ABSTRACT
At age 64 and at the height of his fame Friedrich Schleiermacher (1768-1834) made a Scandinavian tour that brought him to Copenhagen, 22-29 September 1833, where the Plato translator and Christian theologian was highly feted, accorded academic honors, held private talks with cultural luminaries as well as students, and preached in the Vor Frue Kirke.1 The visit, less than five months before his death, was certainly extraordinary. The Copenhagen Post noted, “His whole effectiveness is so significant and influential, that he would have to be an object of interest for anyone, who did not wish to hold himself aloof from the most important movements of the age.”2 The young Kierkegaard, then a student at the university, appears to have held himself aloof on this occasion. He thus missed the
I am grateful to Gordon Marino and Cynthia Lund for use of the Kierkegaard Library at St. Olaf College and to Jon Stewart for inviting me to revisit these issues. 1 On Schleiermacher’s Confidential Letters, see also Richard Crouter, “Kierkegaard’s Not so Hidden Debt to Schleiermacher,” Zeitschrift für Neuere Theologiegeschichte / Journal for the History of Modern Theology, vol. 1, no. 2, 1994, pp. 205-25, reprinted as Chapter 4 in Friedrich Schleiermacher: Between Enlightenment and Romanticism, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2005; and Richard Crouter, “More than Kindred Spirits: Schleiermacher and Kierkegaard on Repentance,” in Proceedings of the Schleiermacher-Kierkegaard Congress, Copenhagen, October 9-13, 2003, ed. by Niels Jørgen Cappelørn, Richard Crouter, Theodor Jørgensen, and Claus-Dieter Osthövener, Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2006. For a vivid account of the visit that includes source documents, see Jon Stewart, “Schleiermacher’s Visit to Copenhagen in 1833,” Zeitschrift für Neuere Theologiegeschichte / Journal for the History of Modern Theology, vol. 11, no. 2, 2004, pp. 279-302. An account of the Copenhagen Post for 28 September is found in Aus Schleiermachers Leben. In Briefen, vols. 1-4, ed. by Ludwig Jonas and Wilhelm Dilthey,
poet Adam Oehlenschläger’s (1779-1850) lyrical song that deftly celebrated the visitor’s many gifts. By giving Plato and Socrates to the Germans, Oehlenschläger opined, Schleiermacher had connected the Baltic Sea with the Archipelagos. His words recognized Schleiermacher for having turned Plato, if not also Socrates, into German contemporaries of Golden Age Denmark, a major feat of cultural transmission that will gain our attention in what follows.
