Søren Kierkegaard (above), the Danish Christian philosopher and pioneer of existentialism died at 9pm today in 1855 at the age of 42. He had collapsed in the street a month earlier, with suspected tuberculosis, and was in a coma for his last few days. During his life, he had attacked liberalism for underestimating the unbridgeable chasm between humanity and God, the Enlightenment for teaching that truth is rational, and the Church for betraying New Testament Christianity and being a mere agent of civilisation.
‘What Christianity wanted was chastity – to do away with the whorehouse. The change is this, that the whorehouse remains exactly what it was in paganism, lewdness in the same proportion, but it has become a “Christian” whorehouse. A whoremonger is a “Christian” whoremonger, he is a Christian exactly like all the rest of us; to exclude him from the means of grace – “Good God,” the priest will say, “what would be the end of it if once we were to begin by excluding one contributing member!”’ Søren Kierkegaard, Attack Upon Christendom
Today is Armistice Day, when in 1918 at 11 o’clock, fighting ended in the First World War. Twenty years later, in an Armistice Day radio broadcast in 1938, the soloist Kate Smith sang a song written by Irving Berlin during the war called ‘God Bless America’. It joined the top 10 of songs hymning the surpassing greatness of the USA, and like ‘America the Beautiful’ is a pious and patriotic prayer.
The Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoevsky was born in Moscow today in 1821. His parents read him tales from Pushkin, Homer, Cervantes and Goethe each night, and his mother taught him to read for himself from the Bible. Later, during a decade of prison and exile for joining a supposedly seditious group, Dostoevsky became devoted to the New Testament, and his novels are suffused with the themes of sin and redemption.
‘Even in the mines, underground, I may find a human heart in another convict and murderer by my side, and I may make friends with him, for even there one may live and love and suffer. One may thaw and revive a frozen heart in that convict, one may wait upon him for years, and at last bring up from the dark depths a lofty soul, a feeling, suffering creature; one may bring forth an angel, create a hero!’ Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov
Tonight in 1572, the 26 year-old Danish astronomer Tycho Brahe observed something inexplicable in the constellation of Cassiopeia. He saw a bright new star, which we now know was a supernova, an exploding star, 7,500 light years distant. This was a theological problem in Brahe’s time, when the earth was believed to be the centre of the universe, and the stars fixed and eternally unchanging.
It is the feast day of St Menas, a 3rd century Roman soldier martyred for his faith in Egypt, and very popular in the Coptic Orthodox Church. In the decisive desert battle of El Alamein in 1942, during the Second World War, legend has it that St Menas haunted the German troops the night before the battle and spooked them so badly they lost their nerve the next day.
Image: Royal Danish Library