Abraham’s Faith: Both the Aesthetic and the Ethical in Fear and Trembling

Abstract

In this paper, I examine Johannes de Silentio’s presentation of the faith of Abraham, deriving therefrom a new way of conceiving his notion of faith as a paradoxical co-inhabiting of both the aesthetic and the ethical stages, rather than as a rejection, synthesis, or overcoming of them. Relying largely upon Silentio’s account of Abraham’s faith as anxious but not doubting, I argue that the interpretations of Fear and Trembling by Alastair Hannay and Mark C. Taylor fail to account for some essential aspects of Silentio’s depiction. I conclude that faith, as it is described in Fear and Trembling, cannot be philosophically understood as it is not an object for thought but an existential perspective one lives.

1. Introduction

Faith is not the first immediacy but a later immediacy.

Johannes de Silentio [1,2] (FT 82; SKS 4, 172)¹

According to Johannes de Silentio, the pseudonymous author of Fear and Trembling, the temptation of the Biblical patriarch Abraham is, in fact, a double temptation. Having heard the call and been tempted—“And God tempted Abraham and said to him, take Isaac, your only son, whom you love, and go to the land of Moriah and offer him there as a burnt offering on a mountain that I shall show you” [1,2] (FT 10; SKS 4, 107)²—he is tempted again, to stay himself from murdering Isaac. In a strange—perhaps unique—reversal of the standard order (in which temptation is away from obedience), Abraham is tempted to obey the ethical laws ordained by the divine. But he has been singled out by the divine, and the divine has tempted/commanded him to disobey the law, to murder his son. Ought Abraham succumb to the temptation to sacrifice Isaac (and thus obey, and thus become a murderer)? Or ought he refrain from acquiescing to the temptation to relinquish himself to the temptation (and thus remain righteous, and thus disobey God)? In the face of these questions—and to God’s face—Abraham had faith. This is incomprehensible and does not resolve questions about what ought to have been done, in Abraham’s case or any case relevantly similar to Abraham’s.

Faith does not make the temptation of Abraham make sense, nor does faith as a response to the temptation make sense. Yet, having heard the call and been tempted—Abraham had faith. In what follows, I wish to give an account of faith in Fear and Trembling as a tension resulting from a simultaneous commitment to two “life-views”, each of which commands full obedience from the faithful³. Such a reading of Fear and Trembling differs from the prevalent interpretations available in the Kierkegaard literature, which often take what we might call the “responsibly philosophical” approach to Fear and Trembling, mediating the difficulty of Abraham’s situation (what Johannes de Silentio calls “paradox”) for the sake of understanding⁴ [3]. Perhaps more to the point, my reading seeks to counter philosophical interpretations of Abraham’s faith and sacrifice that undermine the extremity of the crime Abraham is willing to commit, and which offer justifications of the attempted filicide thereby. Faith—distinct from the “teleological suspension of the ethical”⁵ [4,5,6]—is not and ought not be misunderstood as that which makes Abraham’s decision to murder Isaac somehow permissible. Faith, I wish to argue, does not trump ethics or the ethical, but is in fact constituted in part by the ethical (in spite of the fact that, in Abraham’s case, it is also a transgression). I do not wish to make the responsibly philosophical argument, however, made by Either/Or’s ethical Judge William if by no one else, that faith amounts to a religious version of the ethical. Quite the contrary, as a form of immediacy—and resistant to all forms of mediation—faith could only ever be understood by one such as Judge William as a brand of the aesthetic, and thus, as despair.

Navigating the difference between the ethical and the aesthetic in a study of Abraham’s faith (as presented in Fear and Trembling) forces us to walk the razor’s edge, avoiding the conclusions reached by those responsibly philosophical readers noted above. In the first section of the present work, then, I try to uncover something about the relation that holds between faith, the aesthetic, and the ethical in Johannes de Silentio’s thought by way of a consideration of the unascribability of both doubt and justification to Abraham in the aborted sacrifice of his son. Doing so puts my view in opposition both to the classic views espoused by Alastair Hannay and Mark C. Taylor (in his early writings on Kierkegaard). There, by entering Johannes de Silentio into a trialogue on Abraham with Hannay and Taylor, we see faith’s resemblance both to the aesthetic and the ethical, as theorized in Fear and Trembling and earlier Kierkegaardian works (most notably, Either/Or). On that basis, the second section proposes a reading of Abraham’s faith as the simultaneous but separate existentialization of both the aesthetic and the ethical life-views in a single personality: that is to say, as inhabiting both unreflective immediacy and the mediation of rational reflection at the same time, but without resulting in anything like a Hegelian-style Aufhebung. Given the definitions of those terms, as used by Johannes de Silentio and other of the Kierkegaardian authors, faith can only be understood as impossible—that is, it cannot be understood—and thus is not the proper object of philosophical thought (falling, as all reflection and reflective thought do, squarely within the category of the ethical, according to Johannes de Silentio)⁶. Faith, I conclude, is best understood not as a mode of belief but instead as an existential perspective from and out of which Abraham (or any knight of faith) confronts the world. That perspective is opaque to the understanding and can only be understood either as an instance of the aesthetic (as Judge William would and Kant did interpret Abraham)⁷ [7] or as an instance of the ethical (by way of which the sacrifice of Isaac can be understood as an expression of duty via some sort of teleological suspension of the ethical). Thus, insofar as it is understood (either as aesthetic or as ethical), faith is not. Correlatively, insofar as it is the perspective from which the knight of faith exists—if faith and the knight of faith are possible—faith cannot be understood, even (perhaps especially) by that knight him or herself.

One final note: In what follows, I will be using a number of related terms—following Silentio’s practice—to refer to the general category of reflective or rational mediation. Perhaps the most frequent of these will be “understanding” and “the ethical”, but there are others, including “the universal”, “reason”, “rationality”, “reflection”, “logical”, “explicable”, “comprehensible”, and the like. Except when otherwise noted, the differences between these terms are meant only to track with their differing uses in Fear and Trembling, not to establish meaningful conceptual distinctions between them (despite the fact that I acknowledge such distinctions might, on a different sort of analysis, very well exist). Furthermore, it is worth noting that, on this reading of Fear and Trembling, all mediated understanding of anything falls within the ethical—including any mediated understanding of individuals or life-views that fall within the aesthetic and the religious or faith. Thus, to understand someone as inhabiting an aesthetic life-view (as in the way that Judge William understands his aesthetic interlocutor, A, or, as noted above, as Kant understood the biblical Abraham) is still to operate from within an ethical (mediated) point of view⁸.

