Summary: Fear and Trembling (page 4)

Let us, then, perform a thought experiment: how would someone without faith have acted in Abraham's place?

Johannes de Silentio imagines that he too would have walked towards Mount Moriah; he too would have raised the knife. Outwardly, he would have behaved in every respect like Abraham. But something essential would have been missing: the inner feeling. That inner state would have been radically different from Abraham's.

Kierkegaard calls it 'resignation'. Yet even if this immense resignation […] at most showed my human courage, it would be only a substitute for faith¹.

For in resigning, Johannes indicates that he considers the action to be wrong—that he is committing a crime, and that God himself is blameworthy for imposing such a trial upon him. Besides, if I had got Isaac back, I would have been in great embarrassment. I would have found it difficult to rejoice in him again—which causes no difficulty for Abraham.

Shame, guilt… these are ethical categories in which Johannes (and we may include ourselves with him) remains entangled; and they throw into relief, by contrast, the singularity of Abraham—and of faith.

There is, as it were, a leap to be made in order to enter the realm of faith: a leap out of ethics, as we have seen, but also out of the rational—into the absurd.

Thus, whereas the ethical person would have walked in resignation and despair, Abraham, during all that time […] had faith; he believed that God did not want to demand Isaac of him, though he was willing to sacrifice him if it was required. He believed by virtue of the absurd, for there can be no question of human calculation; and the absurd is that God, who demanded this sacrifice, would revoke his demand a moment later.

This qualitative leap into a sphere beyond morality and reason is what defines faith—and it is exceedingly difficult to make:

I can indeed make the springboard leap into the infinite; my back, like a tightrope dancer's, was twisted in childhood; so the leap is easy for me: one, two, and three! I throw myself headlong into life; but the next leap I cannot make. I cannot do the prodigious; I can only stand before it, open-mouthed.

We can now better understand what Kierkegaard means by faith. It is not what is sometimes called 'the faith of the charcoal-burner': a vague and blind belief, appealing to common sense and custom, characteristic of rough and simple souls.

People generally think that the fruit of faith, far from being a masterpiece, is heavy and crude work reserved for the most uncultivated natures; but this is far from the case. The dialectic of faith is the most subtle and the most remarkable of all; it has a sublimity of which I can form some idea—but only just.

Kierkegaard is speaking here of authentic faith, Abraham's faith: it is this that constitutes a paradox to be understood, a leap to be made.

A leap towards what? If there is a leap, then there is a qualitative change—a move into a new sphere. Which one?

Let us recall that in his previous work, Either/Or, Kierkegaard identified two stages of the spirit, two radically opposed conceptions of existence: the aesthetic and the ethical. The aesthete devotes himself to pleasure and cannot commit himself to any project, having no will and taking life not at all seriously; the ethical person, by contrast, works, marries, chooses a particular life-project.

But here, in Fear and Trembling, a third stage emerges—distinct from the first two, irreducible to them: the religious stage. It is only within this stage that the story of Abraham becomes intelligible and takes on meaning.

What are its distinctive features? How are we to describe this third stage?

To bring out what is distinctive about the religious stage, Kierkegaard sets it against the ethical stage.

He illustrates this opposition through two figures: the 'knight of infinite resignation' and the 'knight of faith'.

Resignation, let us recall, is an ethical category. It is one of the cardinal virtues of the ethical stage, central to doctrines such as Stoicism: the sage is the one who accepts what happens to him without lamenting or raging pointlessly—the one who resigns himself before Fate.

The 'knight of infinite resignation' is therefore the sage in the ancient sense of the term, or more broadly the person who has reached the ethical stage.

The knight of faith goes 'further': Such is the summit where Abraham stands. The last stage he leaves behind is that of infinite resignation. He truly goes further and arrives at faith.

Yet outwardly nothing distinguishes them: I examine him from head to toe, searching for the crack through which the infinite [of faith] might show itself. Nothing! He is sound in every respect […] Nothing to detect of that strange and magnificent nature.

¹ Our translation. The references for the quotations are available in the book Kierkegaard: A Close Reading