Fear and Trembling: With Linked Table of Contents

by Søren Kierkegaard

After all, in the poets love has its priests, and sometimes one hears a voice which knows how to defend it; but of faith one hears never a word. Who speaks in honor of this passion? Philosophy goes further. Theology sits rouged at the window and courts its favor, offering to sell her charms to philosophy.

I catch sight every moment of that enormous paradox which is the substance of Abraham’s life, every moment I am repelled,

Paradox of the subversion of ethics

but into Abraham I cannot think myself; when I reach the height I fall down, for what I encounter there is the paradox.

Philosophy cannot and should not give faith, but it should understand itself and know what it has to offer and take nothing away, and least of all should fool people out of something as if it were nothing.

my imagination is (as I myself am not) a diligent little maiden who all day sits quietly at her work, and in the evening knows how to chat to me about it so prettily that I must look at it, though not always, I must say, is it landscapes, or flowers, or pastoral idylls she paints.

I am unable to make the movements of faith, I cannot shut my eyes and plunge confidently into the absurd, for me that is an impossibility.

Paradox

I would rather speak humanly about it, as though it had occurred yesterday, letting only the greatness be the distance, which either exalts or condemns.

But what did Abraham do? He arrived neither too soon nor too late.

He believed simply; he did not weigh up the pros and cons in his mind and then make a definitive choice.

He believed by virtue of the absurd;

He was indeed astonished at the outcome, but by a double-movement he had reached his first position, and therefore he received Isaac more gladly than the first time.

God makes us all from nothing; He giveth and taketh away; Abraham received his son as a gift.

He believed by virtue of the absurd; for all human reckoning had long since ceased to function.

but to be able to lose one’s reason, and therefore the whole of finiteness of which reason is the broker, and then by virtue of the absurd to gain precisely the same finiteness

Kierkegaard’s denial of aesthetic, ethical, and religious, but ultimately the regaining of all of it in God.

I bow seven times before his name and seventy times before his deed.

Literally idolatry of faith rather than God

for he who loves God without faith reflects upon himself he who loves God believingly reflects upon God.

He really goes further, and reaches faith;

He “reaches” faith

“One cannot know what is going to happen . . . it might possibly be after all” — these caricatures of faith are part and parcel of life’s wretchedness, and the infinite resignation has already consigned them to infinite contempt.

The hopeless “we don’t know if there’s nothing or not” that was characteristic of “The Good Place.”

Abraham I cannot understand, in a certain sense there is nothing I can learn from him but astonishment.

If people fancy that by considering the outcome of this story they might let themselves be moved to be...

People commonly travel around the world to see rivers and mountains, new stars, birds of rare plumage, queerly deformed fishes, ridiculous breeds of men — they abandon themselves to the bestial stupor which gapes at existence, and they think they have seen something. This does not interest me. But if I knew where there was such a knight of faith, I would make a pilgrimage to him on foot, for this prodigy interests me absolutely.

I would regard myself as secured for life,

he is interested in everything that goes on, in a rat which slips under the curb, in the children’s play, and this with the nonchalance of a girl of sixteen.

The movement of the infinite to regain the finite.

With infinite resignation he has drained the cup of life’s profound sadness, he knows the bliss of the infinite, he senses the pain of renouncing everything, the dearest things he possesses in the world, and yet finiteness tastes to him just as good as to one who never knew anything higher,

But to be able to fall down in such a way that the same second it looks as if one were standing and walking, to transform the leap of life into a walk, absolutely to express the sublime and the pedestrian — that only these knights can do — and this is the one and only prodigy.

It is not so with the knight of infinite resignation, he does not give up his love, not for all the glory of the world.

He is not cowardly, he is not afraid of letting love creep into his most secret, his most hidden thoughts, to let it twine in innumerable coils about every ligament of his consciousness — if the love becomes an unhappy love, he will never be able to tear himself loose from it.

Every movement of infinity comes about by passion, and no reflection can bring a movement about.

