For Kierkegaard, poet of ideality and practitioner of the indirect method, ideality was a corrective and had a polemical side that was apparent in direct critiques in four episodes: the early criticism of Hans Christian Andersen in From the Papers of One Still Living; the Corsair affair with Meir Goldschmidt on destructive anonymous journalism; the exchange with Andreas G.

Rudelbach on the politicizing reformation of the Church; and the "attack on Christendom" against the established ecclesiastical order and the formalism of culture-accommodated Christianity, the subject of the present volume.