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.
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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