Fear and Trembling: With Linked Table of Contents

by Søren Kierkegaard

Every speculative price-fixer who conscientiously directs attention to the significant march of modern philosophy, every Privatdocent, tutor, and student, every crofter and cottar in philosophy, is not content with doubting everything but goes further.

for not even he who anxiously and with deep concern sought a little enlightenment was able to find any such thing, any guiding sign, any little dietetic prescription, as to how one was to comport oneself in supporting this prodigious task. “But Descartes did it.”

Scala paradisi

Memores tamen, ut jam dictum est, huic lumini naturali tamdiu tantum esse credendum, quamdiu nihil contrarium a Deo ipso revelatur. . . . Praeter caeter autem, memoriae nostrae pro summa regula est infigendum, ea quae nobis a Deo revelata sunt, ut omnium certissima esse credenda; et quamvis forte lumen rationis, quam maxime clarum et evidens. aliud quid nobis suggerere videretur, soli tamen auctoritati divinae potius quam proprio nostro judicio fidem esse adhibendam.”

Faith is to be trusted over and above reason.

Descartes was a quiet and solitary thinker, not a bellowing night-watchman;

“Ne quis igitur putet me hic traditurum aliquam methodum quam unusquisque sequi debeat ad recte regendum rationem; illam enim tantum quam ipsemet secutus sum exponere decrevi. . . . Sed simul ac illum studiorum curriculum absolvi (sc. juventutis), quo decurso mos est in eruditorum cooptare, plane aliud coepi cogitare. Tot enim me dubiis totque erroribus imblicatum esse animadverti, ut omnes discendi conatus nihil aliud mihi profuisse judicarem, quam quad ignorantiam meam magis magisque detexissem.”

There is no way of reasoning one’s path to God—Descartes’ exercise was only a “guiding light” for him towards faith and not some kind of logical answer to all mysteries.

who intrepidly denied the certainty of sense-perception and the certainty of the processes of thought,

In our time nobody is content to stop with faith but wants to go further.

In those old days it was different, then faith was a task for a whole lifetime, because it was assumed that dexterity in faith is not acquired in a few days or weeks.

When the tried oldster drew near to his last hour, having fought the good fight and kept the faith, his heart was still young enough not to have forgotten that fear and trembling which chastened the youth, which the man indeed held in check, but which no man quite outgrows. . . except as he might succeed at the earliest opportunity in going further.

The present writer is nothing of a philosopher, he has not understood the System,

what a prodigious head everybody in our day must have, since everybody has such a prodigious thought.

Even though one were capable of converting the whole content of faith into the form of a concept, it does not follow that one has adequately conceived faith and understands how one got Into it, or how it got into one.

He can easily foresee his fate in an age when passion has been obliterated in favor of learning,

he will slice the author into paragraphs,

Kierkegaard is not to be understood by paragraphs but by the entirety of each work.

Johannes De Silentio

The ineffability of faith which denies ethical normativity

Once upon a time there was a man who as a child had heard the beautiful story about how God tempted Abraham, and how he endured temptation, kept the faith, and a second time received again a son contrary to expectation.

The older he became, the more frequently his mind reverted to that story, his enthusiasm became greater and greater, and yet he was less and less able to understand the story.

Incomprehensibility of faith

for what his mind was intent upon was not the ingenious web of imagination but the shudder of thought.

Not aesthetic but religious anti-reason

That man was not a thinker, he felt no need of getting beyond faith;

That man was not a learned exegete, he didn’t know Hebrew, if he had known Hebrew, he perhaps would easily have understood the story and Abraham.

But Isaac was unable to understand him, his soul could not be exalted;

“O Lord in heaven, I thank Thee. After all it is better for him to believe that I am a monster, rather than that he should lose faith in Thee.”

but when he turned and drew the knife, Isaac saw that his left hand was clenched in despair, that a tremor passed through his body — but Abraham drew the knife. Then they returned again home, and Sarah hastened to meet them, but Isaac had lost his faith.