2. Faith, Justification, and Doubt: Contra Hannay and Taylor

Johannes de Silentio describes Abraham and the case of Abraham numerous times throughout Fear and Trembling. In each case, he is careful to maintain that Abraham and his faith are incapable of being understood⁹. However, many of the descriptions appear to rely upon just such an understanding. Silentio presents faith early in the book in its opposition to infinite resignation; both are responses to the call to sacrifice that which one most loves. The movement of infinite resignation preserves the love while affirming the loss of the beloved in finitude and the world, thus Silentio’s example, the common boy who loves the princess: “A young lad falls in love with a princess, and this love is the entire substance of his life, and yet the relation is such that it cannot possibly be realized, cannot possibly be translated from ideality into reality” [1,2] (FT 41; SKS 4, 136). This boy is infinitely resigned insofar as he both realizes the impossibility of marrying the princess and continues to love her in his resignation. In so doing, the boy shifts his love from the finite world to the infinite, and is what Johannes de Silentio calls a knight of infinite resignation. He relinquishes the finite world, and the impossibility of living with the princess becomes also the impossibility of living wholly within finitude.

His love for that princess would become for him the expression of an eternal love, would assume a religious character, would be transfigured into a love of the eternal being, which true enough denied the fulfillment but nevertheless did reconcile him once more in the eternal consciousness of its validity in an eternal form that no actuality can take away from him.

[1,2] (FT 43–44; SKS 4, 138)

For Johannes de Silentio, the knight of infinite resignation can thus acquire for his or her love a “religious character”, not unlike the unification of the ethical and the religious in Judge William’s conception in the second volume of Either/Or, insofar as, eternalizing his love for the princess as something greater than the love of a single existing human being, this knight’s love is transfigured into love of God¹⁰ [8]. Instead of loving the princess as she exists in time and space, the knight of infinite resignation loves God as the eternal source and origin of all love. Both Judge William and the knight of infinite resignation substitute a love abstracted into infinitude for worldly, finite love of the beloved—his wife and the princess, respectively¹¹.

But this is not the case of Abraham, whose love for Isaac remains within finite actuality. Abraham is not a knight of infinite resignation; he does, however, make the movement of infinite resignation as a part of the movement of faith.

Infinite resignation is the last stage before faith, so that anyone who has not made this movement does not have faith, for only in infinite resignation do I become conscious of my eternal validity, and only then can one speak of grasping existence by virtue of faith.

[1,2] (FT 46; SKS 4, 140)

The movement of infinite resignation can be understood, insofar as it remains within the universal, ethical realm. The impossibility the boy affirms in his resignation can be seen by all to be impossibility; the tragedy of the boy’s situation can be understood as tragedy by all. We can sympathize with the boy, and attempt to console him, and recognize in his resignation a tragic nobility uncharacteristic of those who would foolishly pine away after the unattainable princess, or those who would prove the inconstancy of their love by shifting their attentions to someone more attainable. By contrast, however, the movement of faith is incomprehensible.

For Johannes de Silentio, faith is a double movement—a movement corresponding to Abraham’s double temptation. On the one hand, the faithful individual makes the movement of infinite resignation. Abraham knows that he will kill Isaac, and that preserving the object of his fatherly love is impossible, so long as he remains committed to the sacrifice. On the other hand, however, and simultaneously¹² [9], the faithful individual secures him or herself in the finitude of his or her relation to the beloved, by virtue of the absurd.

The absurd does not belong to the differences that lie within the proper domain of the understanding. It is not identical with the improbable, the unexpected, the unforeseen. The moment the knight executed the act of resignation, he was convinced of the impossibility, humanly speaking; that was the conclusion of the understanding, and he had sufficient energy to think it. But in the infinite sense it was possible, that is, by relinquishing it, but this having, after all, is also a giving up. Nevertheless, to the understanding this having is no absurdity, for the understanding continues to be right in maintaining that in the finite world where it dominates this having was and continues to be an impossibility. The knight of faith realizes this just as clearly: consequently, he can be saved only by the absurd, and this he grasps by faith. Consequently, he acknowledges the impossibility, and in the very same moment he believes the absurd, for if he wants to imagine that he has faith without passionately acknowledging the impossibility with his whole heart and soul, he is deceiving himself and his testimony is neither here nor there, since he has not even attained infinite resignation.

[1,2] (FT 46–47; SKS 4, 141)

Abraham believes that he will kill Isaac, but Abraham also believes that he will keep Isaac, or receive the same Isaac again—and this, by virtue of the absurd. Contrary to the knight of infinite resignation, Abraham commits himself to the actualization of an impossibility. According to Johannes de Silentio, this is not able to be understood; faith is “a paradox that makes a murder into a holy and God-pleasing act, a paradox that gives Isaac back to Abraham again, which no thought can grasp, because faith begins precisely where thought stops” [1,2] (FT 53; SKS 4, 147). Faith is neither an act of thought, nor the product of an act of thought.

In one of the most influential scholarly interpretations of Fear and Trembling, Alastair Hannay argues that, for Johannes de Silentio, Abraham’s faith is in some sense an enlightened sort of reason: while killing Isaac and keeping Isaac (or receiving Isaac again) is impossible humanly speaking, with faith comes the understanding that, for God, all things—including the humanly impossible—are possible¹³ [9,10,11,12]. For Hannay, Abraham’s perspective (qua knight of faith) can be understood, even if Silentio himself does not understand it. Hannay’s position is worth considering in some detail, as the influence of his understanding of Abraham’s understanding of the im/possibility of Isaac’s post-sacrificial return is common to many readings of Kierkegaard, and his presentation is one of the most thorough and rigorous available. The interpretation espoused by Hannay rests largely on a passage in Fear and Trembling in which Johannes de Silentio poetizes a knight of faith into the situation of the common boy in love with the princess.

