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MARIONETTES 35
ing his head with a helmet; and then standing on one foot, with one foot outstretched behind him, leaning forward with an idiotic smile of greeting, he made a speech of welcome to his masters the moment they came within earshot. The extraordinary thing about Grobecker was the cold calculating precision of his mimicry, the clear outlines, the sense that he was performing according to rigorous laws, and above all his detachment. "He was intelligence personified," Kierkegaard commented, "and at the same time he was a sentimentalist whose sentiments led him into a state of ecstacy. In that mood of cold detachment he showed his mastery to perfection, though he lacked Beckmann's fermenting flame. Nevertheless it would be untrue to say that he was not a genius: he was a genius, and worthy of his calling."
Kierkegaard possessed the utmost respect for these clowns. All his life he was bewitched by the spirit of comedy. He attended the theatre regularly and continually commented on the performances. It seemed to him that the comic stage with its paradoxes and absurdities, its excesses, its eternal dilemmas, was quite extraordinarily close to the explosive world of theology where he was at home. It was absurd to be alive, it was absurd to die, and most of all it was absurd to be a Christian. Credo quia absurdum. Tertullian's phrase haunted him. He examined "the category of the absurd" tranquilly, always walking on a tightrope and always in danger of falling, inventing his terminology as he went along because no one had ever explored such a landscape before. Jesus said that salvation is found only by putting everything one has in jeopardy. That, too, was absurd, and yet it was true. Men spent their whole lives on the edge of the abyss "suspended over 70,000 fathoms," and that was absurd and wonderful beyond belief. He was not the first to note that the universe is essentially comic, but he was the first to give depth and precision to the divine absurdity in the world of faith. He told the story of the Old Testament princess who mysteriously murdered her husbands one by one, and how in the