denmark is not primarily a debate about biology. It is a debate about who writes the rules for how we live.
On one side: our moral program was written by God. The natural sciences can describe the mechanism of creation, but they cannot touch the authority of divine command. This is Nielsen’s position, and it is also the position of the Lutheran establishment.
On the other side: if humans are products of natural selection, then our moral instincts, sexual norms, and social institutions are products of the need to survive and reproduce — nothing more. There is no divine legislator. The rules are negotiable, and the question becomes: which ones do we actually want to keep?
Brandes’s use of Darwin is a move in this second direction. The implication is radical: once the cosmological story underwriting Christian morality collapses, the entire moral order becomes an open question — including, as the course will show, sexual morality. This is exactly what the Sædelighedsfejde of the 1880s will fight out in public.
Nielsen’s position. Rasmus Nielsen succeeded Poul Martin Møller in the chair of philosophy in 1841, becoming professor ordinarius in 1850. He taught Filosofikum — the year-long required philosophy course taken by every Copenhagen student until the 1960s — giving him unusual influence over the entire educated class. After Kierkegaard’s death in 1855, Nielsen became the primary keeper of his legacy, making Kierkegaard required reading in Filosofikum.
The faith-knowledge project. In the years after Kierkegaard’s death, Nielsen developed a systematic philosophy of science aimed at demarcating faith and scientific knowledge as genuinely incommensurable domains. His magnum opus, Grundideernes Logik (1864), triggered a wave of controversy — over 25 pamphlets and nearly 100 articles — that directly prefigured the Modern Breakthrough.
Brøchner as hinge figure. Hans Brøchner (1820–1875) is the key intellectual mediator between Kierkegaard and the Breakthrough generation. A distant relative of Kierkegaard who knew him personally, Brøchner was also a convinced Feuerbachian — barred from the theology degree in 1841 for declaring sympathy with Strauss and Feuerbach. He gave the first systematic lectures on Kierkegaard’s complete authorship (Copenhagen, 1858–59), sympathetically but critically. His philosophical objection to Nielsen’s dualism was sharp: a faith-paradox asserted as a belief in consciousness cannot be quarantined from the rest of cognition — it must either be resolved by thought or it disorders thought. Both Høffding and Brandes were regular visitors in his last years. His Erindringer om Søren Kierkegaard — the richest contemporary memoir of Kierkegaard — was published posthumously in the Brandes brothers’ journal Det nittende Aarhundrede (1876–77).
Brøchner’s argument in Problemet om Tro og Viden (1868). The book — a lightly revised transcript of lectures given at Copenhagen in the autumn of 1867 — organizes the Danish debate into a three-way confrontation. On one side stands Bishop Martensen’s philosophizing theology, which holds that faith-content can be taken up into the form of knowledge to produce a genuine Troesvidenskab (faith-science), and which claims for theology a supervisory authority over the other sciences. On the other side stands the Kierkegaard–Nielsen anti-theological religious standpoint, which secures religion by insisting on a principled separation of faith and knowledge: each gets its own domain, and neither can invade the other. Brøchner rejects both and argues for a third position he calls den religionsforsonede humane Bevidsthed — the religiously reconciled human consciousness.
His demolition of Martensen is brisk: the theological concept of God (personal, ethically determined, creator of miracles and of the world ex nihilo) is internally incoherent, and any attempt to cast it in the form of rational science merely smuggles a supernatural postulate into a structure that cannot bear it.
The extended argument — some ninety pages — is directed against Nielsen. Brøchner grants Nielsen his starting point: the principled opposition between scientific knowledge and positive religious faith is real and cannot be dissolved. But Nielsen’s version of it, which declares the principle of knowledge and the principle of faith/action to be absolutely heterogeneous (absolut uensartede), leads to a practical dualism in human nature that makes consciousness self-contradictory. If the two principles are truly incommensurable, they cannot be united in the same consciousness — yet Nielsen insists they can. The theory is therefore self-refuting. Worse, it is morally destructive: by sealing faith off from rational scrutiny, it opens the door to every form of superstition and absurdity, and it corrupts ethics at its root by severing it from its rational ground. Brøchner’s verdict, stated in the preface: Nielsen’s absolute heterogeneity between the principle of knowledge and the principles of faith and action is “en for Religiøsiteten, Sædeligheden og al sand Charakteerudvikling fordærvelig Misforstaaelse” — a misunderstanding pernicious to religiosity, morality, and all genuine character development.
