Søren Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling is a philosophical treatise on the nature of faith and what it means to truly have it. Kierkegaard feared that his world of mid-19th century Europe was becoming too eager to find something beyond faith and simple belief in God in the name of intellectualism. What exists beyond faith, though, is doubt—doubt of God’s existence, of an eternal life, and of the Bible. In Kierkegaard’s opinion, it’s far better to stop at faith—as inferior as it may seem to those who have lofty ideas of themselves and want to leave a mark on the world—than to continually search for something beyond it, especially because that something is empty and ultimately meaningless. In Fear and Trembling, Kierkegaard (through his pseudonym, Johannes de silentio) makes a compelling argument that nothing is greater than faith and urges his audience to go no further than simple belief to find true fulfillment.
Kierkegaard believes that people want to go beyond faith and belief in God to find something greater. By doing this, however, these people lose far more than they gain. Kierkegaard writes, “Today, nobody will stop with faith; they all go further.” By this he means that nobody is content with what they have and insist on trying to find something better. In particular, Kierkegaard believes that modern philosophers are “cheating people out of something by making them think it is nothing.” In other words, philosophers are taking something meaningful (belief) and convincing people that it’s nothing, thus robbing them of the chance to have a positive connection with God. Kierkegaard mourns that “our age does not stop with faith, with its miracle of turning water into wine; it goes further, it turns wine into water.” This highlights how losing a rich, meaningful connection with God through belief robs life of its beauty and depth, making it seem more like plain water than invigorating wine.
However, according to Kierkegaard, there is nothing more comforting or greater than belief because it’s through belief that human beings achieve greatness. The fact that people feel like they must get beyond belief indicates that they are trying to find something greater, but in doing so they are forcing themselves forward and leaving their better nature behind. As Kierkegaard explains, “Only lower natures forget themselves and become something new.” In other words, a person who tries to push themselves forward beyond belief and into something new isn’t greatness—they’re just revealing their own “lower nature[].” In Kierkegaard’s opinion, true greatness is achieved through nurturing belief and love in God: “he who loved himself became great in himself, and he who loved others became great through his devotion, but he who loved God became greater than all.”
Not only can anyone find greatness by embracing a healthy love of and belief in God, but belief leads to happiness and contentment, neither of which can really be attained through doubt. Kierkegaard writes, “The mass of humans live disheartened lives of earthly sorry and joy.” What he means is that most people limit their belief and understanding to temporal matters (“earthly sorry and joy”), and because of this they lack the will to try to do something meaningful with their lives. This is because “Everything is possible spiritually speaking, but in the finite world there is much that is not possible.” This means that when a person chooses doubt over belief, they also limit what’s possible because there is only so much a human being can achieve in one lifetime—and if there’s no eternal life, then what’s the point of trying to achieve more? Many believe that embracing belief in God means having to sacrifice all earthly pleasures, but Kierkegaard argues that “Through faith I don’t renounce anything, on the contrary in faith I receive everything.” Through belief in God and the promise of eternal life, Kierkegaard “receive[s]” infinite possibilities and comfort without having to “renounce” or give up any of the things that are truly meaningful to him.
During his lifetime, Kierkegaard was alarmed to see how unpopular faith in God was becoming and wanted to remind his audience that God is the key to happiness—but only if they truly believe in him. To those who persist in wanting to get beyond belief to enter doubt, Kierkegaard asks one question: “if an unfathomable, insatiable emptiness lay hid beneath everything, what would life be but despair?”
Related Themes from Other Texts
Belief vs. Doubt ThemeTracker
Belief vs. Doubt Quotes in Fear and Trembling
Today nobody will stop with faith; they all go further. It would perhaps be rash to inquire where to, but surely a mark of urbanity and good breeding on my part to assume that in fact everyone does indeed have faith, otherwise it would be odd to talk of going further. In those old days it was different. For then faith was a task for a whole lifetime, not a skill thought to be acquired in either days or weeks.
If there were no eternal consciousness in a man, if at the bottom of everything there were only a wild ferment, a power that twisting in dark passions produced everything great or inconsequential; if an unfathomable, insatiable emptiness lay hid beneath everything, what then would life be but despair?
Therefore no one who was great will be forgotten: and however long it takes, even if a cloud of misunderstanding should take the hero away, his lover still comes, and the more time goes by the more faithfully he sticks by him.
No! No one shall be forgotten who was great in this world; but everyone was great in his own way, and everyone in proportion to the greatness of what he loved. For he who loved himself became great in himself, and he who loved others became great through his devotion, but he who loved God became greater than all. They shall all be remembered, but everyone became great in proportion to his expectancy.
There was one who was great in his strength, and one who was great in his wisdom, and one who was great in hope, and one who was great in love; but greater than all was Abraham, great with that power whose strength is powerlessness, great in that wisdom whose secret is folly, great in that hope whose outward form is insanity, great in that love with is hatred of self.
Had Abraham wavered he would have renounced it. He would have said to God: ‘So perhaps after all it is not your will that it should happen; then I will give up my desire, it was my only desire, my blessed joy. My soul is upright, I bear no secret grudge because you refused it.’ He would not have been forgotten, he would have saved many by his example, yet he would not have become the father of faith; for it is great to give up one’s desire, but greater to stick to it after having given it up; it is great to grasp hold of the eternal but greater to stick to the temporal after having given it up.
