Summary: Fear and Trembling (page 5)

So what differentiates them? Kierkegaard answers by means of a concrete example. Suppose a poor young man falls in love with a princess. It is an impossible love—one that cannot be realised, given the difference in their social condition.

Both knights recognise that this love is impossible, yet remain faithful to it: they do not cease to love. That is their common ground.

The ethical person—the knight of infinite resignation—stops there. He will never see his beloved again; he accepts it, resigns himself; but he will think of her until his last breath. That is his wisdom, and the fervour of his love reveals all the beauty of the ethical stage.

The knight of faith too has resigned himself: it is an impossible love. But he goes 'further', as we have seen. He continues, nonetheless, to believe that this love will be realised.

He knows it is impossible, yet believes that the impossible can become possible through that famous leap into the absurd that constitutes faith:

Let us now see the knight of faith in the case cited. He acts exactly as the other does: he renounces infinitely the love, the substance of his life; he is at peace in his pain; then the prodigy occurs. He makes yet another movement more surprising than all the rest; he says, indeed: "I nevertheless believe that I shall have her whom I love—by virtue of the absurd, by virtue of my faith that with God all things are possible".¹

In short, the knight of faith is just as clearly aware of this impossibility. The only thing capable of saving him is the absurd, which he grasps by faith. He thus recognises the impossibility and at the same moment believes the absurd.

This is what fills Kierkegaard with admiration: I can therefore see that it takes strength, energy, and freedom of spirit to make the infinite movement of resignation—and likewise that it can be done. But the rest amazes me; my brain reels. For after having made the movement of resignation, then to obtain everything by virtue of the absurd, to have one's whole desire granted in full—this is beyond human powers; it is a miracle.

It is beyond his powers—as he admits in these remarkable lines:

I can renounce the princess by my own strength […] But by faith, says the astonishing knight, by faith you will receive her by virtue of the absurd. Alas, I cannot make this movement. As soon as I try, everything turns around and I take refuge in the pain of resignation. I can swim in life, but I am too heavy for this mystical soaring […]

And yet it must be glorious to obtain the princess; and yet the knight of faith is the only happy man—the direct heir of the finite world—whereas the knight of resignation is a strange wanderer. The wonderful thing is to obtain the princess as well, to live happily and joyfully, day after day, with her […] finding not rest in the pain of resignation, but joy by virtue of the absurd. The one who is capable of this is great—he is the only great man.

All this allows him to capture the mystery of faith in a striking formula:

By faith I renounce nothing; on the contrary, I receive everything […] By faith Abraham did not renounce Isaac; on the contrary, by faith he obtained him.

It is no accident that Kierkegaard chose the example of an impossible love to illustrate the phenomenon of faith. It is an implicit allusion to his broken engagement with Regine Olsen, two years earlier.

It was Kierkegaard who ended the relationship, returning the engagement ring—probably because he felt that the deep melancholy that had tormented him since childhood posed a danger to their bond. Yet he continued to think of her and dream of being reunited with her despite the rupture—which, as we shall see, amounted to a practical impossibility.

We can now understand why Kierkegaard could write in his private journal: If I had had faith, Regine would have remained mine. Had he trusted himself—had he, by an act of faith, moved beyond the impossibility: that one cannot live as a couple when one is so unhappy; had he been able to step past that perfectly logical—and even, from an ethical point of view, admirable—thought, then a love story might have unfolded against all logic.

If, then, he describes with such anguish this paralysis of the spirit—this inability to rise to the religious stage—it is because he lived it himself, and because that pain played an essential, founding role in his own existence.

Now that we have a fuller picture of the religious stage, we are in a position to examine the dialectic at work at the very heart of faith—a task that will allow us, Kierkegaard promises, to see what an unheard-of paradox faith is: a paradox capable of making a crime into a holy act, pleasing to God […] a paradox that no reasoning can resolve, because faith begins precisely where reason ends.

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