Fear and Trembling — themes & analysis

The first and most famous of the three Problemata asks the question on which everything else in the book depends. Hegelian philosophy, dominant in 1840s Copenhagen, held that the ethical was the universal — the rational moral order in which the individual is fully realised by recognising himself as a member of the family, civil society, the state. On this view, any individual who believes himself to have a duty higher than the universal is in a state of moral aberration. Kierkegaard, in the voice of Johannes de Silentio, asks: if this is correct, then Abraham is a murderer. There is no other word for what he intended on Mount Moriah.

The universal ethical demand — do not kill your child — was clear and binding, and Abraham proceeded to violate it on what he claimed was the authority of a private command from God. If the ethical is the highest, Abraham's case is closed: he is a criminal, and the church that calls him the father of faith has either been asleep for two thousand years or worships a murderer. Kierkegaard's alternative is the doctrine the chapter title announces. There is, he argues, a teleological suspension of the ethical — a moment in which the individual stands in an absolute relation to the absolute, and the universal moral demand is, for that moment, set aside.

This is not the immoral, which is below the ethical; it is the religious, which is above it. Abraham's faith does not make his action ethical, and it does not make him a tragic hero, whose conduct, though grievous, is intelligible within the ethical universal. It makes him something for which Hegelian ethics has no category at all: a knight of faith, in a category of one. The reader is left to decide whether such a category can exist — and whether, if it cannot, the entire tradition of Abrahamic religion collapses with it.

Kierkegaard draws the contrast with the tragic heroes: Agamemnon sacrificing Iphigenia, Jephthah his daughter, Brutus his sons. Each acted in anguish — but each acted within the ethical universal, for the welfare of the people. Each could be understood. Abraham cannot. His deed stands in no relation to the universal; it is, as Johannes de Silentio says, a purely private undertaking. That is what makes it either faith or madness, and no middle term is available.

Where to follow it: Problema I (the argument itself), Eulogy on Abraham (the setup), Exordium (the four versions).

The single most original contribution of the book is the distinction between two figures who look superficially alike and are, on Kierkegaard's reading, separated by an infinite movement. The knight of infinite resignation is the figure of romantic and idealist literature: the lover who renounces the beloved he can never have, the stoic who accepts what fate has taken, the dignified loser who finds his greatness in the gesture of giving up. He has performed an infinite movement — he has surrendered the finite good — and lives henceforth in eternity, in the consolations of memory and concept. He is admirable, and Kierkegaard writes about him with genuine respect.

The knight of faith has performed the same infinite movement, given up the finite good as the knight of resignation has done, and then performed a second movement — by virtue of the absurd — receiving the finite good back. He believes both that he has lost what he loved and that he will have it again, in this life, in time, on the strength of nothing but God's promise. This is not balance between two attitudes; it is the holding-together of two contradictory beliefs at once. Abraham believed that he must lose Isaac and that he would not lose Isaac. He performed every act of the loss and was prepared to lose him in fact, and simultaneously believed that on the very mountain Isaac would be returned to him.

The knight of faith is harder to depict than the knight of resignation, and Kierkegaard, characteristically, says he has never met one — though he imagines, in a famous passage, what one would look like: he might walk through the streets of Copenhagen looking exactly like a tax collector, eating his Sunday dinner with appetite, indistinguishable from his neighbours, holding within him a movement his neighbours could not perform. The image is gentle and terrifying. Faith is not visible in the face; resignation is.

Johannes de Silentio, the pseudonymous narrator, confesses that he can perform the movement of infinite resignation but not the second movement to faith. This is not false modesty; it is the structural point of the book. The narrator stands outside what he is describing, can admire Abraham without comprehending him, and his inability to follow is precisely what makes the portrait of Abraham so precise. You understand a thing better, sometimes, when you know you cannot do it.

Where to follow it: Preliminary Expectoration (the two knights), Eulogy on Abraham (the praise), Problema I (why Abraham is not a tragic hero).

Throughout Fear and Trembling Kierkegaard returns to the word absurd, and he means by it something specific that has been blurred in the existentialist vocabulary that borrowed the term a century later. The absurd, for him, is not the meaninglessness of human life but the specific paradox of faith: that the very thing the individual has given up, on the strength of an infinite movement, will be returned to him by virtue of God's promise, in time, in the finite world. This is absurd because it cannot be reasoned to.

Hegel's dialectic cannot reach it; the universal ethical cannot accommodate it; no calculation of probability can produce it; no inference from premises will ever give it as conclusion. The believer reaches it, if he reaches it at all, by what Kierkegaard elsewhere calls a leap — a movement of the will that is not the conclusion of a thought but the act of staking one's life on what no thought has secured. The leap of faith is the most influential idea Kierkegaard ever produced, and it has been understood in many ways: as anti-rationalism, as a precursor of pragmatism, as the founding move of religious existentialism, as the condition of all serious belief.

