Andersen in 1860, photographed by Franz v. Hanfstaengel, Munich.. Kilde: Det Kongelige Bibliotek.
“I’m drifting like a bird in the gale”
At the manor of Basnæs Andersen had several arguments with Lady Scavenius and others about religious matters; thus on July 14, 1870, he recorded in his diary: “1 told them that the teaching came from God and that it was a blessed thing, but that conditions of birth and family, however interesting they might be, were not essential to me. Then the storm broke out and they said that the teaching had no significance if one did not take into account his birth and his death. The last addition was necessary to confirm his firm conviction of truth, etc. -If I did not believe in the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost, then I wasn’t a Christian. I replied that I believed in them as concepts, not as persons, not as bodily creations -they almost gave me up.”
One evening in October 1871 when Andersen happened to express his views on God and Christ, on the Virgin Mary, and so forth, a lady, who was a firm supporter of Grundtvigian ideas, exclaimed: “Dear me! Then you must be a Jew! ” When Andersen told her of his love of, gratitude towards, and admiration for Christ as a human being who was entitled to ask others to follow his example, the poor lady burst into tears and rushed out of the room. “There was quite a scene,” Andersen writes. “1 was unhappy if I had ‘offended’ someone who had never so far thought about matters of faith, and later in the evening I tried to clear everything up and pacify her, in which I seemed to succeed. I said, ‘ A father gives each of his two daughters a costly ring; one of them is firmly convinced that it is genuine and it would never occur to her to doubt it, she is happy in her blind faith; the other wants to know and so goes to an expert with the ring and by having it examined learns that it is in fact genuine. In this latter way I have become convinced that what Christ teaches does in fact come from God.
Andersen: What was he like? by Elias Bredsdorff Nr.7 a. Primitive and undogmatic religion