“No one is so great as Abraham! Who is capable of understanding him?”

If there were no eternal consciousness in a man, if at the foundation of all there lay only a wildly seething power which writhing with obscure passions produced everything that is great and everything that is insignificant, if a bottomless void never satiated lay hidden beneath all — what then would life be but despair? If such were the case, if there were no sacred bond which united mankind, if one generation arose after another like the leafage in the forest, if the one generation replaced the other like the song of birds in the forest, if the human race passed through the world as the ship goes through the sea, like the wind through the desert, a thoughtless and fruitless activity, if an eternal oblivion were always lurking hungrily for its prey and there was no power strong enough to wrest it from its maw — how empty then and comfortless life would be!

For he who loved himself became great by himself, and he who loved other men became great by his selfless devotion, but he who loved God became greater than all.

Aesthetic, ethical, religious

One became great by expecting the possible, another by expecting the eternal, but he who expected the impossible became greater than all.

he who strove with the world became great by overcoming the world, and he who strove with himself became great by overcoming himself, but he who strove with God became greater than all.

There was one who was great by reason of his power, and one who was great by reason of his wisdom, and one who was great by reason of his hope, and one who was great by reason of his love;

Abraham was greater than all, great by reason of his power whose strength is impotence, great by reason of his wisdom whose secret is foolishness, great by reason of his hope whose form is madness, great by reason of the love which is hatred of oneself.

he left his earthly understanding behind and took faith with him

What is it to be God’s elect? It is to be denied in youth the wishes of youth, so as with great pains to get them fulfilled in old age.

For it is great to give up one’s wish, but it is greater to hold it fast after having given it up,

in a deeper sense the miracle of faith consists in the fact that Abraham and Sarah were young enough to wish, and that faith had preserved their wish and therewith their youth.

he had fought with Time and preserved his faith.

That is, he had been tested in his faith.

this is not faith but the furthest possibility of faith which has a presentiment of its object at the extremest limit of the horizon, yet is separated from it by a yawning abyss within which despair carries on its game.

Faith beyond all the intercessory evils which lie between, all the impossible contradictions, all the mysteries and unknowns.

He would have plunged the knife into his own breast. He would have been admired in the world, and his name would not have been forgotten; but it is one thing to be admired, and another to be the guiding star which saves the anguished.

Not so Abraham: joyfully, buoyantly, confidently, with a loud voice, he answered, “Here am I.”

And there he stood, the old man, with his only hope! But he did not doubt, he did not look anxiously to the right or to the left, he did not challenge heaven with his prayers.

Then he would have borne witness neither to his faith nor to God’s grace, but would have testified only how dreadful it is to march out to Mount Moriah.

For the outward world is subjected to the law of imperfection,

Here an eternal divine order prevails, here it does not rain both upon the just and upon the unjust, here the sun does not shine both upon the good and upon the evil, here it holds good that only he who works gets the bread,

They express the whole thing in perfectly general terms: “The great thing was that he loved God so much that he was willing to sacrifice to Him the best.”

for to money I have no ethical obligation, but to the son the father has the highest and most sacred obligation.

When I talked about Abraham on Sunday I did not feel moved in the least.”

Ethical imperatives

If faith does not make it a holy act to be willing to murder one’s son, then let the same condemnation be pronounced upon Abraham as upon every other man.

The ethical expression for what Abraham did is, that he would murder Isaac; the religious expression is, that he would sacrifice Isaac; but precisely in this contradiction consists the dread which can well make a man sleepless, and yet Abraham is not what he is without this dread.

Sacrifice is not such without acknowledging the ethical; just as courage is not such without acknowledging fear.

If I had recognized that it was the verdict of truth that Abraham was a murderer, I do not know whether I would have been able to silence my pious veneration for him.

I would begin by showing what a pious and God-fearing man Abraham was, worthy to be called God’s elect.

K.‘s irony. How are we to have faith in our own faithfulness?!

But if he does not love like Abraham, then every thought of offering Isaac would be not a trial but a base temptation