Now let us meet the knight of faith on the occasion previously mentioned. He does exactly the same as the other knight did: he infinitely renounces the love that is the substance of his life, he is reconciled in pain. But then the marvel happens; he makes one more movement even more wonderful than all the others, for he says: Nevertheless I have faith that I will get her—that is, by virtue of the absurd, by virtue of the fact that for God all things are possible.

[1,2] (FT 46; SKS 4, 141)

Hannay concludes that, “The word ‘absurd’ here means not ‘logically impossible’ but something like ‘humanly impossible’” [12] (Hannay 1993, 74). Thus,

Faith is then the young man’s accepting that it is possible nevertheless, but without altering or in any way qualifying the position he has arrived at in resignation, namely that it is not humanly possible. His faith is his belief that it is possible even if humanly it is not possible. And it is not just allowing the possibility, it is the confident expectation that what is humanly impossible is nevertheless in store.

[12] (Hannay 1993, 74)

Humanly speaking, it is irrational to believe that killing and keeping the son are possibilities that can both be actualized. Faith moves beyond human possibility in its affirmation that for and through God, all things are possible. As Hannay points out, however, faith is not simply a matter of affirming the existence of God [12] (Hannay 1993, 74–75). Rather, on Hannay’s reading, Abraham’s faith is his belief “that, in the end, he will not be deprived of Isaac even if he carries out God’s command to kill him” [12] (Hannay 1993, 75). Although Hannay presents faith in terms of rationality and belief, he seems to understand Abraham’s faith, as presented by Johannes de Silentio, to be something more like reliance upon God and God’s ability to actualize even those things that are humanly impossible¹⁴ [13].

Such reliance makes the apparently contradictory beliefs held by Abraham perfectly consistent and rational. If Abraham puts his trust—his faith—in God, then Abraham is no longer bound to conceive of his possibilities in terms of the merely humanly possible. Faith is difficult insofar as reliance upon an invisible God is difficult—but such reliance is by no means impossible. Nor is it irrational, for Hannay, given an affirmation of the existence of such a God before or outside of faith¹⁵. And thus, faith is only a paradox for someone like Johannes de Silentio, who believes in the existence of Abraham’s God but finds himself incapable of trusting in that God in the manner of Abraham. Specifically, for Hannay, Abraham admits that which is only a possibility for God into his understanding of what is possible for himself and for Isaac. Abraham is not wrong on such an understanding to believe that, whether or not he kills Isaac, it is possible that Isaac will remain with/return to him—even if such an outcome is impossible for Abraham to bring about himself. For Abraham, according to Hannay, faith is overwhelmingly difficult but perfectly consistent. For Johannes de Silentio, however, for whom what is possible only for God does not appear within the realm of possibility at all, Abraham’s position is the epitome of religious paradox.

All this by way of justification, albeit only from Abraham’s faithful perspective, of Abraham’s murderous intention. Hannay writes:

Unless this act is to be simple, or even compound, murder, there must be some authority that can be called absolute in relation to the ethical life, and in relation to which the ethical life is itself merely relative. There must be a ‘teleological suspension of the ethical’. Abraham’s act, because he believed it justified, implies some end to which the ethical life is made subservient.

[12] (Hannay 1993, 73; emphasis added)

What is suspicious in this passage is Hannay’s claim that Abraham believed his intended act—the murder of Isaac—to be justified¹⁶ [14]. It is difficult to conceive of an extra- or non-rational sort of justification; if one grounds one’s acts in something external to reason (emotion, for example), then one’s acts are simply unjustified, however understandable or forgivable they may be. For Abraham to believe himself justified, he must believe himself to have good reason for acting as he does. This is not to deny that we often consider some persons’ actions justified on non-rational grounds (chief among them, insanity and overwhelming passion). But such persons are not also thought to have had good reason to believe themselves justified before and as they performed those acts. Concluding that one is justified is a matter of more or less thoughtful deliberation, and a belief in the at least relative transparency of one’s motives. One who believes oneself justified ought to be able to persuade others to agree in that belief—and this is only possible within the ethical.

Johannes de Silentio thus cautions those who might believe Abraham to believe himself in some way justified¹⁷ [15]. He writes:

How did Abraham exist? He had faith. This is the paradox by which he remains at the apex, the paradox that he cannot explain to anyone else, for the paradox is that he as the single individual places himself in an absolute relation to the absolute. Is he justified? Again, his justification is the paradoxical, for if he is, then he is justified not by virtue of being something universal but by virtue of being the single individual.

[1,2] (FT 62; SKS 4, 155)

Johannes de Silentio claims that Abraham’s faith is a paradox insofar as Abraham’s act, if it is not to be understood as murder alone, grants Abraham priority over the ethical. Any attempt to mediate this paradox on Abraham’s part would reveal his lack of faith, as it would be an instance of Abraham seeking an affirmation of his actions from and in terms of the universal.

He acts by virtue of the absurd, for it is precisely the absurd that he as the single individual is higher than the universal. This paradox cannot be mediated, for as soon as Abraham begins to do so, he has to confess that he was in a spiritual trial, and if that is the case, he will never sacrifice Isaac, or if he did sacrifice Isaac, then in repentance he must come back to the universal.

[1,2] (FT 56–57; SKS 4, 150)

That Abraham is ultimately unjustified in the sacrifice of Isaac is, for Johannes de Silentio, the root of Abraham’s anxiety. On Hannay’s view, Abraham seems to have no such cause for anxiety. A teleological suspension of the ethical conceived as a rational justification of Abraham’s unethical act ought to result in rest, as did resignation for Agamemnon. Rest is not anxious. Agamemnon’s rest results from the fact that in the suspension, he is relieved of his responsibility for fulfilling the duty suspended. This is a suspension of the ethical in the sense of a negation. Agamemnon is no longer held responsible for refraining from killing his daughter. However unpleasant, there is nothing paradoxical about this. If we side with the state in conflicts of duty—by way of Greek or Hegelian ethics, for example—there is nothing unethical about this, either. If this is Abraham’s case, Abraham ought not worry. He is free of anxiety because he is free of the obligation to preserve the life of his son¹⁸.