Conventional wisdom aims presumptuously to introduce into the world of spirit that same law of indifference under which the outside world groans. It believes it is enough to have knowledge of large truths. No other work is necessary. But then it does not get bread, it starves to death while everything is transformed into gold.
If the rich young man whom Christ met on the road had sold all his possessions and given them to the poor, we would praise him as we praise all great deeds, but we would not understand even him without some labour. Yet he would not have become an Abraham even had he given away the best he had. What is left out of the Abraham story is the anguish; for while I am under no obligation to money, to a son the father has the highest and most sacred of obligations. Yet anguish is a dangerous affair for the squeamish, so people forget it, notwithstanding they want to talk about Abraham. So they talk and in the course of conversation they interchange the words ‘Isaac’ and ‘best.’
The ethical expression for what Abraham did is that he was willing to murder Isaac; the religious expression is that he was willing to sacrifice Isaac; but in this contradiction lies the very anguish that can indeed make one sleepless; and yet without that anguish Abraham is not the one he is. […] For if you remove faith as a nix and nought there remains only the raw fact that Abraham was willing to murder Isaac, which is easy enough for anyone without faith to imitate; without the faith, that is, which makes it hard.
Love, after all, has its priests in the poets, and occasionally one hears a voice that knows how to keep it in shape; but about faith one hears not a word, who speaks in this passion’s praises? Philosophy goes further. Theology sits all painted at the window courting philosophy’s favour, offering philosophy its delights. It is said to be hard to understand Hegel, while understanding Abraham, why, that’s a bagatelle. To go beyond Hegel, that is a miracle, but to go beyond Abraham is the simplest of all.
I have seen horror face to face, I do not flee it in fear but know very well that, however bravely I face it, my courage is not that of faith and not at all to be compared with it. I cannot close my eyes and hurl myself trustingly into the absurd, for me it is impossible, but I do not praise myself on that account. I am convinced that God is love; this thought has for me a pristine lyrical validity. When it is present to me I am unspeakably happy, when it is absent I yearn for it more intensely than the lover for the beloved; but I do not have faith; this courage I lack.
Let us go further. We let Isaac actually be sacrificed. Abraham had faith. His faith was not that he should be happy sometime in the hereafter, but that he should find blessed happiness here in this world. God could give him a new Isaac, bring the sacrificial offer back to life. He believed on the strength of the absurd, for all human calculation had long since be suspended.
Abraham I cannot understand; in a way all I can learn from him is to be amazed. If one imagines one can be moved to faith by considering the outcome of this story, one deceives oneself, and is out to cheat God of faith’s first movement, one is out to suck the life-wisdom out of the paradox. One or another may succeed, for our age does not stop with faith, with its miracle of turning water into wine; it goes further, it turns wine into water.
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.
I can see then that it requires strength and energy and freedom of spirit to make the infinite movement of resignation; I can also see that it can be done. The next step dumbfounds me, my brain reels; for having made the movement of resignation, now on the strength of the absurd to get everything, to get one’s desire, whole, in full, that requires more-than-human powers, it is a marvel.
Then why does Abraham do it? For God’s sake, and what is exactly the same, for his own. He does it for the sake of God because God demands this proof of his faith; he does it for his own sake in order to be able to produce the proof. The unity here is quite properly expressed in the saying in which this relationship has always been described: it is a trial, a temptation. A temptation, but what does that mean? What we usually call a temptation is something that keeps a person from carrying out a duty, but here the temptation is the ethical itself which would keep him from doing God’s will. But then what is the duty? For the duty is precisely the expression of God’s will.
But it is the outcome that arouses our curiosity, as with the conclusion of a book, one wants nothing of the fear, the distress, the paradox. One flirts with the outcome aesthetically; it comes as unexpectedly and yet as effortlessly as a prize in the lottery; and having heard the outcome one is improved. And yet no robber of temples hard-labouring in chains is so base a criminal as he who plunders the holy in this way, and not even Judas, who sold his master for thirty pieces of silver, is more contemptible than the person who would thus offer greatness for sale.
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.
The ethical is as such the universal; as the universal it is in turn the disclosed. Seen as an immediate, no more than sensate and psychic being, the individual is concealed. So his ethical task is to unwrap himself from this concealment and become disclosed in the universal. Thus whenever he wants to remain in concealment, he sins and is in a state of temptation, from which he can emerge only by disclosing himself.
Abraham is silent—but he cannot speak, therein lies the distress and anguish. For if when I speak I cannot make myself understood, I do not speak even if I keep talking without stop day and night. This is the case with Abraham. He can say what he will, but there is one thing he cannot say and since he cannot say it, i.e. say it in a way that another understands it, he does not speak. The relief of speech is that it translates me into the universal. Now Abraham can say the most beautiful things any language can muster about how he loves Isaac. But this is not what he has in mind, that being the deeper thought that he would have to sacrifice Isaac because it was a trial. This no one can understand, and so no one can but misunderstand the former.
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.
