There were no Calvinists or Dominics or Augustines. The man who was most like those great ones was a Dane, a contemporary of Hans Andersen, but thoug… - Charles Williams

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There were no Calvinists or Dominics or Augustines. The man who was most like those great ones was a Dane, a contemporary of Hans Andersen, but though Hans Andersen achieved world-wide repute at once, Soren Kierkegaard had to wait for his through some seventy years. It has taken Christendom that long to catch him up; it took fifty years to catch up St. Thomas, and it has not caught up Dante yet. He coordinated experiences in a new manner; say, using the old word, that he caused alien and opposite experience to coinhere. ... No doubt as soon as Kierkegaard becomes fashionable he will be explained. His imagination will be made to depend on his personal history, and his sayings will be so moderated in our minds that they will soon become not his saying but ours. It is a very terrible thing to consider how often this has happened with the great, and how often we are contented to understand what we have neatly supposed that they have said.