Fear and Trembling

by Søren Kierkegaard

He will be saved in so far as he is disclosed.

I can therefore understand the movements of the merman, but I cannot understand Abraham. It is to realize the universal that the merman has recourse to the paradox. If he stays hidden and dedicates himself to all the torments of repentance, he becomes a demon, and as such is brought to nothing. If he stays hidden but entertains no clever thoughts about being able to extricate Agnete at the cost of his own torment in the bondage of repentance, he will no doubt find peace but is lost to the world. If he discloses himself, lets himself be saved through Agnete, then he is the greatest human being I can imagine.

The conclusions of passion are the only reliable, i.e. the only convincing, ones.

for certainly no one has yet altogether escaped love, and none shall so long as there is beauty and eyes to see’]

For what love for God it takes to want to be healed when one has been crippled from the start for no fault of one’s own, an unsuccessful specimen of humanity from the very beginning! What ethical maturity to take on the responsibility of allowing the loved one such an act of daring! What humility before another person! What faith in God that in the next instant she should not hate the man to whom she owed everything!

Pity has a curious dialectic; one moment it calls for guilt, the next it wants to do away with it,

That horrid demon, the most demonic figure Shakespeare ever portrayed, and did so incomparably, Gloucester (later Richard III), what made him a demon? Obviously that he could not endure the pity that had been piled on him from childhood. His monologue in the first act of King Richard III is worth more than all moral systems, none of which bears a hint of the terrors of existence and of their nature.

To be put outside the universal from the start, by nature or by historical circumstance, that is the beginning of the demonic, and the individual can hardly be blamed for that.

there was never great genius without some madness’].

I would like to consider one more case of an individual wanting to save the universal by his concealment and silence.

Gregory of Rimini was called tortor infantium because he subscribed to the damnation of infants,

Gregorius Rimini, an Augustinian monk who was Professor of Philosophy in the University of Paris and died in 1358, was given this name because he subscribed to the view that unbaptized children went to hell, not limbo as usually held among Catholics.

The Sermon on the Mount says: ‘But thou, when thou fastest, anoint thine head, and wash thy face; that thou appear not unto men to fast’.

Not to make Abraham more intelligible thereby, but in order that his unintelligibility might be seen more in the round,118 for, as I have said, I cannot understand Abraham, I can only admire him.

So Abraham did not speak. He spoke neither to Sarah, to Eleazar, nor to Isaac. He passed over these three ethical authorities. Because for Abraham the ethical had no higher expression than that of family life.

Aesthetics can well understand that I sacrifice myself, but not that I should sacrifice another for my own sake.

The genuine tragic hero sacrifices himself and everything he has for the universal; his action, every emotion in him belongs to the universal, he is revealed, and in this disclosure he is the beloved son of ethics. This does not apply to Abraham. He does nothing for the universal and he is concealed.

Abraham is done for, he is neither a tragic hero nor an aesthetic hero.

Abraham is silent – but he cannot speak, therein lies the distress and anguish. For if when I speak I cannot make myself understood, I do not speak even if I keep talking without stop day and night. This is the case with Abraham. He can say what he will, but there is one thing he cannot say and since he cannot say it, i.e. say it in a way that another understands it, he does not speak.

The relief of speech is that it translates me into the universal.

cry out like King Edward IV at the news of the death of Clarence: Who sued to me for him? Who, in my wrath, Kneeled at my feet and bid me be advised? Who spoke of brotherhood? Who spoke of love?

The tragic hero knows nothing of the terrible responsibility of solitude. Moreover, he has the comfort of being able to weep and wail with Clytemnestra and Iphigenia – and sobbing and crying give relief, while groans that cannot be uttered are torture. Agamemnon can rally himself quickly to the certainty that he will act, and he therefore still has time to bring comfort and courage.

This Abraham cannot do. When his heart is stirred, when his words would convey a blessed consolation for the whole world, he dare not console, for would not Sarah, would not Eleazar, would not Isaac say to him, ‘Why do you want to do this, you can after all refrain’?

Abraham can refrain at any moment, he can repent the whole thing as a temptation. Then he can speak, then all will understand him – but then he is no longer Abraham.

Abraham cannot speak. What would explain everything, that it is a trial – though note, one in which the ethical is the temptation – is something he cannot say (i.e. in a way that can be understood). Anyone so placed is an emigrant from the sphere of the universal.

Abraham makes two movements. He makes the infinite movement of resignation and gives up his claim to Isaac, something no one can understand because it is a private undertaking. But then he further makes, and at every moment is making, the movement of faith. This is his comfort. For he says, ‘Nevertheless it won’t happen, or if it does the Lord will give me a new Isaac on the strength of the absurd.’

I have often pondered on how far a tragic hero, whether suffering or action provides the consummation of his heroism, ought to have a final remark.

So if an intellectual tragic hero consummates his heroism in suffering (in death), in this final word he will become immortal before he dies, while the ordinary tragic hero only becomes immortal after his death. Socrates can be used as an example. He was an intellectual tragic hero.

So as a hero Socrates is required to stay calm and at ease, but as an intellectual hero he is required to have sufficient spiritual strength at the final moment to fulfil himself. So he cannot, like the ordinary tragic hero, concentrate on keeping himself face to face with death; he has to make this latter movement so quickly that in the same instant he is consciously above that conflict and continues to assert himself. Had Socrates been silent in the crisis of death he would have weakened the effect of his life, aroused a suspicion that the resilience of irony was not, in him, a primitive strength, but only a game whose flexibility he had to exploit in the decisive moment, according to an opposite standard, pathetically to sustain himself.*

the death-sentence is announced to him, that instant he dies and fulfils himself in the famous rejoinder that he was surprised to have been condemned with a majority of three votes.

Abraham cannot speak.*

In his last moments Pythagoras had to consummate the silence he had always maintained, and so he said, ‘It’s better to be killed than to speak.’

Had Abraham simply renounced his claim to Isaac and done no more, he would have uttered an untruth. He knows that God demands the sacrifice of Isaac, and he knows that precisely at this moment he himself is ready to sacrifice him.

He utters no untruth then, but neither does he say anything, for he speaks in a foreign tongue. This becomes still more obvious when we consider that it was Abraham himself who was to sacrifice Isaac.

But none could understand Abraham. And yet think what he achieved! To remain true to his love. But he who loves God has no need of tears, needs no admiration, and forgets his suffering in love, indeed forgets so completely that afterwards not the least hint of his pain would remain were God himself not to remember it; for God sees in secret and knows the distress and counts the tears and forgets nothing.

Once when the spice market in Holland was a little slack, the merchants had some cargoes dumped at sea to force up the price.

Thus no generation has learned from another how to love, no generation can begin other than at the beginning, the task of no later generation is shorter than its predecessor’s, and if someone, unlike the previous generation, is unwilling to stay with love but wants to go further, then that is simply idle and foolish talk.

Faith is the highest passion in a human being. Many in every generation may not come that far, but none comes further.

‘One can never walk through the same river twice.’* The obscure Heraclitus

if one probes one’s own depths what one uncovers is first and foremost the disposition to evil.