Fear and Trembling by Soren Kierkegaard

Jim and I took a quick trip to San Francisco a few weeks ago to catch Mozart’s opera, Idomeneo, at the San Francisco Opera. I had not seen the opera before. The music and performances were excellent, though I would have preferred a more robust staging. The entire set was a single spare room: three walls, three doors, and projections.

That was on Saturday, June 14. The next day we had breakfast with a friend of Jim’s in Oakland. That afternoon we took a bus out to the Legion of Honor for a show of paintings by Wayne Thiebaud. On the bus ride back to our hotel I noticed a small hardback book lying under the seat of the man opposite us. I assumed it was a library book. I was curious to see what it was, but didn’t want to disturb the guy to reach under him. But when we got to our stop, I did ask him if the book belonged to him. He didn’t know it was there and it wasn’t his, so I picked it up and discovered it was a work of Kierkegaard from 1843; this edition published in 1941. Not a library copy. (M. K. Cruickshank inscribed his name in black ink on the inside page, with a shopkeeper’s note of “PHL” and “12” in pencil, plus a small sticker on the inside front cover noting that the book once lived at “Hatcherds Piccadilly, London”.) I have never read Kierkegaard and wasn’t thinking to, but I figured the serendipity compelled me, so I kept it and read it.

The book is an extended meditation on the story of Abraham and Isaac from Genesis, asking the question how Abraham’s curious and shocking actions could be justified. After a short Editor’s Preface (Walter Lowrie, who also translated and added notes) and a long Editor’s Introduction, there is a Preface from the pseudonymous author of the book: Kierkegaard writing as Johannes de Silentio. Then a Prelude, where Kierkegaard expands, imaginatively on several possibilities for the Abraham and Isaac story. Kierkegaard then offers a long chapter of praise, a “Panegyric” for Abraham expounding on his title as “The Father of Faith” and what that means.

Kierkegaard recognizes Abraham as an exemplar of what he calls the “Knight of Faith”, that is, one who has devoted his life to faith in God. In order to achieve such status the first movement of a would-be Knight is what Kierkegaard calls infinite resignation. The Knight of Faith gives himself over entirely to the will of God, resigning himself entirely to the impossibility by his own action or understanding of rising beyond sin. This is the Protestant notion of Justification by Faith: if we are saved, it is entirely by God’s grace not by any work we can do ourselves. Abraham assents to sacrifice Isaac with complete obedience to God and also complete confidence that the action will be for the good, because God asks it of him.

This puts Abraham in an interesting position vis a vis the ethical. Usually when we are tempted to assert our own will against the ethical we fall into sin. Abraham, however, obeys God when Abraham asserts himself against the ethical. For Abraham the temptation he must resist is the desire to do what ethics requires (protecting his son from harm). Abraham illustrates for Kierkegaard a category of direct relationship to God, called faith, where a person acts for themselves against ethical demands but without sin.

Initially, spiritual development asks the individual to subsume himself into the universal. Rather than obeying our personal desires, we recognize the higher demands of the universal, which Kierkegaard equates with ethics. But for the Knight of Faith there is a further movement whereby the advanced individual then subsumes the universal into himself, re-making himself as an individual for whom the ethical is the base but not the entirety. For the lesser man, to assert his particularity against the universal is to sin. But the evolved man asserts himself against the universal without sin. Kierkegaard, or at least Johannes de Silentio, admits this is absurd, a paradox, and beyond his understanding, but is necessary to account for Abraham to hold the title Father of Faith. (Kierkegaard never questions the validity of that title. If Abraham is simply amoral or pathological then the story is easily dismissed and Kierkegaard has no argument.)

For a father to sacrifice a son is murder. But ethics are sometimes in conflict and allow for degrees. Child murder might be permissible if the killing achieved some higher purpose. Kierkegaard gives several such examples from classical stories: Agamemnon and his daughter Iphigenia; Jephthah and his daughter (Judges 11); Brutus and his son. By coincidence, Jim and I had just seen another example in Idomeneo, where the king, Idomeneo, prays for Neptune’s salvation from a shipwreck in exchange for a vow to sacrifice the first person he comes to after finding safety. He finds his son, Idamantes. Idomeneo’s attempts to avoid the sacrifice enflames the anger of Neptune, putting the entire kingdom in danger. Thus, Idomeno, the same as Kierkegaard’s examples, becomes a Tragic Hero when he acknowledges that the right and necessary thing to do is to rise above filial love in order to fulfill the greater obligations to the good of the State.

