Fear And Trembling

“That man was not a thinker, he felt no need of getting beyond faith; he deemed it the most glorious thing to be remembered as the father of it, an enviable lot to possess, even though no one else were to know it.”

Kierkegaard uses the extended metaphor of a man who admires the story of Abraham and envisions four versions of the story to try to comprehend it. The non-thinking man is a metaphor for Kierkegaard himself who, despite being very much a thinker, is like the non-thinker in that he cannot understand faith. And, like the non-thinker, Kierkegaard too wishes he could simply end at faith instead of asking for more as many in his time do.

“Every time he returned home after wandering to Mount Moriah, he sank down with weariness, he folded his hands and said, ‘No one is so great as Abraham! Who is capable of understanding him?’”

In the Prelude, Kierkegaard uses the metaphor of a man who admires the story of Abraham but cannot make sense of it. Each time he reads or thinks about Abraham, the man grows more confused. The inability to understand faith is a central theme of Fear and Trembling and one that Kierkegaard uses to disprove certain elements of Hegelian absolute truths.

“If there were no eternal consciousness in a man, if at the foundation of all there lay only a wildly seething power which writhing with obscure passions produced everything that is great and everything that is insignificant, if a bottomless void never satiated lay hidden beneath all—what then would life be but despair?”

In the opening lines of the “Panegyric,” Kierkegaard wonders about the meaning of life if there were no universal, no society, no past to build upon. But he announces that the world is not so, even while arguing that man must escape the despair he would feel by creating an individual relationship with God. That is, greatness does exist in the world, so long as one knows how to access it and does not give in to the empty void that at times seems to exist.

“He would have plunged the knife into his own breast. He would have been admired in the world, and his name would not have been forgotten; but it is one thing to be admired, and another to be the guiding start which saves the anguished.”

In discussing Abraham, Kierkegaard imagines a scenario in which Abraham sacrifices himself to save Isaac. This would make Abraham a tragic hero and not the father of faith. In this quotation as well as the work as a whole, Kierkegaard imagines what Abraham could have done and uses those negations to prove the greatness of what he did.

“But Abraham believed.”

Kierkegaard uses this simple quotation several times in the “Panegyric.” It captures the essence of what makes Abraham great to Kierkegaard: he had faith. By repeating it, Kierkegaard emphasizes the point while also utilizing the repetition he claims is part of the struggle to find and retain faith.

“He will never forget that in a hundred and thirty years thou didst not get further than to faith.”

Kierkegaard is upset at the movement in his time for people to assume they have faith and attempt to go beyond it. To him, this is impossible, as no one can just have faith—it has to be earned through struggle, pain, and the embrace of the absurd. The power of Abraham as a symbol is that he did not get further than faith and instead stands as a guiding light for those in need of faith.

“It is supposed to be difficult to understand Hegel, but to understand Abraham is a trifle.”

Kierkegaard felt that contemporary critics seemed to understand Hegel too readily and employ the dialectic with too much ease while pretending that it was difficult to grasp. Kierkegaard himself explains that his view is the opposite—he can understand Hegel through studying his writings but can make no sense of Abraham, the man whose story many claim is easy to grasp. In making that inversion, Kierkegaard makes use of irony, as he does often in Fear and Trembling.

“I think myself into the hero, but into Abraham I cannot think myself.”

Kierkegaard clarifies the difference between the tragic hero and the knight of faith. The former sacrifices himself for the ethical and universal, while the latter can never be understood. Plays and poems are written about the tragic hero, so it is easy for us to imagine what it takes to be a hero; Abraham, on the other hand, embodies the knight of faith, and so no one can put themself in Abraham’s shoes.

“Perhaps one or another may succeed in that, for our age is not willing to stop with faith, with its miracle of turning water into wine, it goes further, it turns wine into water.”

Kierkegaard laments the need of philosophers and others in his time to go beyond faith and ask for more. He dislikes this idea because he finds it impossible to explain faith let alone understand it enough to go deeper. He dislikes the idea also because it robs life of purpose and wonder. This quotation implies that the need to turn wine back into water would effectively rob man of his need to believe in the absurd to have faith; one must be willing to believe that water can be turned into wine to believe anything else.

“[F]or only in the infinite resignation do I become clear to myself with respect to my eternal validity, and only then can there be any question of grasping existence by virtue of faith.”

Kierkegaard highlights three ways of being: the finite, the infinite resignation, and the religious. The infinite resignation is a movement one makes beyond the aesthetic and into the ethical; it is a movement that requires a person to recognize the pain of loss but accept it. As this quotation makes clear, if one does not first do this, then one cannot make the movement of faith through which that which has been lost will be regained.

“Faith therefore is not an aesthetic emotion but something far higher, precisely because it has resignation as its presupposition; it is not an immediate instinct of the heart, but is the paradox of life and existence.”

To Kierkegaard, the movement of faith is the highest movement one can make. It requires passion as well as the embrace of the absurd and is therefore two steps past the aesthetic, the world of earthly pleasure. Kierkegaard sees faith as the central paradox of life because faith requires one to believe the impossible is possible; that is why, as he explains in this quotation, one cannot start with faith as an instinct but must, instead, learn it and earn it through struggle.

“Therefore, whereas the tragic hero is great by reason of his moral virtue, Abraham is great by reason of a personal virtue.”

Throughout the text, Kierkegaard compares the tragic hero with Abraham, the knight of faith. In “Problem I,” he suggests that the tragic hero is the hero of the ethical, while Abraham is the hero of the religious and argues that faith can require a suspension of the ethical. In this quotation, Kierkegaard uses juxtaposition to make the differences between the tragic hero and Abraham simple and clear—both are celebrated, one for societal values, the other for personal ones, and yet Abraham’s actions would upset societal values.

