Exploring the Nature of Faith and Ethics with Kierkegaard

Reviewing the book ‘Fear and Trembling’

I was very excited about this book, but at the same time, I was dreading it. I’ve read Kierkegaard’s Sickness Unto Death before, which I found incredibly rewarding but also one of the most difficult intellectual tasks I had.

I read Fear and Trembling only, despite my edition having the book of Adler as well. Surprisingly the text was easier than I expected. It starts by analyzing the story of Abraham. In case you aren’t aware of it, Abraham is called by God that he and his progeny are going to be blessed, and through them, help mankind. Yet Abraham wasn’t able to have children, and thus the prophecy wasn’t being fulfilled, and Abraham kept getting older and older.

But Abraham kept his faith, and when he was 100 years old, his wife bore a son - Issac. But when Issac was a child, God commanded him to travel to a mountain and sacrifice him in his name. He does the travel and plans to go through with God’s plan. But just as he is about to kill his son, an Angel appears and provides a sacrificial animal instead (which, unlike human sacrifice, was very common at the time).

Kierkegaard presents several variations of this story of his creation. For example, Issac begs Abraham to spare his life, or Abraham doubts himself as he’s about to kill Isaac. He is trying to make you properly understand the story. Not from the outside, as an observer, but as a participant. He is countering Hegel’s philosophication of religion into a system that is intellectual and yet without requiring direct engagement. Kierkegaard wants us to fully experience the paradox that Abraham is facing and his anxiety. He is compelled to do the greatest of sins, kill his only beloved son, but by the command of the highest authority possible.

This story is easily dismissed in a secular worldview, where God can be interpreted as simply asking for an immoral act, and thus it should not be done. But that’s misleading because that’s not how ancient people saw God, as a person that can be judged. God was, by definition, the highest good. Should Abraham follow his faith? Kierkegaard argues so, making him a knight of faith, the highest human ideal.

Abraham is not a hero in the typical sense. The stories of heroes (for example, Greek heroes) are often based on the tragedy with the sacrifice they have endured, which is applauded and recognized by everyone through the poets and oracles. But Abraham is the hero of faith, his sacrifice is not intelligible to the community because it was based on his personal faith. He has to endure his sacrifice alone, determined to follow through with what he thinks is right. He greater than the great heroes. Yet, how does a hero of faith still a hero while supposedly acting immorally? This is the paradox of Abraham.

It’s a wonderful exploration of faith, and also how it relates to ethics. But this is incredibly hard to grasp from his perspective because faith is not simply blind trust as we currently view it. It is an act of will toward the ultimate good. But that ultimate good doesn’t easily fit into ethics, it is beyond comprehension. Hence what he calls the “teleological suspension of the ethical”. Theology is above everything. But this way of thinking is completely alien to our modern culture.

I really enjoyed the hiddenness in the knight of faith. For Kierkegaard, the knight of faith can be anyone anywhere, and one cannot tell the divinity within by his behavior. It is totally hidden, and yet always available. A close-to-perfect parallel can be seen with Daoism in which it started by one having to retreat from society in order to live by the “way”, but over time it was argued that the Dao is in everything and can be followed by anyone and anywhere.

While this book can be seen as a theological position, it seemed to me that it is deeply biographical as well. He saw himself as the knight of faith when breaking his marriage with his wife Regine. He made an “immoral” act toward the absolute duty of God, and he was rejected by his community, unable to understand his personal reasons for it. What is fascinating is that while it seems a forced connection when comparing the two directly, this theological and autographical element can easily be read in the text on its own.

The book is full of great insights, but not without its cost. While in the beginning, I was pleasantly surprised at the difficulty, this only applied to the first third of the book, which mostly dealt with Abraham’s paradox (the teleological suspension of the ethical). The second part dealt with the absolute duty to God, and the third to Abraham’s decision to conceal his purpose of sacrificing Issac. The last two were much denser.

It gradually got harder and harder to read. The connection to Abraham also got fainter, making me struggle to find coherence in the work. At one point, I was despairing, looking at the pages like an ant trying to grasp mathematics. There was so much that I didn’t understand, and in many instances, I had no choice but to give up.

In the last third of the book, in particular, I found it very hard and got very little from it, which resulted in me skipping large sections of it. It relied on stories that I wasn’t familiar with, which only made it even harder to grasp the ideas he was trying to get across. It was very frustrating not only for me being unable to understand it but also for the realization that there was so much value in the book that I was incapable of receiving.

Nevertheless, I still found the beginning of the book fascinating to read, and this is despite me already been somewhat familiar with Kierkegaard’s take on Abraham’s story. Very much like Sickness Unto Death, which I liked better, they both have the peculiarity that their religiousness creates a barrier to most readers, and it is written from a perspective that is largely lost. In order to fully appreciate the work, there is a certain background required for it to make some sense. One of the biggest themes of the work is that faith begins where reason ends, and this sounds the most pathetic and ridiculous claim one can make. Yet it is one of the deepest realizations on the human condition.

If I have to consider the book as a whole, I can’t help but be disappointed from so much of what I missed in the third part. But removing that, which is not so unreasonable as part one and two can stand on their own, then the effort is worth, and it was very rewarding.

“How monstrous a paradox faith is, a paradox capable of making a murder into a holy act well pleasing to God, a paradox which gives Isaac back to Abraham, which no thought can grasp because faith begins precisely where thinking leaves off.”

“Everyone shall be remembered, but everyone was great wholly in proportion to the magnitude of that with which he struggled. For he who struggled with the world became great by conquering the world, and he who struggled with himself became great by conquering himself, but he who struggled with God became the greatest of all.”.

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