Fear and Trembling

Søren Kierkegaard and the experience of having faith.

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I’m thinking about faith, both religious and secular. As far as religion goes, however, I have been on edge for months, chewing on the temptation to explore religious topics more deeply until last week I finally opened up Søren Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling. I may eventually write a bigger treatment on religion and where I currently stand, but for now here are the takeaways from my first read of Kierkegaard’s “dialectical lyric.” In one sentence: there is a ton of depth to the timeless stories of the Bible and I think I just read one of those books that calls for a constant revisiting over the course of a lifetime.

… I was kneeling with my forehead on the wood in front of me, and was thinking of myself as praying, I was a little ashamed, and regretted that I was such a rotten Catholic, but realized there was nothing I could do about it, at least for a while, and maybe never, but that anyway it was a grand religion, and I only wished I felt religious and maybe I would the next time;

Jake Barnes, The Sun Also Rises

Like most Cubans, I grew up Catholic and, like most Catholics, I am of the lapsed variety—let us just say that after attending Catholic school for the first eighteen years of my life, at the time of writing I do not go to Church every Sunday. We can leave it at that for now. That said, in the last few months or so I have found within myself a renewed (or perhaps entirely new) appreciation for the Bible.

Gonzalo Nuñez @gonzalo__nunez

idk who needs to hear this but the take you are seeking is probably already in the bible

The evolutionary argument here is sound: the texts of the Bible form the backbone, in one way or another, of the most popular and longstanding memes in all of history: the Abrahamic religions. (The irony of using evolution to defend religion, despite nowadays being a common tactic, is not beyond me.) To give you an idea of the timescale that we are dealing with here, the Torah was already accepted as Jewish Canon by the 5th century BCE. That brings us all the way back to Classical Greece and predates Alexander the Great by an entire century.

The Bible is very old, even the parts that feature Jesus, and we should be hard-pressed to dismiss something that has stood the test of time like that. Even if only from a secular perspective, there must be some depth to the stories of the Bible, otherwise we probably would have gotten fairly bored of them by now, a full two thousand years later.

I purchased Søren Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling about a year ago. And for a year it stayed buried under a stack of books that I at one point or another also got curious about but never opened right away. Most of these remain unopened, occasionally piquing my interest enough to have me flip through them casually but never courting me enough for me to seriously commit.

Fear and Trembling is Kierkegaard’s attempt, through a pseudonymous narrator who goes by the name of Johannes de silentio, to decipher Genesis 22. For the uninitiated, Genesis 22 is where God asks Abraham to sacrifice his only son Isaac. Moments before Abraham kills Isaac (the knife already in hand) an Angel appears, interrupting the filicidal affair. Abraham looks up to find a ram with its horns caught in a nearby thicket. The ram is offered, and Isaac is saved. God delivers.

Sacrifice of Isaac, Caravaggio, c. 1603

At first glance, I was surprised that such a dense and mysterious work like Kierkegaard’s dealt with such a foundational Biblical story like Abraham’s. What could there possibly be to analyze about the twenty second chapter of Genesis that has not already been said? Has not everybody already heard everything that there is to hear about Abraham?

Kierkegaard argues that Abraham, despite his reputation, is in fact widely misunderstood. Even the narrator himself repeatedly states that he does not understand Abraham, at times also insisting that it is impossible for anyone else to do so.

Nowadays, most of us do not even try to understand Abraham—who can imagine being asked to murder their own son? That is so horrific that it is beyond imagination. (I also understand that it’s cringe to try and take these stories of the Bible so literally.)

The implications of this potential misunderstanding are massive, as one can imagine, given that Abraham is known as “the father of faith.” Kierkegaard argues that a misunderstanding of Abraham could theoretically result in faith never really having ever existed, or at least our popular conception of it.

I certainly do not know enough to give a complete treatment of Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling and the story of Abraham, but a few things stood out to me. For more sophisticated treatments see the footnote below.¹

First, this was not a test of Abraham’s faith in God. In other words, this story has nothing to do with doubting the existence of God. God gave Abraham the test in the first place, Abraham’s belief in God is axiomatic to the entire story. If he did not believe in God he could have just rejected the test outright. The temptation goes much further than a simple go/no-go test of His existence.

Second, neither is the story about obedience to God. Abraham went on what surely must have been an excruciatingly painful three-day journey to Moriah. (On a donkey, might I add.) I imagine that for three days he suffered tremendously through difficult bouts of anticipation, forecasting the upcoming tragic and bloody affair in his head over and over and over again. Just think about how many times Isaac must have asked him, “Dad, are we there yet?”

