Søren Kierkegaard · Philosophy
Through the terrible story of Abraham, commanded to sacrifice his son Isaac, Kierkegaard explores faith at its most extreme. The ‘knight of faith’ makes a double movement: infinite resignation (giving up everything) and then, by virtue of the absurd, receiving it back. Faith may even require a ‘teleological suspension of the ethical’.
In Fear and Trembling (1843), published under the pseudonym Johannes de Silentio (‘John of the Silence’), Kierkegaard confronts the most disturbing story in the Hebrew Bible: God commands Abraham to take his beloved son Isaac - the son of the promise, born in his old age, on whom all God’s promises depend - up the mountain of Moriah and there to kill him as a burnt offering. Abraham obeys. He rises early, saddles his ass, travels three days in silence, binds his son, and raises the knife - and only then does the angel stay his hand and provide a ram instead. The Church had long celebrated Abraham as the ‘father of faith’ and read the story smoothly as a tale of obedience rewarded. Kierkegaard’s genius is to refuse this comfortable reading and to make us feel the full horror and scandal of what Abraham actually did - or was prepared to do.
For consider it honestly, Kierkegaard insists. By every ethical standard, what Abraham set out to do was murder - the premeditated killing of an innocent child, his own son. There is no ethical category under which raising a knife over Isaac is anything but monstrous. If we met an Abraham today, we would call him a madman or a murderer, not a saint. And yet the tradition venerates him as the supreme example of faith. How can this be? Kierkegaard will not let us dodge the question by sentimentalising the story or by quietly assuming it all worked out. He dwells on the three-day journey, on Abraham’s silence (he could explain himself to no one - not to Sarah, not to Isaac, not to his servant), on the unbearable tension of a father who loves his son with all his heart and yet is prepared to slay him because God has commanded it. Johannes de Silentio confesses that he cannot understand Abraham, that the more he contemplates him the more he is filled with awe and horror - that Abraham either is lost (a would-be murderer) or is the father of faith, and that there is no third possibility, no way to make him merely admirable or comprehensible. Faith, if this is faith, is something far stranger and more terrible than the tradition’s comfortable platitudes allow.
To understand what makes Abraham the ‘knight of faith’, Kierkegaard distinguishes him from a figure who is great but lesser: the ‘knight of infinite resignation’. The knight of infinite resignation is the tragic hero who can give up everything: faced with the loss of what he loves most, he renounces it, makes peace with the loss, and finds a kind of nobility and consolation in the renunciation. He gives Isaac up - and accepts that Isaac is gone. This is already a great spiritual achievement; resignation requires courage and concentrates the whole self into a single act of giving-up. Many religious and philosophical traditions reach exactly this point: the wisdom of renunciation, of detaching oneself from the finite, of accepting loss with equanimity. The knight of infinite resignation has given up the finite and found peace in the infinite, in eternity, in resignation itself.
But Abraham does something more, something that resignation cannot account for, and this is the ‘double movement’ that defines faith. Abraham makes the movement of infinite resignation - he genuinely gives Isaac up, holds nothing back, is truly prepared to lose him utterly. But then he makes a second movement that the resigned hero cannot make: he believes, at the very same time and with full passion, that he will not lose Isaac, that he will receive him back - ‘by virtue of the absurd’. He believes both that he must give Isaac up and that he will keep him; that the impossible will happen; that God will somehow, against all reason and against the command itself, restore what is being taken away. This is faith: not the renunciation of the finite (that is mere resignation), but the giving-up of the finite combined with the impossible faith that one will receive it back - that for God all things are possible, even the absurd. The knight of faith resigns everything and yet expects everything, holds the contradiction in the passion of faith, and so lives in the finite world joyfully, having given it up and received it back. Kierkegaard says he could make the movement of resignation himself, with effort - but the movement of faith, receiving the finite back by virtue of the absurd, he cannot make; it leaves him in awe.
Why does Kierkegaard press this terrifying analysis of Abraham? Not to recommend that anyone go off and harm their children in the name of God - he is acutely aware of how dangerous the idea is, and the whole book trembles with that awareness. His purpose is to recover the genuine difficulty and grandeur of faith against the cheapened, complacent ‘Christianity’ of his own comfortable Christendom, where everyone assumed they had faith simply by being respectable churchgoing citizens, and where faith was treated as something easy that one naturally possessed and then went beyond. Against this, Kierkegaard insists that faith is not the starting point one quickly surpasses but the highest and hardest thing a human being can attain - ‘the highest passion in a person’ - a task that may take a whole lifetime and that few ever truly reach. The story of Abraham is the measure of what faith really costs: not comfortable assent to doctrines, but the willingness to stand alone before God, in fear and trembling, prepared to give up what one loves most, sustained by a passion that reason can only call absurd.
The deeper philosophical point is that faith, for Kierkegaard, is the supreme expression of the single individual’s absolute relation to the Absolute - the highest reach of the ‘truth is subjectivity’ that began this whole study. Faith cannot be objective knowledge (Abraham has no proof, no universal justification, nothing he could explain or demonstrate); it is the most intense and risky inwardness, a venture of the whole self beyond what reason can secure or the universal can sanction. And it places the individual above the universal - not below it, as the criminal or the merely selfish do, but above it, in a relation to God so absolute that it transcends the shared moral world. This is the culmination of Kierkegaard’s exaltation of the single individual against the System, the crowd, and the comfortable universal: the knight of faith is the supreme individual, utterly alone with God, incomprehensible to everyone else, sustained only by the passion of faith. Whether this is the summit of the spiritual life or a dangerous license for fanaticism is the question every reader must wrestle with - and Kierkegaard, who would not let us off easily, intended exactly that. Faith is the marvel and the scandal at the heart of his thought, the place where the individual’s relation to God passes beyond everything that can be reasoned, justified, or shared.
This is the opening of the lesson. The rest — the dialogue, the primary source, and the recall — is in the app.
You learned that in Fear and Trembling Kierkegaard reads Abraham as the ‘knight of faith’ who makes a double movement - infinite resignation (giving Isaac up) and faith (receiving him back by virtue of the absurd) - and that faith may require a ‘teleological suspension of the ethical’, the individual standing above th…
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