Johannes de Silentio emphasizes the inexplicability and incomprehensibility of faith but also claims to be incapable of faith himself. Hannay seeks to argue against Silentio by way of Silentio’s depiction of faith in Fear and Trembling, thereby demonstrating the philosophical possibility of faith as something other than irrationalism. Silentio is wrong to characterize faith as utterly absurd, on Hannay’s view, and his wrongness is derivative of his lack of faith. In the subsumption of Abraham’s faith under the ethical by way of the justifiability of the sacrifice of Isaac (through a teleological suspension of the ethical), however, Hannay and likeminded readers undermine more than the limited authorial perspective of Johannes de Silentio. Hannay stresses the singularity of the case of Abraham as presented in Fear and Trembling: the fact that Silentio’s Abraham is granted a self-transparency that all factually actual human beings lack. Hannay relegates Abraham to the realm of poetry, where there are not grievous consequences for understanding Abraham to have found an ethical justification for the murder of his son.

The Abraham story is very unlike an everyday one. In fact it seems contrived especially to eliminate these kinds of doubt. As Johannes tells it there can be no deception, or self-deception, of this kind. Abraham could not be wrong in believing that he himself has no selfish interest to serve in sacrificing Isaac.

[12] (Hannay 1993, 77)

Given the lack of correspondence to everyday life, Hannay finds himself justified to make of Johannes de Silentio’s terrifying tale but an edifying allegory.

As we have seen, the story need not be taken as a literal description of what a person must be prepared to do if he has faith. Instead of as offering a paradigm of the sort of deeds to be expected of someone with a religious consciousness, we can read it as an allegory in which Abraham’s actions symbolize certain abstract features of that consciousness.

[12] (Hannay 1993, 78)

In ascribing to Abraham faith as a sort of rationality, Hannay rationalizes Abraham’s paradox—and his fear and trembling—away. More fundamentally, Hannay presents a reading of Fear and Trembling that deprives it of any correspondence to real human existence. Abraham becomes a character in a fanciful story by Johannes de Silentio, a story the horror of which, we are assured, is safely absent from real religiousness.

In one of his early essays, Mark C. Taylor identifies an important aspect of rationalizing interpretations such as Hannay’s: that faith is subsumed thereby under the ethical, and any real distinction between the two categories (“the ethical”, and faith or “the religious”) is lost.

As opposed to the ethicist, however, the believer does not absolutize duty but stands ready to suspend it in light of a higher obligation to the transcendent God. It is essential to stress that suspend does not mean “negate”. Precisely the coincidence of ethical obligation and the divine dictate to transgress morality creates fear and trembling for the knight of faith.

[16] (Taylor 1981, 183)¹⁹

Taylor brings the coincidence of Abraham’s duties—the universal duty to the ethical and the absolute duty to God—to the fore as the foundation of Abraham’s fear and trembling. Hannay’s Abraham is an Abraham without fear and trembling, one who is not anxious in the temptation to kill his son. Johannes de Silentio, however, stresses repeatedly that Abraham is a deeply anxious figure. In criticizing more traditional accounts of the sacrifice, Silentio writes, “What is omitted from Abraham’s story is the anxiety, because to money I have no ethical obligation, but to the son the father has the highest and holiest” [1,2] (FT 28; SKS 4, 124). And further:

The ethical expression for what Abraham did is that he meant to murder Isaac; the religious expression is that he meant to sacrifice Isaac—but precisely in this contradiction is the anxiety that can make a person sleepless, and yet without this anxiety Abraham is not who he is.

[1,2] (FT 30; SKS 4, 126)

Abraham is the father of faith—but he is also the father of Isaac, and the generations promised Abraham and Sarah through Isaac. In Abraham’s dual fatherly roles, that he has two duties simultaneously becomes the source of much trepidation. He cannot fulfill his duty to God without betraying his duty to Isaac, nor can he fulfill his parental duty to Isaac without betraying God. Taylor casts Abraham’s situation as a conflict between the ethical and the religious, a struggle between reason and faith²⁰ [17]. When Fear and Trembling is read in this way (as in the early Taylor or elsewhere in the Kierkegaard literature), however, faith must be understood as a brand of irrationalism. Where one has faith, one does not know.

Abraham is not a mere irrationalist, however, as Taylor readily admits—but this poses more of a problem than not, given the antithesis between faith and reason. So long as faith is understood as a kind of belief, as in Taylor, then the faithful person can know that he or she lacks knowledge of that with regard to which he or she has faith. In the case of Abraham, this allows for the entrance of doubt into the story.

Not only is the believer unable to express himself to others; he cannot even make his trial comprehensible to himself. Faith involves an absolute paradox that shatters human reflection—shipwrecks understanding. After all, Abraham’s conviction that he should kill Isaac might be a horrible temptation rather than a trial of faith.

[16] (Taylor 1981, 185)

This admission of doubt into Abraham’s consciousness with regard to his divine calling leads to a further temptation on Taylor’s account: the temptation to repentance and resignation. “Abraham is tempted”, Taylor writes elsewhere, “to forego the demand of God and to repent himself back into the ethical, acknowledging that the whole episode was a terrible mistake” [18] (Taylor 1975, 246). While such a view avoids the pitfalls of an approach such as Hannay’s, and in particular stays readers from finding in Fear and Trembling an argument for the ethico-religious justifiability of child murder, it nevertheless runs counter to Johannes de Silentio’s depiction of Abraham as free of doubt. “But he did not doubt, he did not look in anguish to the left and to the right, he did not challenge heaven with his prayers” [1,2] (FT 22; SKS 4, 118). Abraham is anxious, according to Johannes de Silentio, but he does not doubt. He acts with conviction, but without justification. While Hannay’s Abraham lacks anxiety and feels justified, Taylor’s Abraham doubts and lacks conviction—and thus, neither interpretation incorporates all of the essential elements of Silentio’s illustration.

For Taylor, as for Johannes de Silentio, language is only possible in terms of the universal, the ethical. To speak is to make oneself understood. According to Silentio, “Abraham cannot speak, because he cannot say that which would explain everything (that is, so it is understandable): that it is an ordeal such that, please note, the ethical is the temptation” [1,2] (FT 115; SKS 4, 202). Abraham must remain silent. Johannes de Silentio also notes, however, that Abraham does not—must not—desire to remain undisclosed. Such would be to remain simply within the ethical, as a transgression of the ethical. Abraham, intent on killing Isaac, would be nothing but a murderer.

