In Soren Kierkegaard’s ‘Fear and Trembling’ [1834]

(Doubleday Anchor Books: New York, 1954. Translated by Walter Lowrie) is a series of different interpretations of the story of Abraham and Isaac. As simply as I can put it ………..

Abraham is seen as incomprehensible for several reasons not the least of which is that he appears criminally insane and this inspires ‘fear and trembling’ and dread and ‘horror religiosus’ in the author as it contravenes ethics, morality and law. Abraham wishes to kill Isaac ‘by virtue of the absurd’. He states that many say that Abraham loved God so much that he was willing to sacrifice his son – it has become a holy act to murder one’s son! How can Abraham be sure of his mission? It may have been his own thought, that of Satan, or just a dream. Who gave the strength to Abraham to do this deed? God, himself or Satan?

If Abraham is the ‘father of faith’ this story cannot be ignored. There is a double act of giving Isaac up (‘infinite resignation’) and receiving him back (‘movemnent of faith’) which occurs at the same time in the same act.

Abraham makes the movement of infinite resignation (becoming ‘a knight of infinite resignation’) and loses everything including himself. He is willing to sacrifice Isaac and himself. He suspends ethical judgement for something higher than ethics – God’s command – a ‘teleological suspension of the ethical’.

Kierkegaard associates this story with what Jesus says about an absolute duty to God in Luke 14:26 “If anyone comes to me and does not hate his father and mother, his wife and children, his brothers and sisters – yes, even his own life – he cannot be my disciple. …” [Hence my link to Barry’s statement.]

However, at the same moment of the ‘infinte resignation’ the movement of faith occurs where Abraham becomes the ‘knight of faith’. He believed ‘by virtue of the absurd’. The absurdity was that Abraham had already given up Isaac infinitely and at the same time believed God that he would not have to give up Isaac.

They are contradictory beliefs. Abraham is insane (divinely mad) and yet is also the father of faith at the same time. Kierkegaard advocates this madness because it is divine. Abraham may be unintelligible to others but he is intelligible to God. It is as if Abraham speaks in tongues to God and no-one else understands.

His summation:

Faith is a paradox. Abraham is both murderer and believer at the same time. The ‘knight of faith’ is unable to make him / herself intelligible to others. Faith is what the Greeks call ‘divine madness’. Only God can judge whether the knight of faith’s madness is divinely inspired or of the devil. The two types of lunacy are behaviourally the same.

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p. 48 ….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.

p. 56 Infinite resignation is that shirt we read about in the old fable. The thread is spun under tears, the cloth bleached with tears, the shirt sown with tears; but then too it is a better protection than iron and steel. The imperfection in the tale is that a third party can manufacture this shirt. The secret in life is that everyone must sew it for himself, and the astonishing thing is that a man can sew it fully as well as a woman. In the infinite resignation there is peace and rest and comfort in sorrow ….

p.77 Faith is a miracle, and yet no man is excluded from it; for that in which all life is unified is passion, and faith is a passion.

p. 132 Heraclitus the obscure said, “One cannot pass twice through the same stream” Heraclitus the obscure had a disciple who did not stop with that, he went further and added, “One cannot do it even once.” Poor Heraclitus, to have such a disciple!

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Mark