Brøchner’s positive position is neither Feuerbach nor Hegel. Against Feuerbach, he insists that the religious relation is essential to human self-consciousness: humans have always been, and always will be, religious creatures, and their religiosity is not a deficient form of knowledge to be superseded. Against Hegel, he insists that the religious is not merely a cognitive form but expresses the whole human being in its concrete existence. His proposal: genuine knowledge and genuine ethical action, when fully realized, are the adequate expression of what is essentially religious in human life — not its abolition but its concrete fulfillment. The inner unity of the religious, the philosophical, and the ethical is the ground of an integrated human life; their separation, as Nielsen demands, is the ground of self-destruction.
Why this matters for Darwin. Brøchner’s critique is what makes Nielsen’s framework unavailable as a solution to the Darwin problem for the generation he trained. Nielsen’s response to Darwin in 1873 — “entirely correct as biology, entirely irrelevant to faith” — depends on precisely the absolute incommensurability that Brøchner had already shown to be self-contradictory and morally corrosive. Høffding explicitly names Brøchner’s critique as one of the things that moved him away from Nielsen in his letter of November 1867 — the year before the Problemet was published. Brandes had absorbed the same diagnosis. The Breakthrough generation’s insistence that a genuine worldview must integrate knowledge, ethics, and the deepest human interests into an undivided whole — that these cannot be quarantined from one another by decree — is Brøchner’s position, radicalized and secularized.
Brøchner also, in a small way, named the Modern Breakthrough: when Brandes came to him in October 1871 with a plan to lecture on the French drama, Brøchner told him to aim higher. Brandes proposed the title Grundstrømninger; Brøchner rejected the word as hard to understand and suggested Hovedstrømninger instead.
Brandes’s opening move. Høffding and Brandes both took Filosofikum under Nielsen in the early 1860s. When a glowing review of Grundideernes Logik appeared in Fædrelandet (1865), Brandes tried to get Brøchner and Gabriel Sibbern to respond publicly; both hesitated; Brandes went ahead himself, publishing Dualismen i vor nyeste Philosophie (1866). Høffding initially defended Nielsen in print that same year, but gradually distanced himself.
The 1860s reception. Darwin’s Origin of Species appeared in 1859. Through the 1860s, the theory circulated mainly in professional scientific and theological circles — not yet a matter of broad public controversy. Nielsen discussed it seriously in his lectures in the early 1860s, treating it as a philosophical challenge manageable within his incommensurability framework.
Why the Danish debate differed from the English. A key structural difference stressed by Gregersen and Kjærgaard: in England, Darwin threatened Paley-style natural theology, which offered a rational pathway from science to religion. Danish Lutheranism had no such tradition — Kant had already made natural theology suspect, and Luther before him had dismissed it as a theologia gloriae. The debate was therefore never really about God’s existence, but about cultural authority and worldview.
How far the Golden Age world was from modern science. Grundtvig — the dominant cultural theologian of the Golden Age — never once mentioned Darwin in his 23,000 pages of writing, and was a lifelong anti-Copernican. He took Adam and Eve as historical individuals and located Paradise between the Ganges, Euphrates, Nile, and Amazon. The Breakthrough was reacting against a world that had not fully absorbed even the Copernican revolution.
“Et synspunkt for Darwinismen” (1873). Published in Nielsen’s own journal For Idé og Virkelighed, this is the direct application of his Kierkegaard-derived project to the Darwin question. His position is radical in its dualism: Darwin’s theory is entirely correct as an account of biological development and natural history — but has absolutely no bearing on creation ex nihilo, humans as imago dei, or the doctrine of the Fall, because these belong to faith, not science. Nielsen’s framework was quickly adopted as a ready-made Danish solution: a translator’s note in Dansk Kirketidende in 1871 had already appealed to it as proof that the English crisis did not apply in Denmark.
Brandes on Kierkegaard’s fatal limitation. The 1877 Søren Kierkegaard book is the place where Brandes most sharply articulates the dialectic. Kierkegaard, he argues, should have given us the outline of a rational morality — a human ethics independent of religion. But he never did, because his moral sphere is never kept distinct from the religious: it always leans on a foreign authority. The key passage (p. 210):
Enhver, der i sit eget Sind forgjæves har tumlet med de Tanker og Forestillinger, som hin Hypothese klarer, Enhver, som efter Studiet af Kants «Kritik der Urtheilskraft» har grublet over Naturteleologien uden at kunne slaae sig til Ro ved Kants Besvarelse af det store Problem, har sikkert modtaget den Darwinske Theori ved dens Fremkomst som det løsende og befriende Ord, hvorefter han havde smægtet; Kierkegaard omvendt kunde ikke tilegne sig den uden at opgive den Opfattelse af Natur og Historie, hvori han havde fundet alle Gaaders Løsning.