The ethical as such is the universal; as the universal it is in turn the disclosed. The single individual, qualified as immediate, sensate, and psychical, is the hidden. Thus his ethical task is to work himself out of his hiddenness and to become disclosed in the universal. Every time he desires to remain in the hidden, he trespasses and is immersed in spiritual trial from which he can emerge only by disclosing himself.

[1,2] (FT 82; SKS 4, 172)

Taylor sees the locus of the necessity of Abraham’s silence in the privacy of his relation to God. Abraham may desire to speak, but to do so would be to sever his God relation. Taylor writes, “The relationship to God cannot be mediated through other persons, but must be direct, unmediated. If an individual abrogates his isolation, even out of ethical obligation to another person, he negates the possibility of an absolute (i.e., faithful) relation to the Absolute” [16] (Taylor 1981, 183). In his relation to God, Abraham can do nothing other than remain silent before Isaac. This is the sense of Taylor’s claim that, for Abraham, “silence is not volitional” [16] (Taylor 1981, 183). This remains true, however, only from the undoubting perspective of Abraham’s faithful relation to God—and, for Taylor, Abraham’s God relation is characterized by an anxiety founded in doubt. On Taylor’s reading, Abraham questions whether he is actually relating to God in his temptation²¹ [19]. This questioning, like all questioning, takes place in terms of the universal, and in terms of the universal Abraham can speak. Doubting drives Abraham out of faith, directly into the ethical. His silence then becomes a choice he makes on the basis of a rational process beginning in doubt. Contrary to Taylor’s claim, on Taylor’s interpretation Abraham’s silence must be volitional—and Taylor’s Abraham is thus not acting in faith. Doubt, as Descartes famously averred, is a mode of thought; a doubting Abraham is always a thinking, rationally reflective Abraham whose choices spring from a rational process of deliberation rather than as immediate expressions of an existential point of view²² [6].

Hannay, on the other hand, explicitly rejects any reading of Abraham as a doubter. Doubt, in Abraham’s case, would amount to a belief on Abraham’s part in the possibility that he is incorrect in his understanding of the temptation, but not so strong a belief as to overturn his belief in the possibility of the correctness of his interpretation. He might be right, but he might be wrong. He is not certain. Doubt is in this instance, then, a kind of uncertainty in oneself. Taylor is certainly right in his belief that with doubt, at least in matters of grave existential import, comes anxiety. But as we have seen, the Abraham poetized by Johannes de Silentio is anxious in the absence of doubt. As we have also seen, however, a belief in his own justification removes any anxiety from Abraham’s situation: to believe oneself justified is precisely not to doubt oneself. A belief in one’s own justification is thus in this instance a kind of certainty in oneself. These states—certainty and uncertainty in oneself—correspond to the existential perspectives articulated by Judge William in Either/Or as the ethical and the aesthetic. The ethicist, having chosen him or herself, has a coherent personality and a stable life-view; the aesthete, whose personality risks multiplicity and fragmentation, is in the existential uncertainty of despair [2,8] (see EO2 160, 192; SKS 3, 158, 186). To the extent that the aesthete lacks a sense of his or her own justification, they are motivated by non-rational motivators, like desire or passion. Once again, to doubt the justificatory power of one’s non-rational motivation to act in a particular way is to begin, at least, to mediate one’s non-rational motivations—one’s desires, passions, etc.—with reason, and thus to transition from the aesthetic into the ethical.

Taylor keeps the discussion of Abraham within the realm of belief and knowledge, of what Abraham does and does not affirm to be true. So long as Abraham’s faith remains explicable in terms of knowledge and belief, however, the fact that Abraham doubts can only be the cause for staying himself from the sacrifice. Taylor offers nothing to compel Abraham to kill Isaac in the place of the certainty in himself ascribed to Abraham by Hannay. Abraham doubts his justification in killing Isaac but draws the knife anyway. Faith on such a view becomes nothing more than committing oneself to what is more or less an inclination one has. Abraham feels like he has received a singular call from God to murder his son, and he feels it so strongly that his own horror at the thought of Isaac’s death does not stay him from the act. But on the three-day journey to Moriah, Taylor’s Abraham doubts. And he makes the move to kill his son despite the fact that he is aware that he is not certain that the killing is commanded by God. He sacrifices his only son because he thinks that he is probably right to do so. This is not the mystery of faith; this is something more akin to a strong opinion.

If faith is to remain something other than the ethical, then Abraham must be understood to live without a life-view. For Judge William in Either/Or, the ethical is ultimately the only life-view [2,8] (see EO2 202; SKS 3, 195). On this view, the only possible alternative to the possession of a life-view—and thus residence squarely within the ethical—is the despair of the aesthetic. And this is ultimately the status of any Abraham who doubts himself in his temptation and sacrifice, and the reason why Johannes de Silentio warns against the belief that Abraham had doubts. A doubting Abraham is a fractured Abraham, one shattered into multiplicity, incapable of a coherent personality, and for whom the murder of Isaac is but a matter of following an inclination to its conclusion in action, albeit against his better judgment. This better judgment—that which makes it possible for him to doubt at all—gives Abraham a wholly ethical self-understanding²³ [19]. An Abraham who doubts doubts in terms of the universal, as all thinking is in such terms. His faith becomes a matter of weighing alternatives, the factor deciding matters in favor of sacrifice being unknown, certainly, but not unable to be known. The doubting Abraham is capricious to such an extraordinary degree that his caprice is easily mistaken for mystery. But in the end, he does not choose sacrifice on the basis of universal principles, as would an ethical Abraham. Rather, the doubting-despairing Abraham picks sacrifice out of myriad conflicting inclinations, not on the basis of a principle derivative of a life-view but on the basis simply of another inclination. The doubting Abraham—the Abraham of Taylor’s reading of Fear and Trembling—is everything that appalled Judge William about A. He is Abraham as aesthete²⁴.

