In Fear and Trembling, Søren Kierkegaard (under the pseudonym Johannes de silentio) launches a powerful argument against the prevalence of religious indifference or even blatant disbelief in God’s existence. He mourns the fact that so many people want to “go further” than faith to find something more just to arrive at doubt. However, Kierkegaard also acknowledges that “stopping” at faith requires courage because the truly faithful are often misunderstood. Kierkegaard selects the biblical story of Abraham and Isaac to highlight the fact that faith is unintelligible by those who don’t have it, but becomes intelligible to those who open themselves up to faith’s possibilities.
Kierkegaard hones in on two possible interpretations of Abraham’s willingness to sacrifice Isaac: the ethical and the spiritual. From an ethical perspective, Abraham is an evil, murderous old man. Kierkegaard writes, “if you simply remove faith as a nix and nought there remains only the raw fact that Abraham was willing to murder Isaac.” In other words, when one takes Abraham’s actions at face value (tying up Isaac, placing him on a sacrificial altar, and then raising up a knife to stab him) without any consideration of his motives, then he is a cold-blooded killer. Indeed, the “ethical expression for what Abraham did is that he was willing to murder Isaac.” This means that even when one considers Abraham’s motives, the chilling fact remains that he was willing to kill his own child. Furthermore, as a human being, Abraham “belongs to the universal, and there he is and remains a murderer.” Regardless of motives, faith, or even the fact that Abraham didn’t actually stab Isaac, his mere willingness to kill his son is enough to condemn him as a murderer in the universal (meaning the temporal world), and this is how many would treat him in the modern day.
However, if Abraham was truly acting in accordance with God’s expressed desires, then he is actually a great and truly faithful man—not a heartless murderer. Kierkegaard points out that “the religious expression is that [Abraham] was willing to sacrifice Isaac.” By sacrificing instead of murdering Isaac, Abraham wouldn’t have been fulfilling the insane desires of a murderous madman but surrendering the most precious part of his life to God at a great personal cost. The story of Abraham changes shape when “one makes faith the main thing—that is, make it what it is.” If a person understands faith as the greatest and most powerful motivator, then they will also understand that Abraham’s actions were courageous, selfless, and even brave because they were done for God. In Kierkegaard’s opinion, “Abraham represents faith.” In other words, Abraham embodies the courageousness and surrender that characterizes faith, which is in direct opposition to the ethical perspective of the case which casts Abraham as a villain.
What it all comes down to is the idea that faith is difficult to understand, and the sacrifices and choices people make in the name of their faith are even more so. Because of this, the faithful are nearly always isolated and often misunderstood. Kierkegaard highlights the isolation that comes with faith by writing that “he who walks the narrow path of faith no one can advise, no one understand.” This means that not only do the faithful have nobody to turn to for guidance or advice, but nobody would understand them if they did. For example, if Abraham asked a friend for advice about any pain he might feel over having to sacrifice Isaac, that friend might have pointed out the alternative (to not kill Isaac) and question why Abraham would choose to do it anyway.
For anyone to understand Abraham’s actions—or the actions of any faithful person—they would have to reconcile two difficult facts: “it [was] the expression of extreme egoism (doing this dreadful deed for his own sake) and on the other hand the expression of the most absolute devotion (doing it for God’s sake).” The “extreme egoism” is at the root of what makes faith unintelligible to most people, but can be explained by the fact that faith requires sacrifice, and it’s not really a sacrifice if what a person gives to God is something they’re indifferent about; therefore, in order to prove his faith and pass God’s test, then “for his own sake” Abraham had to be willing to sacrifice the thing that meant the most to him and which God specifically asked for—Isaac. Faith is a “hope whose outward form is insanity,” and is therefore unintelligible to most. However, anyone can understand Abraham’s actions if they are willing to lay aside their ethical horror at the bare fact of murder and learn more about faith, which demands personal sacrifice in exchange for the security of knowing that nothing is ever truly lost.
Related Themes from Other Texts
The Unintelligibility of Faith ThemeTracker
The Unintelligibility of Faith Quotes in Fear and Trembling
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.
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.
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.
The absurd is not one distinction among others embraced by understanding. It is not the same as the improbable, the unexpected, the unforeseen.
Seen as an immediate, no more than sensate and psychic, being, the single individual is the particular that has its telos in the universal, and the individual’s ethical task is always to express himself in this, to abrogate his particularity so as to become the universal.
Faith is just this paradox, that the single individual as the particular is higher than the universal, is justified before the latter, not as subordinate but superior, though in such a way, be it noted, that it is the single individual who, having been subordinate to the universal as the particular, now by means of the universal becomes that individual who, as the particular, stands in an absolute relation to the absolute. This position cannot be mediated, for all mediation occurs precisely by virtue of the universal; it is and remains in all eternity a paradox, inaccessible to thought. And yet faith is this paradox.
To the question, why?, Abraham has no other answer than that it is a trial and a temptation, which, as remarked above, is what makes it a unity of being for both God’s sake and his own. […] On one hand it contains the expression of extreme egoism (doing this dreadful deed for his own sake) and on the other expression of the most absolute devotion (doing it for God’s sake). Faith itself cannot be mediated into the universal, for in that case it would be cancelled. Faith is this paradox, and the single individual is quite unable to make himself intelligible to anyone.
The moment he is ready to sacrifice Isaac, the ethical expression for what he does is this: he hates Isaac. But if he actually hates Isaac he can be certain that God does not require this of him; for Cain and Abraham are not the same. Isaac he must love with all his soul. When God asks for Isaac, Abraham must if possible love him even more, and only then can he sacrifice him; for it is indeed this love of Isaac that in its paradoxical opposition to his love of God makes his act a sacrifice. But the distress and anguish in the paradox is that, humanly speaking, he is quite incapable of making himself understood. Only in the moment when his act is in absolute contradiction with his feeling, only then does he sacrifice Isaac, but the reality of his act is that in virtue of which he belongs to the universal, and there he is and remains a murderer.
The tragic hero renounces himself in order to express the universal; the knight of faith renounces the universal in order to be the particular.
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.
