Evangelietroen og den moderne Bevidsthed

Nielsen’s lectures on the life of Jesus, delivered in the University building in the winter of 1848 to “et hæderligt Antal Tilhørere af begge Kjøn” and published on 19 May 1849 — five months before the Johannes Climacus review, and the first book in which Nielsen works out publicly how evangelical faith is to stand toward modern historical-critical consciousness. The title page marks it “Første Deel”; no second part ever appeared, and the last page announces none.

The organising device is a three-cornered debate. Nielsen sets the Believer, the Free Thinker and the Middle Way — the last of these “Skolens Theologer” — to read the four gospels together, each speaking in character. The Fortale warns the reader not to expect a verdict, and the reason it gives is the interesting part: the author has come to think that neither party can refute the other, and so declines to try.

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

The gospel faith cannot be refuted; it has its own, supernatural principle: the believer holds out to the end. The free thinker is granted the same immunity on the same grounds, and the Middle Way, Nielsen adds with some relish, is irrefutable too — not from strength but from pliability.

The text

Complete. Image-verified verbatim throughout: the front matter and printed pp. 1–530, 530 of 530 pages, no gaps and no duplicates, compiling to a 363-page LaTeX PDF. English translation not begun.

Editorial note

The page map is uniform, printed p = PDF p + 17, and was checked against the scan’s own text layer for all 551 PDF pages. Every apparent change of offset turned out to be a misread header numeral that the following page reverts.

The errata leaf is not trustworthy. The book prints nine Rettelser. Six have now been read at the printed page, and three do not behave as directed: p. 346 and p. 368 already print the reading the leaf asks for — the latter as a risen sort at cap height with the word space closed up, so the defect is in the justification and not in the reading — and p. 124’s directed reading is ungrammatical. Two of its nine corrections had therefore already been carried out in the forme, which suggests this copy is not the state the leaf was written against. Each correction is applied in the body and the printed reading logged in a comment at the site, so both states are recoverable; p. 124 is flagged for editorial decision rather than settled.

Three emphasis devices, not two. Letterspacing (\emph), antiqua set against the Fraktur (\textit), and a bold Fraktur (\textbf) used for certain scripture and for the refrain “Varslerne komme og svinde…”. The bold must be distinguished from the larger display fount used for gospel passages, which is size and not weight; the two are separated by measurement at 600 dpi rather than by eye. Several German proper names — Strauß, Schleiermacher, Lessing — are set not in antiqua but in a lighter Fraktur, and stay plain. The same verse is often set one way on one page and another way on the next, and each occurrence is transcribed as its own page sets it.

Diplomatic throughout. Turned sorts, wrong sorts, dropped sorts and unclosed speeches are transcribed as printed and logged at their sites: the speech opened on p. 223 runs open for three hundred and seven pages and the book ends without closing it. The running quotation-mark balance is therefore not zero on purpose. Where the printed heads and the Indhold disagree, both readings are kept — chapter VI exists in three states, the Indhold’s “i Ord og Gjerning”, the head’s plural “Gjerninger.”, and the chapter’s own closing line back to the singular.

Reading

The book is usually filed as theology, and most of it is: 530 pages of gospel exposition. But three stretches are philosophy in the full sense, and they are what make it worth having.

The miracle dialogue, pp. 92–97. A formal exchange between the Believer (A) and the Non-Believer (B), and the best philosophical writing in the volume. B argues from the analogy between biblical and pagan miracle stories to the maximal improbability of the former, and then slides from “maximally improbable” to “impossible” on the ground that the boundary is too fine for the historical eye to see. A refuses the slide and extracts the circle:

Naturloven kan ikke afbrydes, og hvorfor ikke? Fordi Underet er umuligt. Underet er umuligt, hvorfor? Fordi Naturloveu ikke kan afbrydes. Ergo: Underet er umuligt, fordi det er umuligt.

(The turned u in Naturloveu is the compositor’s, transcribed as printed.) The law of nature cannot be broken, and why not? Because the miracle is impossible. The miracle is impossible, why? Because the law of nature cannot be broken. Ergo: the miracle is impossible because it is impossible.

Then a sharper move. Improbability is a criterion of the miraculous, not evidence against it — “tabte det sig i Sandsynligheden, lod det sig jo forklare paa en ganske naturlig Maade, og var følgelig intet virkeligt Under.” So the negative critic, in establishing that miracles are maximally improbable, unwittingly supplies one of their most unmistakable marks, while the apologist of the Middle Way, in labouring to make them probable, strips them of it. Both enterprises are self-defeating, in opposite directions. The section closes on the sentence the rest of the book leans on: faith “har Intet at befrygte af Philosophien, efterdi denne ligesaa lidt er istand til at bevise Underets Umulighed, som dets Nødvendighed” — philosophy can prove neither the impossibility of the miracle nor its necessity.

A theory of religion and contradiction, pp. 232–240. Nielsen concedes the modern doctrine that all existence lies in contradiction, and turns it. Four numbered theses follow, of which the third is the load-bearing one: the perfect religion is not the one that excludes contradiction but the one that grasps it at full depth “og magter den med uendelig Overlegenhed.” Underneath is an anthropology — man as the middle term between time and eternity, the one being who feels the contradiction of existence, “jeg er Modsigelsen” — and a self-refutation argument: a criticism that dissolves every purpose into bottomless contradiction must, if it is consistent, take itself in.

A fourth passage is short but consequential. On p. 156, arguing that no amount of first-hand experience could have let Joseph and Mary settle the annunciation by sober examination, Nielsen letterspaces the claim that “det Overnaturlige er ueensartet med det Naturlige” — the supernatural is heterogeneous with the natural — and insists the difficulty “kan umulig ophæves derved, at et Menneske selv oplever Aabenbarelsen.” It is the earliest statement in this collection of the formula Nielsen would become known for, a year before he applied it to faith and knowledge.

A survey of philosophical theology, running through pp. 223–250 and 394–405: Kant’s rule that scripture be read to agree with the practical laws of pure rational religion, Paulus’s naturalising exegesis of Cana and the walking on the water, Strauß, Bruno Bauer, Weisse, Schleiermacher, Feuerbach, and an argued slippery slope against Hegel — “begynde hos Schelling og Hegel, maa man finde sig i at ende hos Strauß og Feuerbach.”

For where all this places Nielsen in 1849 — and in particular for the question whether the uensartede Størrelser doctrine is yet in place — see the essay Before the Heterogeneous Magnitudes.

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