3. Abraham in the Aesthetic and the Ethical

Johannes de Silentio’s Abraham does not doubt, but neither does he have a life-view—at least not a life-view as understood by Judge William, or by Kierkegaard in his literary analyses of the works of Hans Christian Andersen and Thomasine Gyllembourg²⁵ [2,8,20,21]. He is anxious—in fear and trembling—but he does not doubt. We have seen this in the relative strengths and weaknesses of Alastair Hannay’s and Mark C. Taylor’s readings and in the inadequacy of either reading to fully elucidate faith as it is presented in Fear and Trembling. Johannes de Silentio’s Abraham is a truly confounding figure instantiating qualities heretofore only ascribable to the aesthetic or to the ethical, but he is neither aesthete nor ethicist.

There are two rather different ways to understand this.

(1) Abraham does not believe himself to be justified in the murder of Isaac because he is not justified in the murder of Isaac. The ethical is the universal, for Johannes de Silentio, and thus applies to all persons (including Abraham) at all times (including the moment of temptation). Abraham does not doubt the moral rectitude of his actions because there is nothing to doubt: it is an obvious transgression of the ethical. Abraham believes himself to be unjustified in his temptation to kill his son, and he is correct in this belief—and thus there is no cause for doubt, even in the absence of a belief in his own justifiability. Ethically speaking, Abraham is a murderer. This ethical judgment does not change on the basis of the divine command, the temptation, or the faith. Nothing can justify the action Abraham commits himself to performing, including (perhaps especially) a teleological suspension of the ethical. There is, however, no cause for anxiety on this reading of Abraham. Anxiety only results from an incongruity, and so long as Abraham knows that what he is doing is condemned ethically, he is not anxious: he is evil.

And/or:

(2) Abraham does not believe himself to be justified in the murder of Isaac because it is an act from immediacy, and there is no belief without mediation. An act from immediacy is not the product of a process of deliberation, in which a series of possible actions are considered and weighed relative to one another, one of which presents itself in the light of reason as the best possibility to actualize in action through choice. Deliberate choice can only result in ethical action, and ethical action can only be the product of deliberate choice. Deliberation takes place in terms of the universal and, once we are acting in terms of the universal, we are acting on ethical terms. There is, however, no cause for anxiety on this reading of Abraham, either. Anxiety only results from an incongruity that presents itself as incongruent to the unified thinking subject, which occurs only by way of the mediation of (conceptual) representation. So long as Abraham acts in immediacy, he is not anxious. This is what Johannes de Silentio refers to as “the first immediacy”, and it is tantamount to what both he and Judge William call “the aesthetic” [1,2] (see FT 82; SKS 4, 172)²⁶.

The closest one could come to understanding the faith of Abraham is to realize that, for Abraham, either the ethical or the aesthetic is a total explanation of his temptation. Or, perhaps better, both the ethical and the aesthetic are total explanations of Abraham. That is, Abraham is simultaneously mediated and immediate, an instance of the universal as well as the single individual. The two perspectives do not resolve themselves into a happy mediation, from which Abraham can think and act with the kind of commitment he would need in order to think and act toward some specific end. Yet Abraham does think and act toward some specific end: the sacrifice of Isaac is not an arbitrary event. Additionally, as both the ethical and the aesthetic explain Abraham totally, neither the ethical nor the aesthetic offer a total explanation of Abraham. This is what Johannes de Silentio means when he maintains that Abraham cannot be understood, that the temptation and the sacrifice cannot be thought. While thought can grasp Abraham in terms of the ethical, and grasp him fully, that grasp cannot hold Abraham’s faith. Likewise, while thought can grasp Abraham in terms of the aesthetic, and grasp him fully once again, once again thought cannot grasp faith²⁷ [19].

Abraham’s faith is where his fear and trembling is, and there is fear and trembling neither in the ethical nor in the aesthetic. The faith of Abraham is in the tension between the aesthetic and the ethical, the immediate and the mediated, the singular and the universal, within Abraham. As it is within Abraham, there is no access to his faith—no understanding of it, no evidence of it, no justified belief in its existence—from outside of Abraham. This is not to grant Abraham some sort of epistemological privilege in matters of his own faith, as some readers of Fear and Trembling are wont to do²⁸ [4]. Faith is absolutely subjective, in no part or way objective. Knowledge, belief, and understanding all mediate subjectivity by way of objectivity, so that, in principle, what any subject knows all subjects could know. According to Johannes de Silentio, however, no one can know Abraham in his faith—and this must include Abraham, as it is a matter not of what any particular person knows but of what is in itself knowable. Abraham does not know if his temptation comes from God, he does not believe that he has a private God relation, he does not understand the passion to kill his son²⁹ [22]. Having heard the call and been tempted—Abraham has faith. In faith, Abraham knows that the murder is unjustified. In faith, Abraham passionately moves to offer the burnt offering. He is in both the aesthetic and the ethical, he is in them simultaneously, but he is in them separately. His personality is split between the two perspectives, but somehow, incomprehensibly, his split personality is also unified. This is not the fragmentation of the aesthetic subject, lamented in A by Judge William, although in another sense it is precisely that fragmentation—plus the coherence of the personality possible only within the ethical, although without the ethical³⁰ [23]. The sort of reasoning that requires Abraham to be just one thing or the other, or a coherent synthesis of the two, is incapable of understanding Abraham, or any paradox such as faith is, for Silentio.

The tension that results within Abraham can never be resolved. The instant Abraham moves out of that tension, he moves out of faith—and the instant he moves out of faith, it becomes clear that he was never in faith, as the movement of faith must be made continuously [13] (see Gill 1981). Once Abraham has a simply ethical or simply aesthetic perspective from which to view himself and his history, he is in no position to say anything about his former life and its sacrifice, except that it was sinful. He is in no position to do anything but persist in sin or repent, and repentance, as Johannes de Silentio tells us in Fear and Trembling, is a form of resignation [1,2] (FT 99; SKS 4, 189). The temptation of Abraham appears clearly as that which it always was—a spiritual trial. If Abraham ever fails to sustain the tension between the aesthetic and the ethical within himself, he never had faith. So long as he remains in the tension, he remains in his relation to the Absolute—but he does not know it. He lives in it. Faith is an opaque perspective from which one lives, but one within which one could never choose to live. Choice is only possible in terms of mediation and the ethical, and it is never in accord with the ethical to choose faith or its immediacy (paradoxically, the immediacy of the aesthetic without the aesthetic)³¹ [13]. Whatever the non-faithful person might do to effect a transition to faith, it is something other than a choice; Silentio comes very close to calling it a “leap” [1,2] (FT 38–42; SKS 4, 131–138)³² [2,24,25].

