Before the Heterogeneous Magnitudes

Rasmus Nielsen is remembered for one thesis: that faith and knowledge are uensartede Størrelser, heterogeneous magnitudes, sprung from different principles, so that neither can contradict or support the other. It is the thesis Brøchner attacked, Brandes ridiculed, and Høffding grew up arguing about. It is also usually dated by a gesture — to “Kierkegaard’s influence in the 1840s,” or to the Johannes Climacus review of July 1849 — rather than by evidence.

Three books published within about twenty months let one do better. Evangelietroen og den moderne Bevidsthed appeared on 19 May 1849; Mag. S. Kierkegaards »Johannes Climacus« og Dr. H. Martensens »Christelige Dogmatik« followed in July; Evangelietroen og Theologien, the twelve lectures given at the University in the winter of 1849–50, appeared in 1850. All three are now transcribed in full in this collection, which makes it possible to ask not whether Nielsen held the doctrine but when he began to write in its terms.

The answer is more interesting than either of the usual ones. In May 1849 Nielsen does not have the doctrine. He does have the word, the concept, and one of the three pairs it will later govern — stated in his own emphasis, and defended against exactly the objection the mature doctrine has to defeat.

The 1849 book is philosophy

It is worth establishing this first, because the book is 530 pages of gospel exposition and is usually filed as theology. Three stretches are philosophy in the full sense.

The first is a formal dialogue between a Believer and a Non-Believer, pp. 92–97, in which the unbeliever’s slide from “maximally improbable” to “impossible” is refused and the resulting circle extracted — “Underet er umuligt, fordi det er umuligt” — and in which improbability is then argued to be a criterion of the miraculous rather than evidence against it, so that negative criticism and apologetic mediation are self-defeating in opposite directions. The second is a general theory of religion and contradiction, pp. 232–240, set out in four numbered theses with an anthropology under it and a self-refutation argument on top. The third is a survey of philosophical theology from Kant through Paulus, Strauß, Bauer, Weisse and Feuerbach, with an argued slippery slope against Hegel.

The vocabulary bears this out: Modsigelse occurs 155 times in the book, Videnskab 192, Bevis/Beviis 185, Sandsynlighed 47. These are not the proportions of a devotional work. The details are in the note on the book; what matters here is that the philosophical material exists to be dated.

What is already in place

Mutual irrefutability. The Fortale states it plainly. The author had intended a contest between the Believer, the Free Thinker and the Middle Way, and found that no party could refute another:

Evangelietroen kan ikke gjendrives; den har sit eget, overnaturlige Princip: den Troende holder ud indtil Enden.

The free thinker is granted the same immunity, on the same ground — he too “har sit eget Princip.” Two principles, two irrefutable positions.

A negative result about the reach of philosophy, argued rather than asserted, at the close of the miracle dialogue: faith “har Intet at befrygte af Philosophien, efterdi denne ligesaa lidt er istand til at bevise Underets Umulighed, som dets Nødvendighed.”

The anthropological premise on which the 1850 doctrine will rest. Man is the one being in whom time and eternity meet and conflict: “Det er Mennesket som Menneske, der er det vidunderlige Mellemled imellem det Timelige og det Evige” — the individual who can say of himself, with full right, “jeg er Modsigelsen” (p. 236).

And the conclusion itself, reached by another road. The last pages argue instrumentally: make science a means for Christianity and Christianity must consent to become a means for science, whence — “saa kommer det da omsider ud, at Videnskaben er Videnskab, og har i Grunden Intet med Christendommen at skaffe” (p. 526).

Kierkegaard is present, cited four times and warmly: To opbyggelige Taler (1844) on Anna’s patience in expectation, Kjærlighedens Gjerninger p. 187 on Christ’s look at Peter, “de mange herhen hørende dialektiske Bestemmelser, der findes i Mag. Kierkegaards Skrifter,” and “Gudsforholdets eiendommelige Dialektik, jfr. de kierkegaardske Skrifter.” But he is cited as a source of edifying and dialectical observations, never as a systematic authority.

