Preliminary Expectoration

The Preliminary Expectoration opens with an old proverb: "Only the one who works gets bread." In the outer world the proverb often fails; in the world of spirit it holds absolutely. Only the one who was in anguish finds rest; only the one who descends into the underworld saves the beloved; only the one who draws the knife receives Isaac. The distinction sets the register for what follows: faith is not a comfortable thing, and the vocabulary for it must be paid for.

The chapter then introduces the distinction between the two knights. The knight of infinite resignation performs the movement of giving up the beloved, the finite good, and lives henceforth in the consolation of memory and eternity. He is admirable; he has given up everything. The knight of faith has done all of that — and then performed a second movement, by virtue of the absurd, believing that the finite good will be returned to him in this life, in time. Abraham did not know God would provide; he believed both that he must lose Isaac and that he would not lose Isaac, and he held both simultaneously. Johannes de Silentio confesses he can understand the knight of resignation, can perform that movement himself, but not the second. "I can leap over everything, but I cannot fly."

A famous imaginative portrait follows of what the knight of faith might look like if encountered in daily life — a solid, ordinary figure, perhaps like a tax collector, who takes pleasure in Sunday dinner, looks just like a bourgeois, and yet holds within him a movement that his neighbors could not perform. "He belongs entirely to the world; no bourgeois philistine could belong to it more. And yet he is the most remarkable thing in the world — perhaps the most remarkable thing in the world." The chapter closes by insisting that faith is not teachable in the ordinary sense: one knight of faith cannot help another; each becomes one by taking the paradox upon himself as the single individual, or he never becomes one at all.