Fear and Trembling — who's who

The patriarch of Genesis 12–25, called by God out of Ur and given the promise of a great nation through his son Isaac. Old, childless for decades, he and Sarah finally receive Isaac in their old age. Then, in Genesis 22, God commands him to take Isaac to the land of Moriah and offer him there as a burnt offering. Abraham rises early, saddles his ass, takes two servants and his only son, travels three days to the place God has shown, builds the altar, binds Isaac, takes the knife, raises it. The angel stops him at the last moment; a ram caught in a thicket is offered instead. Kierkegaard's reading is uncompromising: Abraham believed both that God required him to kill his son and that God would somehow give Isaac back, and he proceeded toward the killing on the strength of both beliefs simultaneously. This is, for Kierkegaard, what faith looks like — and it is what most contemporary Christians have stopped recognising as faith because it is too uncomfortable to acknowledge.

The promised son of Abraham and Sarah, born in their old age after decades of barrenness. In the binding-of-Isaac story he is old enough to carry the wood for the burnt offering up the mountain, old enough to ask the question that pierces the narrative: "My father, behold the fire and the wood, but where is the lamb for a burnt offering?" Abraham's answer — "My son, God will provide himself a lamb" — is the most quoted line in the chapter. Isaac in Kierkegaard's reading is largely silent, and his silence is part of what makes the story unbearable. The Exordium presents four imagined versions of the journey, each exploring how the scene might have unfolded if Isaac had understood what was happening. None of them is the version that happened.

Abraham's wife and the mother of Isaac. Genesis says nothing of her in the binding chapter — she does not appear, does not speak, does not know. Kierkegaard, in Problema III, makes her absence the conceptual key to the whole problem of communicability. Abraham could not tell Sarah what God had asked of him because, on the universal ethical, the request was unintelligible — and to have explained it would have been to ask her collaboration in something the ethical universal calls murder. So Sarah is left out, and her exclusion is part of what isolates Abraham in the religious. In the Exordium she is described looking out the window as they ride away, watching until she can see them no more. She dies in the very next chapter of Genesis, without ever being told the story.

Born 5 May 1813 in Copenhagen, youngest of seven children. Educated at the Borgerdydskole and the University of Copenhagen, where he took a master's degree in theology in 1841 with a dissertation on the concept of irony. Engaged to Regine Olsen September 1840, breaks the engagement October 1841. Travels twice to Berlin to hear Schelling lecture. Returns to Copenhagen and writes, between 1843 and 1846, the major pseudonymous works: Either/Or, Fear and Trembling, Repetition, Philosophical Fragments, Concept of Anxiety, Stages on Life's Way, the Concluding Unscientific Postscript. Spends his last years attacking the Danish state church for what he called the comfortable Christianity of the Sunday Christian. Collapses in October 1855 and dies in November of that year, aged forty-two. Fear and Trembling is the book most inseparable from his life.

John of silence, the pseudonymous author Kierkegaard chose for Fear and Trembling. Johannes presents himself as a thoughtful man who is not a knight of faith and who confesses, repeatedly, that he cannot understand Abraham — admires him without comprehending him, can perform the movement of infinite resignation but not the second movement to faith. The choice of pseudonym is deliberate. The book on faith is told by a man who cannot keep faith's silence and must therefore speak about it, and who knows that his speaking is itself a sign that he stands outside what he is describing. This double posture — the attempt to write about a religious experience by a narrator who explicitly does not have it — is one of Kierkegaard's most characteristic devices, and it produces some of the strangest and most truthful philosophical writing of the nineteenth century.

The young Danish woman Kierkegaard fell in love with in 1837, became engaged to in September 1840, and broke the engagement with in October 1841. She was eighteen at their meeting, twenty at the breaking. A serious and intelligent young woman, she was deeply hurt by the engagement's end and remained, for Kierkegaard, the great love of his life. He wrote of her, sometimes obliquely and sometimes directly, in almost every book he published; the figure of the beloved given up appears, under different names and in different keys, throughout his work. Regine eventually married Johan Frederik Schlegel, lived a normal Danish nineteenth-century life, accompanied her husband to the Danish West Indies as governor's wife, and outlived Kierkegaard by more than fifty years. She kept his published works in a special place in her home. Whether Fear and Trembling is, among other things, a coded letter to her is a question Kierkegaard himself raised and never answered.