ABSTRACT
Dialectically, Kierkegaard criticizes the negatives and lauds the positives of monastic asceticism. Negatively, both his pseudonymous and signed works criticize the conceit potentially accrued through asceticism. Kierkegaard’s pseudonym Judge William proclaims, “In the Middle Ages it was thought that in choosing the monastery one chose the extraordinary and became an extraordinary person oneself; from the altitude of the monastery one looked down proudly, almost pityingly, on the ordinary people.”2 But to desire to be supposed a holy person, the pseudonym Johannes Climacus warns, is the most dreadful profanation of the holy.3 It is an irony that the person who renounces vanity wants to be admired for renouncing it.4