“Therefore, though Abraham arouses my admiration, he at the same time appalls me. He who denies himself and sacrifices himself by duty gives up the finite in order to grasp the infinite, and that man is secure enough.”

Kierkegaard constantly points out the paradoxes central to Abraham’s story. In “Problem I,” he focuses on the cruel and unethical actions Abraham takes and notes that Abraham’s decision to murder Isaac offends him ethically and morally. This fact creates a paradox, as one act leads to two separate feelings. But this is the absurdity Kierkegaard argues faith requires.

“[T]here is surely no one who thinks that a man became great because he won the great prize in the lottery.”

One of the conclusions Kierkegaard reaches about whether one has to suspend ethics to find faith is that faith depends on the struggle. He notes that no one can have faith naturally and that no one ought to be admired for simply having it, since there is no such thing as faith that is not earned through fear and trembling. In this quotation, he makes an analogy to winning the lottery, since the movement of faith results in a kind of prize, albeit one that cannot simply be won.

“Faith is a miracle, and yet no man is excluded from it; for that in which all human life is unified is passion, and faith is a passion.”

The conclusion Kierkegaard reaches in response to “Problem I” is optimistic: anyone could become a knight of faith, since all that it requires is passion, a struggle, and courage to make the necessary movements. Faith seems miraculous, but it is not a gift given from on high. It can be earned if someone looks inward and focuses on their beliefs rather than trying to move past them or, worse, simply reflecting on what can be experienced in the known world.

“So the whole existence of the human race is rounded off completely like a sphere, and the ethical is at once its limit and its content. God becomes an invisible vanishing point, a powerless thought, His power being only in the ethical which is the content of existence.”

Kierkegaard starts by mentioning something that is seemingly true from Hegelian thought but that has a logical flaw. One such flaw is the conflation mentioned here that God has no power over the universal since the universal is both the limits of what it means to be human and the entirety of human experience. To a religious person, the idea that God is merely connected to the ethical would seemingly disprove God, so faith would seemingly disprove the idea that God is merely an invisible vanishing point that has no power.

“The one knight of faith can render no aid to the other.”

Life is essentially lonely to Kierkegaard, especially when one lives with the realization that one can transcend aesthetics and experience a personal relationship with God. Even those who realize this cannot communicate with each other, since the personal relationships they have would not be the same and would have derived from individual struggles. Life so difficult to live because each person is responsible for their fate and must go on their own journey.

“He who has learned that to exist as the individual is the most terrible thing of all will not be fearful of saying that it is great, but then too he will say this in such a way that his words will scarcely be a snare for the bewildered man, but rather will help him into the universal, even though his words do to some extent make room for the great.”

To Hegel, the goal of human life is to exist in the universal, but Kierkegaard argues one can transcend the universal to find the individual and the religious. However, this possibility is paradoxically great and terrible, since to exist as an individual means to know higher truths but also to live in constant temptation of forgetting them and returning to the ethical plane. The truth about what the individual has gained may not encourage others to seek that same existence even though it is a higher plain.

“The knight of faith, on the other hand, is kept sleepless, for he is constantly tried, and every instant there is the possibility of being able to return repentantly to the universal, and this possibility can just as well be a temptation as the truth.”

To be a tragic hero is to be secure in the universal, beloved, and able to relax. In comparison, as this quotation suggests, the knight of faith can never have security or certainty, since faith is a constant test. In this quotation, Kierkegaard also addresses the spiritual test of temptations, a theme he explores throughout the text.

“The man who has performed the cloister-movement has only one movement more to make, that is, the movement of the absurd. How many in our age understand what the absurd is?”

In “Problem III,” Kierkegaard notes that men in his age have stopped entering the monastery and instead have cloistered themselves by believing they have accomplished great things already and not even trying lesser things. One of Kierkegaard’s central complaints about the society he lived in is that he saw others around him declaring absolute certainty over concepts one could not be certain about rather than embracing the absurd, a prerequisite for finding truth. In this quotation, Kierkegaard uses a pun on “cloister” to complain about both the lack of men seeking spiritual truth in the monastery (the cloisters) as well as the way men closed themselves off from the absurd (cloistering themselves off).

“So either there is a paradox, that the individual stands in an absolute relation to the absolute/or Abraham is lost.”

All of the problems take the same form, with Kierkegaard opening by stating a Hegelian truth and then refuting it implicitly through the example of Abraham. Each problem ends with an either/or statement that implies that either Hegel is wrong, or Abraham is essentially pointless. Technically, he leaves it up to the reader to decide, although his arguments are persuasive enough to imply that Hegel is wrong and faith proves the limits of the “System.”

“Thus no generation has learned from another to love, no generation begins at any other point than at the beginning, no generation has a shorter task assigned to it than had the preceding generation...”

At the end of the book, Kierkegaard returns to a point from the beginning of the text: it is foolish for people in his generation to go beyond faith. Faith is the problem that everyone must work out for themself, meaning there is no way to start from a further point based on an earlier generation’s work. No one starts out having the ability to go beyond faith, since they do not start with faith; and, if they were to acquire faith, they would still not be able to go beyond it, since faith is a constant struggle, not something one can get past.

“Faith is the highest passion in a man.”

To Kierkegaard, passion is a prerequisite for faith. At the end of the book, he makes it clear that faith is also a passion. The two feed each other, with both being necessary for the other, just as faith requires embracing the absurd and paradoxical.