The knight of faith is a concept Johannes de silentio uses to represent any person who has true faith in God. To become a knight of faith, a person must first make the spiritual movement of infinite resignation, giving up whatever it is in this world that is most precious to them and completely reconciling themselves to the pain of losing it. This is where the knight of infinite resignation stops, but the knight of faith goes further because they believe that they will get back whatever they gave up in this world—in other words, they won’t have to wait to die and go to heaven to get back whatever they gave up. Because of this, the knight of faith finds great happiness in both the temporal world and in their belief in the infinite. Abraham is a clear example of a knight of faith because he developed real faith, as shown by his willingness to sacrifice Isaac when God asked him to. Even though a reasonable person might believe that once Isaac was dead then he couldn’t possibly come back to life, Abraham believed that he could get Isaac back in this world because everything is possible through God. The knight of faith is something any person can become, but it takes a lot of courage and hard work to make all the necessary spiritual movements to become one.
Knight of Faith Quotes in Fear and Trembling
He drains in infinite resignation the deep sorrow of existence, he knows the bliss of infinity, he has felt the pain of renouncing everything, whatever is most precious in the world, and yet to him finitude tastes just as good as to one who has never known anything higher, for his remaining in the finite bore no trace of a stunted, anxious training, and still he has this sense of being secure to take pleasure in it, as though it were the most certain thing of all. […] He resigned everything infinitely, and then took everything back on the strength of the absurd.
The tragic hero renounces himself in order to express the universal; the knight of faith renounces the universal in order to be the particular.
The true knight of faith is a witness, never a teacher, and in this lies the deep humanity in him which is more worth than this foolish concern for others’ weal and woe which is honoured under the name of sympathy, but which is really nothing but vanity. A person who wants only to be a witness confesses thereby that no one, not even the least, needs another person’s sympathy, or is to be put down so another can raise himself up. But because what he himself won he did not win on the cheap, so neither does he sell it on the cheap; he is not so pitiable as to accept people’s admiration and pay for it with silent contempt; he knows that whatever truly is great is available equally for all.
But as the task is given to Abraham, it is he who must act, so he must know at the decisive moment what he is about to do, and accordingly must know that Isaac is to be sacrificed. If he doesn’t definitely know that, he hasn’t made the infinite movement of resignation, in which case his words are not indeed untrue, but then at the same time he is very far from being Abraham, he is less significant than a tragic hero, he is in fact an irresolute man who can resolve to do neither one thing nor the other, and who will therefore always come to talk in riddles. But such a Haesitator [waverer] is simply a parody of the knight of faith.
Knight of Faith Symbol Timeline in Fear and Trembling
