Problema III — Was it ethically defensible for Abraham to conceal his undertaking from Sarah, from Eliezer, and from Isaac?

Problema III opens with the thesis: the ethical, as the universal, is also the manifest. The single individual's ethical task is to unwrap himself out of his hiddenness and become manifest in the universal. If Abraham had not been commanded by God but had decided on his own to sacrifice Isaac, this would have been, on the ethical view, a case of the demonic — of a person who refuses to emerge from hiddenness into the universal. The question is whether Abraham's hiddenness has its ground in something other than demonic refusal.

Kierkegaard works through the aesthetics and ethics of hiddenness in extended detail. Aesthetics rewards hiddenness when the concealment is for another's sake and eventually resolves it through accident — a servant overhears, a letter is found, a misunderstanding is cleared. Ethics always demands disclosure: the tragic hero must himself be the one to announce what is happening, must expose himself to the full force of the tears and arguments of the people he loves. Agamemnon should himself tell Iphigenia. Jephthah should himself tell his daughter. The tragic hero who hides the terrible truth in order to spare the beloved is not heroic but sentimental. He takes onto himself the role of providence, which is not his to play.

Abraham is neither of these. He cannot be resolved aesthetically because no accident can make his deed intelligible — no old servant can overhear what Abraham is doing and explain it to Sarah in a way that Sarah can accept. He cannot fulfill the tragic-heroic obligation of ethical disclosure because the content of what God has asked him is not translatable into any vocabulary available to the universal — to attempt disclosure would be to stand condemned as a murderer by the very people he loves most. His silence is therefore not an aesthetic convention, not a tragic-heroic reticence, but the absolute hiddenness that has its ground in the paradox of faith. Johannes de Silentio chose his name for this reason. He is the one who cannot speak.