And the word itself is in the book, in the period spelling ueensartet — seven times in the body, of which six are unremarkable. It is used of “den hellige Familie” as a compound of two heterogeneous constituents (p. 86); of what eternity presses to have separated out of the mixed (p. 115); of the constituents that a crisis clarifies but does not reconcile (p. 238); of drive, reason and Christianity, which the mediating theology only pretends to harmonise (p. 267); of the state-idea and individual right, “tvende ueensartede, men lige absolute Formaal,” whose combination is a pure contradiction resolvable only in the dialectic of revolution and reaction (p. 482); and of Christianity and “et hvilketsomhelst verdsligt Formaal” (p. 526).

The seventh is not unremarkable at all. On p. 156, in the middle of an argument about what Joseph and Mary could have made of the annunciation, Nielsen writes — and letterspaces, so the emphasis is his:

Vanskeligheden ligger just i, at det Overnaturlige er ueensartet med det Naturlige.

The difficulty lies precisely in this, that the supernatural is heterogeneous with the natural. The context makes the claim stronger, not weaker. Nielsen is answering the mediating critic who supposes that anyone actually present at a revelation could have settled by sober examination whether it was genuine. The difficulty, he replies, “kan umulig ophæves” by a person’s experiencing the revelation himself; on the contrary, such a person feels the opposition between the blessed and the actual pressing “med al sin Haardhed.” Heterogeneity is not an epistemic shortfall that better evidence would close. It is a relation between kinds, and first-hand experience does not touch it.

This is the doctrine’s own formula, in Nielsen’s own emphasis, in May 1849. And the natural and the supernatural are one of the three pairs the 1850 book will enumerate.

What is not in place

Three things.

Størrelser, the paired term, does not occur at all: the singular Størrelse occurs once, of personality, in an unrelated sense.

The application to faith and knowledge — to Christianity and science, or revelation-truth and reason-truth — is nowhere made. Every one of the seven uses above is of some other pair. The 1849 book reaches the conclusion that science and Christianity have nothing to do with each other, but by the instrumental argument about means and ends, not by heterogeneity.

And the existential vocabulary in which the 1850 doctrine is stated is absent. Subjectivitet does not occur once in a book of 158,000 words.

The counts

Word frequencies across the three books, per 10,000 words. Comment lines are stripped before counting; LaTeX control sequences remain in the denominator, which depresses all three columns equally and leaves the comparison intact.

	Bevidsthed May 1849	Climacus Jul 1849	Theologien 1850
body words	158,519	30,099	51,151
ueensartet*	0.44 (7)	1.99 (6)	17.01 (87)
Paradox	0.19	6.98	8.41
Existens	0.82	8.97	10.95
Subjectivitet	0.00	20.27	5.28
Modsigelse	9.78	5.65	6.45

Ueensartet is thirty-nine times commoner in 1850 than in May 1849; Paradox forty-four times. And the movement is not a general rise in abstraction: Modsigelse runs the other way, falling as the others climb. Seven occurrences in 530 pages is a word Nielsen has available; eighty-seven in 174 pages is a word he is arguing with.

The three occurrences of Paradox in May 1849 repay a look. All three fall on pp. 223–226, and all three are hostile — a satire on theologians who, finding both the old faith and the speculative concept threadbare, turn the coat once more and produce “en, saa at sige, decateret Umiddelbarhed, der glimrer og gnistrer, naar man stryger den i Retning af — Paradoxet.” In May 1849 the paradox is a fashion Nielsen mocks. By 1850 it is his own central category.

Contradiction is not heterogeneity

The two books are organised by different concepts, and the difference is substantive.

Bevidsthed is a book about Modsigelse. Contradiction presupposes that its terms are commensurable enough to collide; and Nielsen’s perfect religion does not evade the collision but masters it — it “griber Grundmodsigelsen i dens hele Dybde, og magter den med uendelig Overlegenhed.” Faith wins a contest.