Johannes de Silentio seems to give us some reason for resisting an interpretation of faith as paradox, or faith as problematic tension. On occasion, Johannes de Silentio makes claims that seem to grant Abraham a rational clarity of intention that a paradoxical Abraham seems to lack. In one such instance, Johannes de Silentio offers us a window on Abraham’s internal world on the way to Moriah.

During all this time he had faith, he had faith that God would not demand Isaac of him, and yet he was willing to sacrifice him if it was demanded. He had faith by virtue of the absurd, for human calculation was out of the question, and it certainly was absurd that God, who required it of him, should in the next moment rescind the requirement.

[1,2] (FT 35–36; SKS 4, 131)

In this passage, Johannes de Silentio indicates that Abraham’s faith is located squarely within Abraham’s thoughts on the subject of the sacrifice of Isaac: Abraham is conscious that he is willing to sacrifice Isaac if called upon to do so by God. Such consciousness is, of course, totally within the realm of reason. Likewise, in a passage cited earlier—and much exploited by Hannay—it seems that Johannes de Silentio’s point must be that the knight of faith brings two different kinds of possibility together in a faithful version of ordinary human reason. The knight of faith confronted with his love for the princess, having infinitely resigned himself to the impossibility of marrying her, says: “Nevertheless I have faith that I will get her—that is, by virtue of the absurd, by virtue of the fact that for God all things are possible” [1,2] (FT 46; SKS 4, 141). While both of these passages articulate an understanding of faith that rests on a notion of the absurd, neither explicitly defines the absurd. Additionally, both seem to indicate a sense of the absurd that is easily reconciled with reason. Such a reading of these passages moves Abraham in the direction of the ethical, faith becoming but a way of reasoning that trusts in God.

If Abraham’s faith is an opaque perspective from which he lives, however, as I have claimed above, then Abraham cannot understand that faith. This includes his relation to God: Abraham cannot understand God or his God relation. This makes of faith an absolutely non-rational passion. Nevertheless, an understanding of paradox as the simultaneity of the aesthetic and the ethical within Abraham, as opposed to a simple understanding of paradox as the affirmation of logically contradictory propositions, does not divorce Abraham from his ability to reason. This is evident in the fact that Abraham can understand his passion to kill Isaac as a violation of the ethical law: he can understand himself—as evil. His fear and trembling derives, in part, from the fact that he is able to understand himself in this way. As such, we must understand a portion of the life lived by Abraham (still from the opaque perspective of faith) to be an internal life of rational thinking and understanding. Abraham is in no way deprived of his internal, rational world by faith. He is not simply an irrationalist. Simple irrationalists are at best in some form of the aesthetic, and they are in despair; they are not in faith.

Thus, we must read the problematic passages cited above in light of the fact that an Abraham whose faith is paradox is not an irrational Abraham, although he is an Abraham whose faith cannot be grasped by reason³³. The opaque perspective from which he lives naturally extends to the life of his mind—and, as such, there is the possibility for acts of faith within reason, so to speak. This is, I think, what Johannes de Silentio means when he writes that Abraham believes something “by virtue of the absurd”. In the first of the two passages, Abraham is said to have faith that God will not demand Isaac, by virtue of the absurd. The reason Johannes de Silentio gives for this claim is that human reason cannot make sense of a situation in which God first requires the sacrifice, and then decides not to require the sacrifice. On a rational–ethical reading of the faith of Abraham, as noted above, this passage only makes sense if Abraham thinks he will kill Isaac only if God demands it. If Abraham is fragmented in his faith, however, and is incomprehensibly in both the universal and the immediate separately, then he can be understood to believe simultaneously that he will sacrifice Isaac and will keep Isaac, although this cannot be understood. This is logically impossible, a contradiction of the first order, and as such Abraham can only believe it by virtue of the absurd.

This would also explain why Johannes de Silentio, in depicting the sacrifice of faith, maintains that it is a loss of understanding—although it does not seem, elsewhere in Johannes de Silentio’s depiction of the faith of Abraham, to deprive Abraham of his ability to understand.

But to be able to lose one’s understanding and along with it everything finite, for which it is the stockbroker, and then to win the very same finitude again by virtue of the absurd—this appalls me, but that does not make me say that it is something inferior, since, on the contrary, it is the one and only marvel.

[1,2] (FT 36; SKS 4, 131)

Abraham loses his understanding insofar as he believes on the basis of a logical impossibility, by virtue of the absurd. Again, however, this does not make of Abraham an irrationalist. Rather, within thought Abraham has performed an act of faith, by way of his paradoxical cohabitation of both the aesthetic and the ethical. Believing by virtue of the absurd undermines the universal precisely in the same way that murdering Isaac undermines the ethical: that is, by not undermining it. Believing by virtue of the absurd is a transgression of the universal and is obviously such. As Johannes de Silentio notes, “Humanly speaking, he is mad and cannot make himself understandable to anyone” [1,2] (FT 76; SKS 4, 167)³⁴ [2,26]. Logically speaking, Abraham is totally irrational. But Abraham can ascertain as much by way of an unfailing ability to reason, and thus he is not simply irrational. From the opaque perspective of faith, Abraham is simultaneously mediated and immediate, but separately. His is a fragmented perspective that simultaneously coheres, and that does not make sense. Ultimately, even Kierkegaard’s most responsibly philosophical readers must leave it at that.

