Fear and Trembling

Fear and Trembling

Soren Aabye Kierkegaard

By ESQ

Soren Kierkegaard is a well known Danish existential philosopher and theologian of the 19 century.

In, “Fear and Trembling”, Kierkegaard sets out to question the notion of “faith” and particularly the type that has earned Abraham the title of the “Father of Faith”. Kierkegaard boldly advances the position of faith as being that of “Paradox”. Accordingly, faith is the paradox and the only asserted position that can grasp both the infinite and the finite in a double but simultaneous movement, creating a synthesis realizing a final and solitary position being that of the “absolute relationship to the absolute”. Ironically, faith is also presented as existing only by “virtue of the absurd”, a position that cannot itself be made intelligible except though the demonstration of faith itself.

Kierkegaard begins with the command of God for Abraham to sacrifice his only begotten son Isaac on top of Mount Moriah. Quoting Genesis 22:2,

“And God tempted Abraham and said unto him, Take Isaac, thine only son, whom thou lovest, and get thee into the land of Moriah, and offer him there for a burnt offering upon the mountain which I will show thee.”

Kierkegaard then presents a host of intellectual situation whereby Abraham as the Knight of Faith is distinguished from the knight of resignation (tragic hero). The action of Abraham is elevated to the religious expression of ultimate sacrifice instead of the universally accepted ethical expression of murder. The absurdity of the situation is that whereas the tragic hero renounces everything including himself and all that is finite to attain the infinite, which is universally held to be morally and ethically justified as the highest calling. The Knight of Faith, on the other hand, renounces nothing but rather acquires everything by holding on to the temporal finite in an unexplainable movement of impossibility characterized by grasping all by virtue of the absurd. Kierkegaard calls this movement the “teleological suspension of the ethical”. He writes,

“Faith is precisely this paradox, that the individual as the particular is higher than the universal, is justified over against it, is not subordinate but superior—yet in such a way, be it observed, that it is the particular individual who, after he has been subordinated as the particular to the universal, now through the universal becomes the individual who as the particular is superior to the universal, for the fact that the individual as the particular stands in an absolute relation to the absolute. This position cannot be mediated, for all mediation comes precisely by virtue of the universal; it is and remains to all eternity a paradox, inaccessible to thought. And yet faith is this paradox”.

Kierkegaard believes that since faith has a higher telos, Abraham is not a tragic hero (a knight of resignation) who remains within the realm of the ethical, but rather either a murderer or a believer. Abraham is someone who can only be approached with an underlying understanding of “religious horror”. For Kierkegaard, it is precisely that the paradox of faith is also how the great are tried by the fires of dread and distress…as it were one’s “personal hell”, for …“It is not what happens to me that makes me great…it is what I do”.

The paradox of faith reveals the absolute relationship of one to the absolute, a relationship which encompasses the universal, yet surpasses it by neither renouncing nor negating the absolute duty of love towards other or God. So is faith to be considered absolute self-sacrifice or extreme egotism? Kierkegaard answers by saying that Faith is unintelligible for one cannot in truth make oneself intelligible, unlike the tragic hero who we can all empathize with. For faith the tension of dread and despair exists and becomes a part of how one lives out the absolute relationship to the absolute, keeping in mind that everything turns on the finite.

In Luke 14:26 it says that, "If any man come to me, and hate not his father, and mother, and wife, and children, and brethren, and sisters, yea, and his own life also, he cannot be my disciple ". Here we are reminded that the absolute duty toward God must be reckoned with just as the command to Abraham in Genesis 22:2. to sacrifice Isaac. How shall we deal with this situation? The Knight of Faith must bear the burden of this paradox…the paradox that absolute duty calls for unequivocal love but it does not negate love, neither can it be made intelligible. One suffers just as Abraham does and goes no further than Abraham in faith. Abraham does not speak or make himself intelligible. We see that Abraham’s only reply to Isaac is ironic or paradoxical when asked where the lamb is for the burnt offering,

“And Abraham said, God will provide Himself the lamb for the burnt offering, my son”.