Some notes on Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling .

1. Kierkegaard uses Abraham as the exemplar of the limitations of the Hegelian system. The Hegelians claim to have arrived at the eschatological form of philosophy, encompassing everything, including Christianity, within its scope. Kierkegaard brilliantly discerns that Abraham won’t fit. He’s trying to show, too, that faith and the religious cannot be transcended by the ethical and philosophical; rather the religious is the higher form of existence.

2. Kierkegaard writes under the pseudonym of Johannes de Silentio, a character from a Grimm fairy tale who spoke the truth but was turned to stone because of it. Johannes’s master later sacrificed his sons to bring Johannes back, who in turn raised the two sacrificed sons. The name hints at Kierkegaard’s sense that his words are going to be ignored and that he will be rejected and persecuted for his works.

3. The preface introduces a number of the key Kierkegaardian themes. In a number of places, he speaks of the “system,” which means the Hegelian system. He admits that he has not understood the system, nor discovered whether the system is complete. The contrast between his work and that of the Hegelians is also described in terms of a contrast between “passion” and “science.”

3. The book opens with an exordium that offers four retellings of the Abraham story, each of which brings the story into the compass of a rational ethic. In the first, Abraham lies to Isaac, telling him that the sacrifice was his own idea. His intention is to prevent Isaac from losing faith in God; he considers it better for Isaac to lose faith in him. Kierkegaard compares Abraham to the blackened breast of a woman who is trying to wean her child; the child recoils at the breast, but still considers his mother (God) to be “tender and loving as ever.”

In the second scenario, Abraham sacrifices Isaac out of obedience to God. God provides the ram as a substitute, but Abraham cannot forget the command and he ends in despair and sorrow. He cannot understand God, and has lost all confidence in God’s favor and kindness. Here, the woman’s breast is concealed, so that “the child no longer has a mother.”

In the third, Abraham takes the command as a test, and Abraham concludes that he should reject the commandment. God could never command him to sacrifice his son. God’s commandments never venture outside the realm of public, universal ethics, and Abraham should have known this. He goes to Moriah alone and asks forgiveness for even considering the sacrifice. In this case, Isaac is a child who is more and more separated from his mother, and both the mother and the child grieve over the loss.

In the final retelling, Abraham carries out the command, but Isaac saw that Abraham was following through out of despair. They come home together, God having provided a ram, but “Isaac had lost the faith.” Again, Kierkegaard describes this in terms of weaning: “When the child is to be weaned, the mother has stronger sustenance at hand so that the child does not perish. How fortunate the one who has this stronger sustenance at hand.

4. Kierkegaard follows with a Eulogy on Abraham, which introduces the distinction between the “poet” and the “hero,” and discusses the various degrees of greatness in the hero. Both the poet and the hero overcome the potential meaninglessness of existence, but in different ways. The poet recollects the deeds of the hero, and for Kierkegaard “recollect” is intended to evoke the Platonic theory of knowledge. In part, Kierkegaard is placing himself as poet in relation to his hero, Abraham. But he also trying to show that recollection is a lesser form of life than that of the hero, who becomes great “in proportion to the greatness of that which he loved” or “great in proportion to his expectancy.” The greatest hero of all is the hero who has expected the impossible, and who has “struggled with God.” Abraham is such a hero, who has become great by virtue of a mad hope in God.

Abraham is a hero too because of the way he battles time: “He had fought with that crafty power that devises all things, with that vigilant enemy who never dozes, with that old man who outlives everything – he had fought time and kept his faith.” With the command to sacrifice Isaac, “all the frightfulness of the struggle was concentrated in one moment.” His faith was a faith for this life, not merely the next. He could have sacrificed himself instead of obeying God, which would have been a heroic action and could have rested on faith in a future life. But Abraham is the “Second Father of the race” because he acted on faith in this life.

5. At the beginning of the “Preliminary Expectoration” that precedes the series of Problemata, Kierkegaard describes Abraham’s experience of anxiety. This is not here the featureless, sourceless dread that Kierkegaard sometimes described. Rather, the anxiety has a specific focus in the conflict between ethical obligation and religious call. Every ethical bone in Abraham’s body tells him he cannot sacrifice his son, but God has told him to. To act on the command, he needs to have faith, to transcend the ethical and act in the religious sphere, taking responsibility for his action. In this way, Abraham becomes a particular kind of hero, a knight of faith.

Such a hero bursts the bounds of Hegelian system. Hegelian philosophy, Kierkegaard now says, is fairly easy: I “believe that I have understood it fairly well,” he says. But “thinking about Abraham is another matter . . . then I am shattered.” He can think himself into the mindset of other ancient heroes, but “I cannot think myself into Abraham; when I reach that eminence, I sink down, for what is offered me is a paradox.” He can grasp a “hero of resignation,” a hero who renounces what he loves most and lives with the pain of the loss. However much Abraham might have gone through the stage of resignation, he does not rest there. Instead, he is a knight of faith, who gives up what he loves most with every confidence that he is going to get it all back. The knight of faith acts without ground. His act is an act of faith because it is absurd: Abraham “had faith by virtue of the absurd, for human calculation was out of the question, and it was certainly absurd that God, who required it of him, should in the next moment rescind the requirement.”

The ability to “lose one’s understanding and along with it everything finite,” is appalling, but “that does not make me say it is something inferior, since, on the contrary, it is the one and only marvel.” Far from being “coarse and boorish” as is often thought, faith provides the “finest and most extraordinary” dialectic: “It has an elevation of which I can certainly form a conception, but no more than that. I can make the mighty trampoline leap whereby I cross over into infinity.” By this leap, Abraham leaves the ethical and the realm of resignation behind. Yet, he does not simply leap into infinity. This leap moves back to finitude.

Abraham is the religious man who “does not do even the slightest thing except by virtue of the absurd,” yet “this man has made and at every moment is making the movement of infinity.” He knows the “pain of renouncing everything,” yet “the finite tastes just as good to him as to one who never knew anything higher, because his remaining in finitude would have no trace of a timorous, anxious routine.” He is “a new creation by virtue of the absurd.” The knight of fa it h is constantly making this leap into infinity, but he is able to “change the leap into life into walking, absolutely to express the sublime in the pedestrian.” The leap of faith becomes a walk, a stroll through life.