But for Abraham there is no higher purpose at stake. No one will be saved by Isaac’s death. In fact, the entire covenant with God to create a great nation from Abraham’s seed will be threatened by the death of Abraham’s only son with Sarah. Abraham approaches the sacrifice willingly, there is no despair as with Tragic Heroes, but with trust in God’s promise. Sarah had lost that faith and gave Abraham Hagar to conceive Ishmael when she assumed herself to be permanently barren. But Abraham retains his faith, even to the point of killing Isaac and expecting God to find some other way to fulfill God’s vow.

Positioning Abraham, then, as a Knight of Faith, and not a Tragic Hero, and explaining how the evolved individual is sometimes called to stand above the ethical demands of the universal, Kierkegaard then explores three specific questions, in three chapters.

The first is whether there can be a telos (a purpose) higher than ethics. For a Tragic Hero the ethical violation is justified by the higher ethical demand. For Abraham there is no justification within ethics. He suspends the telos of the ethical in favor of the telos of faith.

The second is whether there is an absolute duty to God. Lesser men approach God through ethics. For the Knight of Faith, ethics follow after his primary relationship with God. This has the effect for the Knight of Faith to be unable to justify their actions ethically because to refer to ethics debases their true allegiance. So yes, there is an absolute duty to God, unmediated through ethics. Kierkegaard uses the primary example from Luke 14:26 of the commandment to hate one’s family, which would be unethical, but is required in order to follow God.

The third of Kierkegaard’s questions is whether it was ethical for Abraham to keep silent about his intentions, telling no one, neither Isaac, nor Sarah, nor Abraham’s servant Eliezer, what he intended to do as he set out for Mount Moriah with Isaac. Kierkegaard includes a long discussion of the difference between aesthetics, which operates on concealment, and ethics, which requires revelation, but he concludes that Abraham’s silence is proper because in effect he could not speak from his position of faith, without turning his actions into ethical violation (there being no higher ethical purpose to justify the murder) and sin. Faith, then, reflects aesthetics in requiring concealment but belongs to its own category.

Do i agree with all of this? No. To allow that some great individuals are justified in committing unethical acts through a direct relationship with God makes excuses for religiously-based terrorists and cult leaders. Such folks often imagine themselves as more spiritually evolved “Knights of Faith” as Kierkegaard would have them, but they never are, and are in fact always deluded and dangerous. Tellingly, Kierkegaard gives no other example of a Knight of Faith except for Abraham. God, for me, is defined by ethics. No true voice of God would ever ask a person to violate ethics, although when ethics are in conflict, ethics itself might demand a violation of a lesser for a greater. But such relative gradations of ethics are themselves defined by the relationship of the individual to the universal: i.e. the death of one to save the lives of many. The spiritually evolved person always places themselves amid the universal not outside or beyond it. To imagine that God would tempt a person to commit an unethical act merely as a test of their faith, is to imagine a God that plays with human lives and violates ethics Himself. I do suspect that the Bible intends to lift up Abraham as a exemplar of faith and to marvel at the mysterious nature of God, but for me, Abraham in this story is no hero, and God in this story is no divinity worthy of respect.

I read the book in dribs and drabs over the following couple of weeks after finding it on the bus as I concluded my work at the church. The argument circles around quite a bit, so although it’s complicated, it’s not hard to follow. I finished reading the book earlier this week as Jim and I relaxed by a pool at a gay men’s resort in Palm Springs, probably the first time anyone has read Kierkegaard in that particular setting. It had been a coincidence to find the book after having just seen Idomeneo with its similar themes of ethics, sacrifice, and duty to God. It was an irony to encounter such a deeply theological book after having just retired at long last and with some relief from my ministry career.