Either It's Universal Or It Isn't

The individual in contemplation of a universal that transcends the manifest world is still cultivating worldly universalism. Consider Kierkegaard. As an extreme protestant he advocated the solitary worship of Christ for the sake of individual salvation. Was it something else, however, that led in the first place to the worldly conditions that he detested? What could the purest of Christianity have produced but the all-too-human Church, once it had achieved mass conversion? Would Kierkegaard have preferred that it had been unsuccessful and had remained a local and curious representation of defiance and renunciation? He himself would never have come to know of it. What about the success of his own philosophy? His greatest claim to fame is as the inspiration for secular existentialism, which has given its support to ideals that he himself would have held in abomination.