What Kierkegaard insists on, in Fear and Trembling, is that the leap is not arbitrary — Abraham is not a fanatic, not a murderer with a religious veneer — and not rational either, in any sense available to the universal ethical or to philosophy as the nineteenth century understood it. It is its own kind of movement, and it is what faith is. Without it, Abraham is unintelligible. Johannes de Silentio can describe the movement with precision and still confess he cannot perform it. That gap — between understanding and doing — is where the book lives.

The Preliminary Expectoration works through this in detail, via the image of Abraham on Mount Moriah drawing the knife. One who merely doubted would have done something great and glorious — plunged the knife into his own breast, offered himself. But Abraham believed. He did not pray to move the Lord. He rose early, went joyfully and confidently. By virtue of the absurd he received Isaac back again. Kierkegaard's point is that no ethical or philosophical vocabulary has a category for that second movement; faith is therefore either real, or it has never existed.

Where to follow it: Preliminary Expectoration (the absurd introduced), Problema I (the paradox of faith), Problema II (the absolute duty).

The third Problema asks whether Abraham was ethically justified in concealing his undertaking from Sarah, from Eliezer his servant, and from Isaac himself. Kierkegaard's answer is that he could do nothing else — and that this incommunicability is one of the marks by which the religious is distinguished from the ethical. The tragic hero — Agamemnon sacrificing Iphigenia, Brutus condemning his sons — operates within the ethical universal and can therefore explain his action in terms anyone can understand: the welfare of the city, the public good, the universal moral demand that overrides particular affection. He weeps as he acts, but he can speak.

Abraham cannot. He cannot tell Sarah that God has asked him to kill their son, because what God has asked is not justifiable in any vocabulary Sarah and Abraham share. To attempt to explain it would be to enter the universal, and the universal would judge him a criminal; to remain silent is to leave Sarah, Isaac, and Eliezer to their incomprehension and to bear alone what has been laid on him. Johannes de Silentio — John of silence — chose his pseudonym precisely for this reason. He is the one who cannot speak.

Kierkegaard works through an extended contrast between aesthetic and ethical hiddenness in Problema III. In aesthetic hiddenness, a character conceals something for another's sake and is eventually rewarded with disclosure when an accident resolves the situation. In ethical hiddenness, disclosure is always demanded: the tragic hero, to be worthy, must himself proclaim Iphigenia's fate to Iphigenia. But Abraham's hiddenness is neither aesthetic nor ethical; it is a hiddenness that has its ground in the fact that the single individual is higher than the universal — a paradox that cannot be resolved by any accident or any ethical courage.

The doctrine has implications beyond the binding of Isaac. It suggests that the deepest religious experience is, by its nature, incommunicable in ordinary discourse, and that any attempt to translate it back into the universal vocabulary distorts it. This claim has unsettled readers ever since — religious readers because it implies that faith cannot be taught in the ordinary way, philosophical readers because it places the religious deliberately beyond the reach of public reason. Kierkegaard means both implications, and he is not sorry.

Where to follow it: Problema III (the argument itself), Exordium (Abraham speaks nothing to Sarah), Eulogy on Abraham (vow of silence).

Fear and Trembling is, on its face, a philosophical reading of Genesis 22, and the whole argument can be followed without any reference to its author's life. Underneath the surface, every page is also about a young woman in Copenhagen named Regine Olsen, to whom Kierkegaard had been engaged from September 1840 to October 1841 and whom he had loved with extraordinary intensity. He broke the engagement deliberately, partly because he believed himself temperamentally unfit for marriage, partly because he believed his vocation as a writer of religious thought required a solitude marriage would have precluded.

The decision tormented him. Regine, by every account, was a serious, intelligent young woman who did not understand the breaking and was hurt by it for years. In Fear and Trembling, Kierkegaard reads Abraham as the man who gives up the thing he loves on the strength of a command he cannot justify, and trusts that he will be returned what he has given up — and the parallel to his own situation is impossible to miss. He is the knight of resignation who has given up Regine; he hopes — he is not sure — to become the knight of faith who receives her back, perhaps not as wife but as something.

The book does not name Regine and never explicitly invokes the engagement. But the autobiographical pressure is everywhere, and contemporary Copenhagen readers, who knew the engagement and the breaking, read it as such. Regine eventually married Johan Frederik Schlegel, accompanied him 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 — and what kind of letter — is a question Kierkegaard himself raised obliquely and never answered. The book is not reducible to its private dimension, but it cannot be fully understood without it. Kierkegaard's own answer would have been that the philosophical and the autobiographical cannot, in his work, be separated. The whole point of his pseudonymous method is that thought is a way of life and a life is a kind of thought.

Where to follow it: Preface (the autobiographical key), Preliminary Expectoration (the knight of resignation), Problema III (the beloved and hiddenness).