Theologien is a book about Ueensartethed, and there is no contest to win. The same anthropological premise returns, restated in the new vocabulary:

I den menneskelige Existens, d. e. i det existerende Menneske ere ueensartede Størrelser forbundne til Eenhed. Det Sandselige og det Aandelige, det Timelige og det Evige, det Naturlige og det Overnaturlige mødes her.

In human existence, that is, in the existing human being, heterogeneous magnitudes are bound into unity. From which follows the “Sandhedsdualisme” and the rule of double relating — to relate christianly to Christianity and scientifically to science, drawing no inferences from either to the other. The temptation the rule guards against is named exactly: “at gjøre de ueensartede Størrelser lidt eensartede,” to make the heterogeneous magnitudes a little homogeneous, “at vække Spliden ved at tilstræbe Forsoningen” — to provoke the quarrel by aiming at the reconciliation.

Where the term comes from

The Johannes Climacus review of July 1849 is the hinge, and its use of the word is revealing: much of it is quotation from Kierkegaard. The review’s exposition of the objective way reproduces the Postscript’s judgement that historical approximation is “saa ueensartet med en evig Salighed, at intet Facit kan fremkomme”; the argument against speculation turns on an Ueensartethed that “vil aldeles forhindre ham i at begynde.” Nielsen’s own uses in the review are local — the two books under review are “i Retning, Aand og Tone saa ueensartede,” the dogmatician cannot serve “to saa ueensartede Opgaver.”

So the term enters Nielsen’s writing on faith and knowledge as Kierkegaard’s, in July 1849. It becomes a doctrine of his own — with the paired Størrelser, the existential grounding and the rule of double relating — in the winter lectures of 1849–50. The received account, which treats the review as “the textual origin of the uensartede størrelser thesis,” is right about the date and imprecise about the authorship: in July the phrase is still being borrowed.

Where this leaves the dating

Both models are on the page in May 1849, and they sit close together. Two pages after the crisis passage that says heterogeneous constituents go on standing apart “snart som ligegyldige, snart som fiendtlige Factorer” — now and again indifferent, which is the 1850 model exactly — comes the theory of contradiction that organises the book. Nielsen has both instruments in hand and is not yet choosing between them.

So the received account needs adjusting at two points rather than one. It is not right that Nielsen lacked the idea of heterogeneity before Kierkegaard: on p. 156 he states it of the natural and the supernatural, in his own emphasis, in a book finished before he had read the Postscript closely enough to review it. And it is not right that the Johannes Climacus review is where the thesis is formulated: there the word is largely still Kierkegaard’s, being quoted.

What happens between May 1849 and the winter lectures is not that Nielsen acquires a new idea. It is that an instrument he already had, and had already used on one of the three pairs it would later govern, gets turned on faith and knowledge; that Kierkegaard’s vocabulary — Existens, Subjectivitet, the paradox he had been mocking in April — gives him the terms to state the result; and that Modsigelse yields to Ueensartethed as the organising category, with the consequence that faith no longer has a contest to win.

The doctrine is therefore not Kierkegaard’s gift to Nielsen, and not Nielsen’s independent property either. It is his own instrument re-tooled in a borrowed vocabulary, and the re-tooling can be dated to the eight months between May 1849 and the winter lectures of 1849–50.

Note on method

Counts were taken over the verified transcriptions in this collection, with % comment lines stripped. Heterogeneity was matched as [Uu]?[Ee]ensarte[td]\w* and the results then split on the initial u-: the negating prefix must not be optional in the pattern, since eensartet means the opposite of ueensartet and both occur in these books. Word counts are of the stripped LaTeX source, so control sequences are included in the denominator; this depresses all three columns by about the same proportion and does not affect the comparison. Page references are to the printed pages of the first editions, which our transcriptions carry as page markers. Every quotation is given as our edition prints it, including the compositor’s errors where they fall inside one.

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