(The problem Brandes has in mind: Kant’s first Critique insisted that nature must be understood purely mechanically — cause and effect, no purposes. But in the third Critique he confronts the fact that living organisms look irreducibly purposive: every part seems to exist for the sake of the whole. His answer — that we use teleology as a regulative fiction, an “as if” — was widely felt to be unsatisfying. What is the real explanation for organized, purpose-looking life? Kant famously doubted a mechanical answer was possible. Darwin is that answer: natural selection produces the appearance of design without any designer.
Note that Brandes’s formulation may be somewhat unfair to Kierkegaard. Kierkegaard, as a forerunner of existentialism, does not in fact require nature to be rationally meaningful — on the contrary, he insists on the absurdity of existence and the impossibility of finding God through nature or reason. What he requires is that the paradox of faith remain a live option: that the individual be free to make the subjective leap toward God precisely because reason cannot reach him. Darwin threatens this not by disproving teleology (which Kierkegaard already doubted), but by demolishing the specific cosmological narrative — Paradise, Fall, the entry of the God-man into history — that gives Kierkegaard’s paradox its content. Whether that is a fatal blow to Kierkegaard’s project, or whether the leap can survive without the cosmological scaffolding, is a genuine question.)
Translation: “Everyone who has in vain wrestled in his own mind with the thoughts and ideas that this hypothesis clarifies, everyone who after studying Kant’s Critique of Judgment has brooded over natural teleology without being able to rest content with Kant’s resolution of the great problem, has surely received the Darwinian theory at its appearance as the releasing and liberating word he had longed for; Kierkegaard, conversely, could not appropriate it without giving up the view of nature and history in which he had found the solution to all riddles.”
Brandes’s argument is cosmological, not social-Darwinist. Brandes does not invoke natural selection to justify social hierarchy or competition. His argument is that Darwin destroys the narrative of Paradise and Fall that underwrites Christian moral authority — just as Copernicus destroyed the physical location of heaven. The key passage in Hovedstrømninger, vol. I (Emigrantlitteraturen, 1872):
Vi Nulevende vide, at Videnskaben har givet Revolutionsmændene Ret og Schelling Uret; vi, som leve i Charles Darwin’s Tidsalder, antage ikke mere Muligheden af en oprindelig paradisisk Tilstand og et Fald. Der er ingen Tvivl om at Darwin’s Lære vil slaae den orthodoxe Moral til Jorden, ganske som Copernicus’s Lære slog den orthodoxe Dogmatik til Jorden; som Copernicus’s System berøvede det orthodoxe Himmerig sit fysiske Sted, saaledes vil engang Darwin’s Lære berøve det orthodoxe Paradis sit.
Translation: “We who live today know that science has proven the revolutionaries right and Schelling wrong; we, who live in the age of Charles Darwin, no longer admit the possibility of an original paradisiacal state and a Fall. There is no doubt that Darwin’s theory will strike orthodox morality to the ground, just as Copernicus’s theory struck orthodox dogmatics to the ground; as Copernicus’s system deprived the orthodox heaven of its physical location, so will Darwin’s theory one day deprive the orthodox paradise of its.”
Jacobsen as parallel figure. Brandes and Jacobsen first met properly at a gathering at Hotel d’Angleterre in late 1871. Jacobsen reminded Brandes that he had once brought him verses for assessment, and Brandes had received him coldly, having mistaken him for another Jacobsen whose play had just flopped at the Royal Theatre. Brandes had read the verses inattentively and pronounced them ranglede (gangly). Jacobsen recalled the word to him with a smile. Brandes’s first real impression: a natural scientist, botanist, Darwinist — “the most beautiful smile, hair and beard soft as silk, reserved and taciturn, said nothing commonplace, and seemed to contain values not easily accessible even to himself, still less to others.” Also in 1871, Jacobsen — later the author of Niels Lyhne — had published his first articles on Darwin in Nyt dansk Maanedsskrift, and produced the Danish translation of the Origin in 1872 and The Descent of Man in 1874–75. Brandes and Jacobsen worked in parallel, not in sequence: Brandes made Darwin politically and rhetorically available; Jacobsen made him scientifically and literarily available.
The real target was the worldview package. According to Gregersen and Kjærgaard, religious respondents were reacting not to Darwin’s theory as such but to the atheist-naturalist worldview in which Brandes’s circle transported it — with Haeckel and Spencer as the more immediate bogeymen.
Endpoint: Geismar (1903). The most creative theological engagement with Darwin was Eduard Geismar’s Kristendom og Udvikling (1903), which distinguished between genesis (how humanity evolved) and gyldighed (the validity of moral claims) — combining Darwin with Kant. By this point Darwin had been domesticated and absorbed into the common cultural canon.
