Has it ever occurred to you, dear reader, to entertain just a little doubt concerning the well-known principle that the outer is the inner and the inner is the outer? Well, frankly, this doubt has not plagued the present author so very much. Or at least a historian cannot be nearly as much a doubter on this score as Victor Eremita, opening his editorial remarks in Either/Or, would seem to want him to be.

Let us consider the following examples. On 19 October 1855, when he lay dying in Frederik's Hospital, Søren Kierkegaard had a caller. It was his brother, the theologian and pastor Peter Christian Kierkegaard, later a bishop and briefly a cabinet minister. Peter had traveled from his parish at Pedersborg-by-Søro in west-central Zealand, in those days a considerable journey. Søren refused to receive his brother, who went home the next day. That same day Søren admitted his friend Emil Boesen for a visit. Boesen asked him if he wished to receive the Eucharist. “Yes,” answered Kierkegaard, “but from a layman, not a pastor.” Boesen protested that this would be difficult to arrange. “Then I will die without it.” Gerkegaard explained his position by stating that “pastors are civil servants of the Crown - they have nothing to do with Christianity.”