If this test was simply about obedience he could have just killed Isaac right then and there, before ever heading out to Moriah, and saved himself all of the trouble. But that feels cheap to us, does it not? Alastair Hannay, in the introduction to the Penguin Classics edition, tells us that Kierkegaard believes the story “requires us to focus on the nature of the suffering.”

Third, faith goes a step further than resignation. Abraham could have simply resigned, giving Isaac up to God and tragically accepting that that was the end of it all. Truly the end of it all, by the way—Isaac was his only son!

Kierkegaard tell us that Abraham did not merely resign, however. He had faith. His faith, according to Hannay, “is believing that he will not in the end be deprived of Isaac even if he carries out God’s command to kill him.”

This, of course, makes no sense, it’s paradoxical, but to Kierkegaard that is the entire point. Faith is believing in human impossibilities “on the strength of the absurd”, and what the story of Abraham tells us is that maintaining impossibilities in your head is a fundamental part of the experience of having faith.

Kierkegaard calls this a “double movement”—the first movement is resignation and the second one is believing nonetheless, despite having resigned.

I walk away from the story of Abraham and Isaac with an appreciation for suspending one’s disbelief. Early on in his dialectical lyric, Johannes de silentio argues that “faith begins where thinking leaves off.” He laments modernity’s way of cheapening faith from “the task of a lifetime” to something more like a childhood disease that one must get rid of. (It is a curious turn that the world has taken since Descartes.)

A lack of faith, then, is the tendency to cut difficult or impossible outcomes short by intervening in the form of doubting and overthinking. It is a failure to maintain the paradoxical. I think this is true of both religious faith and secular faith, the point holds all the same. A lack of faith is the self-fulfilling prophecy whereby a preemptive and overly-excited habit of rationality terminates impossibilities prematurely.

Of this, Kierkegaard is highly qualified to speak on, even if only through the words of Johannes de silentio. In 1837, Søren Kierkegaard met Regine Olsen, the “daughter of a Copenhagen dignitary.” He proposed to Regine on September 10th, 1840 and “all seemed set for a life of civic virtue.” A year later, however, Kierkegaard returned the engagement ring and called the marriage off.

He would leave to Berlin shortly there afterwards, where he would attend the lectures of Friedrich Schelling with the likes of other famous philosophers and historians like Marx, Engels, and Burckhardt. In 1843, his most intense period of brilliance begins and he publishes all of his major works in the short span of three years.

“The reason for this turn of events are not easy to pinpoint,” Hannay tells us, “but the crux seems to have been Kierkegaard’s sense of his inability to fulfill the personal conditions of a civic life, in particular those involved in being husband and father.”

Finally, we’re getting warmer. Did Kierkegaard give up on the possibility, or rather the impossibility, that he could have indeed had it all? Endless parallels have been drawn between Kierkegaard and Regine on one hand and Abraham and Isaac on the other. Kierkegaard sacrificed Regine, much like Abraham did Isaac, but the difference is that he did not have faith—he simply resigned. He let her go; there was no double movement.

Even Kierkegaard himself, or rather Johannes de silentio, slips at one point and leaves us with a clue:

But by my own strength I cannot get the least little thing of what belongs to finitude; for I am continually using my energy to renounce everything. By my own strength I can give up the princess, and I shall be no sulker but find joy and peace and repose in my pain, but with my own strength I cannot get her back again, for all that strength is precisely what I use to renounce my claim on her. But by faith, says that marvelous knight, by faith you will get her on the strength of the absurd. Alas, this movement is one I cannot make! As soon as I want to begin it everything turns around and I flee back to the pain of resignation. I can swim in life, but for this mysterious floating I am too heavy.

Kierkegaard only went as far as resignation but seems to have understood, at least theoretically, what is required of those who have faith. As if we needed yet another reminder that there is indeed a stark difference between theory and praxis.

1. For a more complete sketch of Fear and Trembling (there is a lot I did not cover about it that reads more like a traditional work of philosophy—ethics, metaphysics, all of that fun stuff), on top of reading the actual text I recommend the Wikipedia page and of course the ~40 page introduction to the Penguin classics edition. The introduction does a great job at contextualizing Kierkegaard’s philosophy against the backdrop of both the prevailing Hegelianism at the time and also his own personal life. Also see this that I found after a quick Google, this podcast for a good story, or this for more on the enigmatic epigraph that Kierkegaard places just before the Preface. It also looks like Kierkegaard explained some of his own thinking in his Three Upbuilding Discourses. Like I said in the subtitle, I think Fear and Trembling can be grappled with for an entire lifetime.