One must not close a consideration of Abraham in Fear and Trembling, however, without some treatment of that other knight of faith presented by Johannes de Silentio, to whom Edward Mooney refers as “the simple shopman” and “the shopkeeper”³⁵ [27] and whom Sheridan Hough calls “the dancing tax collector” [28] (Hough 2015). Johannes de Silentio introduces him in contrast to the knight of infinite resignation: “The knights of infinite resignation are easily recognizable—their walk is light and bold. But they who carry the treasure of faith are likely to disappoint, for externally they have a striking resemblance to bourgeois philistinism, which infinite resignation, like faith, deeply disdains” [1,2] (FT 38; SKS 4, 133). This knight of faith is not called to sacrifice his son; he does not clash with the ethical in the manner of an Abraham. Abraham is who he is by virtue of his anxiety, according to Johannes de Silentio. The shopkeeper knight of faith, however, is not anxious. He is planted firmly within finitude, “he belongs entirely to the world” [1,2] (FT 39; SKS 4, 133–134). And yet, in the evening, the simple shopman leaves his shop, heading home, although too poor for the thought of such a feast, “he thinks his wife will have a special hot meal for him when he comes home—for example, roast lamb’s head with vegetables” [1,2] (FT 39–40; SKS 4, 134). Naturally, there is no lamb’s head awaiting his arrival: “His wife does not have it—curiously enough, he is just the same” [1,2] (FT 39–40; SKS 4, 134). The simple shopman is not merely whimsical, however. According to Johannes de Silentio, this shopkeeper has faith.

With the freedom from care of a reckless good-for-nothing, he lets things take care of themselves, and yet every moment of his life he buys the opportune time at the highest price, for he does not do even the slightest thing except by virtue of the absurd. He resigned everything infinitely, and then he grasped everything again by virtue of the absurd. He is continually making the movement of infinity, but he does it with such precision and assurance that he continually gets finitude out of it, and no one ever suspects anything else.

[1,2] (FT 40–41; SKS 4, 135)

This simple shopman knows that he is in no position to expect the roast lamb’s head when he returns home. He knows that he is poor, that he has not “four shillings to his name”, and that to expect his wife to have prepared such a meal is unjustified. He does not feel justified in his expectation: in the case of the simple shopman, such a belief in his own justification would be obviously ludicrous. There is no transgression of ethics as such, that is, of the moral law. The simple shopman deviates only marginally from the universal; he is at worst a laughable eccentric.

The simple shopman as knight of faith resigns himself infinitely to his lowly condition, to the impossibility of his eating roast lamb’s head with vegetables tonight or, likely, any night. And yet, by virtue of the absurd, he believes in the possibility of such a feast. His belief can be explained totally in terms of the universal, as a transgression of the universal: in his belief, the simple shopman is irrational. Nevertheless, and more readily than Abraham, the simple shopman can be understood in terms of immediacy: he expects the roast lamb’s head on the basis of an inclination—or a feeling of hope rooted in an inclination—but not on the basis of any belief. Like Abraham, this knight of faith is situated simultaneously but separately in the mediated and the immediate, the ethical and the aesthetic. As it was for Abraham, such a paradox is a problematic tension for the simple shopman. But this does not entail anxiety. The shopkeeper knight of faith is not in fear and trembling.

He lacks fear and trembling because, unlike Abraham, the simple shopman’s transgression of the ethical is not also a transgression of ethics, of the moral law. He does nothing morally wrong in expecting the lamb’s head against all possibility; he transgresses no obvious duty. Thus, while Abraham must understand himself as a murderer in his sacrifice, the simple shopman has no comparably terrifying self-understanding. He is no murderer; he is but an eccentric shopman. Nevertheless, he does sacrifice his understanding, as did Abraham, and in this sacrifice lies the seed of the sacrifice of Isaac—the simple shopman is not Abraham, but this is only because he has not heard the call and been tempted like Abraham. While the simple shopman is not terrified by his act of faith, perhaps we should be—for his transgression of the universal is qualitatively no different from Abraham’s. The ethics of Abraham condemn Abraham as a murderer; the ethics of the simple shopman merely brand him with eccentricity. Both the eccentric³⁶ and the criminal, however, lie beyond the pale of the ethical understood as the universal.

What we learn from the case of the shopkeeper knight of faith is that, contrary to some readings of the story of Abraham, faith as such is not anxious. Only in cases such as Abraham’s, in which the breach of the ethical is also a crime against ethics, does faith result in anxiety. Faith is always a transgression of the ethical, however, given the broad understanding of that term in Johannes de Silentio as well as in the writings of Judge William in Either/Or. As such, no faith can be explained—not Abraham’s not the simple shopman’s. The simple shopman must remain as silent as an Abraham. Returning home from the shop and finding no lamb’s head and scant vegetables, the knight of faith cannot speak. If he could—if, gloomy at the prospect of soup or bread, he was able to make himself understandable to his wife—then he would not be a knight of faith. He would simply be irrational. And once his irrational actions were complete, he would have to admit the failing of his reason and commit himself anew to the universal, or refrain from speaking and remain unreasonable (by virtue of his continuity with the irrational act, not necessarily the persistence of his irrational behavior in time).

In faith, then, the shopkeeper knight of faith is like Abraham in his simultaneous but separate existentializing of both the aesthetic and the ethical. Both knights are in infinite resignation and both regain what they have resigned by virtue of the absurd. Johannes de Silentio compares this to the most difficult movement in ballet. “It is supposed to be the most difficult feat for a ballet dancer to leap into a specific posture in such a way that he never once strains for the posture but in the very leap assumes the posture” [1,2] (FT 41; SKS 4, 135). That is, the knight of faith is “able to come down in such a way that instantaneously one seems to stand and to walk, to change the leap into life into walking, absolutely to express the sublime in the pedestrian” [1,2] (FT 41; SKS 4, 136)³⁷. The leap and the posture are assumed separately but simultaneously, in the most difficult movement in the dance.

One might imagine a ballet critic attempting to explain the movement, working out clever and ever cleverer theories for how the leap and the posture are able to be assumed simultaneously by the dancer—despite the fact that they are contradictories and make no sense except when understood separately. And yet, at the same time, the critic would have to acknowledge that, separately, the leap and the posture are incapable of achieving anything like what they seem able to achieve in simultaneity. Many a critic is likely to make an effort to explain how it is done, or to deny one movement or the other (“it is not really a leap, it’s just a posture!”—or, “the leap and the posture are the same thing, in the end”—or, “it seems like the leap and the posture are simultaneous, but that’s merely an illusion of the stage”—or, …), so as to preserve reason (and to justify the work of ballet criticism). But an honest critic, in the end, would have to admit what Silentio admits in Fear and Trembling: “Perhaps there is no ballet dancer who can do it—but this knight does it” [1,2] (FT 41; SKS 4, 135). Perhaps, in the end, nothing more can be said.