Kierkegaard breaks the idyll. To understand Høffding’s trajectory, you need to know what happened to him as a student. After immersing himself in Kierkegaard’s writings, he writes that after a hard struggle he had to grant Kierkegaard right (give ham Ret) in his account of Christianity. The idyll shattered: Christianity no longer stood as the mild, consoling truth that could encompass family life, art, science, and civic life. Only one thing was needful — full renunciation, full surrender to the paradox. Reading the New Testament afresh with these eyes, he says, “it fell like scales from my eyes” (Det faldt mig som Skæl fra Øjnene): art, science, marriage — none of it figures there. These were, he writes, “the heaviest and darkest years of my life.” He describes himself literally wandering back and forth between the theology and philosophy auditoriums at opposite ends of the long university corridor — unable to settle in either.
Break from Nielsen (1867). This is the background against which Nielsen’s incommensurability thesis initially attracted Høffding: it offered a way to hold both. But in a letter of November 1867 he writes that he “can no longer agree with Rasmus Nielsen” — moved away by Nielsen’s own inconsistency, Brøchner’s critique, and his own renewed examination. Crucially, this did not bring him closer to orthodoxy but further from it.
Kierkegaard’s lasting influence — in a secularizing direction. Høffding’s admiration for Kierkegaard was deep and lifelong, but transformative rather than orthodox: the principle that subjectivity is truth, he writes, “points far beyond Kierkegaard himself.”
Høffding in 1874. When the Darwin article appeared, Høffding was a newly married Privatdocent — doctorate 1870, lecturing from spring 1871. The article grew from his concurrent engagement with Mill and Spencer, which also produced Den engelske Filosofi i vore Dage (1874). That encounter with English empiricism was simultaneously leading him toward his central philosophical position: that the mind has an irreducible unifying, synthesis-seeking character — which makes it impossible to read Darwin as a complete account of human knowledge or value. He was appointed professor of philosophy in 1883.
Nielsen (1873) defends Darwinism against philosophical objections while insisting it leaves faith untouched — the Kierkegaard-derived dualism applied directly to evolution.
Høffding (1874) subjects Darwin to epistemological scrutiny, arguing that the theory’s significance for Verdensanskuelse (worldview) is separable from its empirical confirmation.
Gregersen & Kjærgaard (2009) survey the broader religious response, including the orthodox resistance that Nielsen’s framework was partly designed to preempt.
C. H. Koch. “Hans Brøchner: Professor of Philosophy, Antagonist—and a Loving and Admiring Relative.” In Kierkegaard’s Influence on Philosophy, Tome I: German and Scandinavian Philosophy, ed. Jon Stewart. Farnham: Ashgate, 2012, pp. 245–265.
C. H. Koch. “Harald Høffding: The Respectful Critic.” In Kierkegaard’s Influence on Philosophy, Tome I: German and Scandinavian Philosophy, ed. Jon Stewart. Farnham: Ashgate, 2012, pp. 267–312.
G. Brandes. Levned (1905–08). Digitized critical edition: georgbrandes.dk — Brandes’s autobiography, with vivid accounts of the 1871 forelæsninger, his relationship with Brøchner and Jacobsen, and the hostile reception of Emigrantlitteraturen.
G. Brandes. Søren Kierkegaard: en kritisk Fremstilling i Grundrids. Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 1877. kb.dk — Brandes’s most explicit statement of the dialectic between Kierkegaard and Darwin: Kierkegaard should have given us a rational, human ethics independent of religion, but never did, because his moral sphere always leans on Christian authority. Darwin, by contrast, is the “liberating and releasing word” for anyone who has struggled with Kant’s problem of natural teleology.
H. H. Hjermitslev, P. C. Kjærgaard, M. Clasen, and S. S. Grumsen. “Translation and Transition: The Danish Literary Response to Darwin.” In T. F. Glick and E. Shaffer (eds.), The Literary and Cultural Reception of Charles Darwin in Europe, vol. III. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2014, pp. 103–127.
H. Brøchner. Problemet om Tro og Viden: en historisk-kritisk Afhandling. Copenhagen: P. G. Philipsens Forlag, 1868. Digitized, open access: kb.dk — The primary text for Brøchner’s critique of both Martensen’s Troesvidenskab and Nielsen’s incommensurability thesis, and the statement of his own position (den religionsforsonede humane Bevidsthed). The argument was delivered as lectures in autumn 1867; the published text is essentially unchanged. The companion volume — Om det Religiøse i dets Enhed med det Humane (1869) — develops the positive side of that position.
O. Seidlin. “Georg Brandes 1842–1927.” Journal of the History of Ideas 3, no. 4 (1942): 415–442. jstor — A wide-ranging intellectual portrait, particularly useful on the structural role of Darwinian evolution in Hovedstrømninger and on the tension between Brandes’s positivism and his idealism of freedom.