Fear and Trembling

Overview

A hundred and twenty pages, published in Copenhagen in 1843 under a false name, and subtitled a dialectical lyric, which is a warning that it will not behave like a treatise. The author on the title page is Johannes de Silentio, John of Silence, and Kierkegaard meant the pseudonym seriously. Johannes is not a believer. He is a man of great intelligence who has thought about faith with total concentration, admires it beyond anything else, and does not have it. Every page is written from outside, looking in.

The subject is four verses of Genesis 22. God tells Abraham to take his son, his only son, whom he loves, to a mountain and offer him there. Abraham rises early, saddles the ass, travels three days, binds the boy, and raises the knife. Then an angel stops him. Christian tradition has always called this a trial passed. Johannes asks what exactly it was that Abraham did during those three days.

The form is deliberately strange: a preface that mocks the intellectual fashion of the day, then a section of four imagined retellings, then a eulogy, then a long central meditation, then three numbered problems with a rhetorical question for a title. It reads in places like poetry and in places like a legal brief.

The argument

Attunement. Four versions of the journey, each imagining what would have to be true for the story to make sense in ordinary human terms. In one, Abraham tells Isaac that the monstrous thing is his own idea, so that the boy will lose faith in his father rather than in God. In another, Abraham obeys but is broken and can never be joyful again. In another he begs forgiveness for having been willing. In another Isaac sees his father’s hand tremble and loses faith. Each is psychologically plausible and none is the Abraham of the text, who goes, and returns, and is glad.

Eulogy on Abraham. A hymn to the man who is called the father of faith, built on the observation that his greatness is exactly proportional to what he expected against all expectation: he believed the promise when he was old and childless, and he believed it still on the mountain.

Preamble from the Heart. The book’s engine. Johannes distinguishes two movements. Infinite resignation gives up the finite thing utterly: the young man who loves a princess he cannot have renounces her, and in renouncing gains a kind of peace and dignity. Johannes says he can make that movement himself, and that anyone with enough courage can. Faith makes it and then makes a second movement, receiving the finite back, on the strength of the absurd. Abraham gives Isaac up entirely and simultaneously expects to keep him, in this life, not in eternity. And the strangest part is what such a person looks like: if Johannes ever met one, he says, he would see no sign at all, only a man who resembles a tax collector, who takes pleasure in his dinner and walks home content.

Problema I: Is there a teleological suspension of the ethical? The ethical, on the Hegelian account Johannes is using, is the universal: what applies to everyone and can be publicly justified. From within it, what Abraham intended is simply attempted murder. So either the story has to be rejected, or the ethical can be suspended for a higher end that is not another ethical end. Faith, he concludes, is the paradox that the individual stands higher than the universal, and is in an absolute relation to the absolute.

Problema II: Is there an absolute duty to God? In the usual philosophical account, duty to God just means doing your duty. Johannes argues that Abraham’s case breaks that, and drives it to the hard place: the command he obeys is a command to hate what he loves most, and it is precisely because he loves Isaac completely that the trial means anything.

Problema III: Was Abraham ethically defensible in concealing his undertaking? The longest section, and the one about speech. The tragic hero, Agamemnon, Jephthah, Brutus, sacrifices a child for a public good, can explain himself, and is mourned by the community; the tears of the nation are his consolation. Abraham can say nothing, because what he is doing cannot be put into the language everyone shares. His only words to Isaac are that God will provide the lamb, which is true and tells nothing. Johannes wanders through Agnes and the merman, Faust, the Book of Tobit and Richard III, examining other figures who cannot speak, and none of them is Abraham.

How to read it

Read Genesis 22 first, all nineteen verses, in a plain translation, before you read a word of Kierkegaard. The book depends on the bareness of the original.

Then read the four retellings, and notice that each supplies a motive. Ask yourself which one you have been assuming all your life.

Keep the pseudonym in view. Johannes de Silentio is a character, and he says over and over that he cannot make the movement he is describing. Treating the book as Kierkegaard’s personal statement of belief flattens it.

Know the biography in the background without letting it take over. Kierkegaard had broken off his engagement to Regine Olsen two years earlier, giving her no explanation he could make intelligible, and the theme of a man who must do something incomprehensible in silence and cannot justify it is not accidental. It is not, however, the meaning of the book.

Watch what the argument does with Hegel. The ethical as the universal, the individual finding his truth by being taken up into the community, is Hegel’s, and the whole book is constructed to find one case the system cannot absorb.

The standard misreading is that this is a licence: if Abraham could, so can I. Johannes blocks it in advance. There is no mark by which a knight of faith can be recognised, and no way to tell him from a murderer, which is not an escape from the problem but a statement of it.

Questions it raises

• If the ethical can be suspended, what distinguishes Abraham from someone who is deluded or monstrous? Is there any test, and does it matter that there is not?
• Johannes says he can make the movement of infinite resignation but not of faith. What exactly is the second movement adding?
• Abraham believes he will get Isaac back in this life, by the absurd. Is that faith, or a failure to grasp what he is being asked?
• Why is silence the hard part? Would the act be different if Abraham could explain it?
• The tragic hero sacrifices a child for the nation and is honoured. Is the difference between him and Abraham a difference in the act or in the audience?
• Johannes writes from outside faith and says he only admires it. Can a book written from outside be right about what is inside?