If a man lacks this concentration, this intensity, if his soul from the beginning is dispersed in the multifarious, he never comes to the point of making the movement, he will deal shrewdly in life like the capitalists who invest their money in all sorts of securities.

Fools and young men prate about everything being possible for a man. That, however, is a great error. Spiritually speaking, everything is possible, but in the world of the finite there is much which is not possible. This impossible, however, the knight makes possible by expressing it spiritually, but he expresses it spiritually by waiving his claim to it.

He has comprehended the deep secret that also in loving another person one must be sufficient unto oneself.

that order of knighthood into which one is not received by balloting, but of which everyone is a member who has courage to introduce himself, that order of knighthood which proves its immortality by the fact that it makes no distinction between man and woman.

everyone must sew it for himself, and

Nietzschean!

The infinite resignation is the last stage prior to faith, so that one who has not made this movement has not faith;

Faith is impossible to gain without one’s choosing to infinitely resign oneself, which requires immense effort of the will and spirit.

Now we will let the knight of faith appear in the rôle just described. He makes exactly the same movements as the other knight, infinitely renounces claim to the love which is the content of his life, he is reconciled in pain; but then occurs the prodigy, he makes still another movement more wonderful than all, for he says, “I believe nevertheless that I shall get her, in virtue, that is, of the absurd, in virtue of the fact that with God all things are possible.” The absurd is not one of the factors which can be discriminated within the proper compass of the understanding: it is not identical with the improbable, the unexpected, the unforeseen. At the moment when the knight made the act of resignation, he was convinced, humanly speaking, of the impossibility.

Faith therefore is not an aesthetic emotion but something far higher, precisely because it has resignation as its presupposition; it is not an immediate instinct of the heart, but is the paradox of life and existence.

So I can perceive that it requires strength and energy and freedom of spirit to make the infinite movements of resignation, I can also perceive that it is feasible. But the next thing astonishes me, it makes my head swim, for after having made the movement of resignation, then by virtue of the absurd to get everything, to get the wish whole and uncurtailed — that is beyond human power,

my eternal consciousness is my love to God, and for me this is higher than everything.

but a paradox enters in and a humble courage is required to grasp the whole of the temporal by virtue of the absurd, and this is the courage of faith.

in case he gave away his goods because he was tired of them, his resignation was not much to boast of.

He whose soul has not this romantic enthusiasm has sold his soul, whether he got a kingdom for it or a paltry piece of silver.

But by faith, says that marvelous knight, by faith I shall get her in virtue of the absurd.

the barb of pain was dulled, but such a man is no knight.

to find repose in the pain of resignation, but joy by virtue of the absurd — this is marvelous.

in case everyone who will not stop at faith is a man who is reconciled in pain and is reconciled to pain,

Those who are reconciled to pain and say that it is just a way of life, and that death need not be feared even without God—they minimize the greatness of evil, pretending it does not exist. But the Christian recognizes that evil is truly evil, and that it is great, and of immense importance. And that is why he hopes in God who will save us from it, precisely because the evil is so great that we could not bear it on our own.

The last movement, the paradoxical movement of faith, I cannot make

Because our reason and our ethical nature would not allow us

“It’s an affair of a moment, this whole thing; if only you wait a minute, you see the ram, and the trial is over.”

No—Abraham had to sit and wait, he had to really make the movement of the resignation and really think that he was sacrificing his son, and then he had to really believe that in spite of sacrificing his son he would receive his son back out of God’s goodness. If the trial was in a moment, he could have suspended his judgment and waited to see what God did. This is another expression of man’s power to create faith for himself.

The comic contradiction in the behavior of the orator is that he reduced Abraham to an insignificance, and yet would admonish the other to behave in the same way.

But men come from dust

I might describe what Abraham suffered, whereas all the while he nevertheless believed.

faith begins precisely there where thinking leaves off.

The ethical as such is the universal, it applies to everyone,

It reposes immanently in itself, it has nothing without itself which is its telos, but is itself telos for everything outside it,