Faith in Fear and Trembling is strictly personal and subjective. One who has faith cannot explain it to anyone else, it is ‘unspeakable’. However, religious tradition identifies Abraham as the father of faith for actions that could ethically be described as murder. If we can identify anyone as possessing and acting through faith, there must be some means of recognizing it, understanding it. Johannes de silentio shows us that we can begin to understand the story of Abraham by examining what is missing in the traditional religious telling. This ‘cheap edition of Abraham’ omits the anxiety and repetition through which we can truly appreciate his greatness and have access to his subjective truth, his faith. Johannes formulates criteria for distinguishing Abraham (as a knight of faith) from a common murderer. He who has faith is solitary, not sectarian, and a witness not a teacher. These characteristics presuppose Johannes’s explanation of faith.
How, then, can we characterize Johannes de silentio’s concept of faith? He bases his examination of faith on the Old Testament story of Abraham, the man known as the father of faith in the Judeo-Christian tradition. His imaginative variations on the biblical story help to establish what faith is not by describing four Abrahams that fell short of faith in different ways. The second scenario illuminates Johannes’s central concept of the act of faith, in presenting an Abraham who “became old. He could not forget that God had demanded this of him... he saw joy no more.” Yet the real Abraham “received Isaac more joyfully than the first time” (p.29), by a double movement which, having renounced what was dearest to him in life, his son, is able to regain his original condition and return to the life he had before. “He left his worldly understanding behind and took faith with him” (p.14), because his situation was logically incomprehensible. Faith is therefore a belief in the absurd, the preposterous. Abraham “resigned everything infinitely and then grasped everything by virtue of the absurd.” (p.34) This paradox, this double movement is what Johannes understands as the meaning of faith.
Yet how can we know that Abraham had faith at all? Johannes admits that he cannot understand Abraham, exclaiming that “in a certain sense, I can learn nothing from him at all except to be amazed.” (p.31) Indeed, Abraham cannot express his situation to anyone else through the universal. As soon as he does, “he must say that his situation is a temptation, for he has no higher expression for the universal that ranks above the universal he oversteps.” (p.53) This is to say that there is no possible universal (ethical) justification for Abraham’s actions, so since communication belongs to the universal it does not have the capacity to allow him to explain himself to anyone. Thus if Abraham’s situation cannot be mediated, if he cannot express his faith, how do we have access to it at all? Johannes says that “anyone who looks upon this scene goes blind.” (p.19) If we are blinded by the frightfulness of his situation, how can we see that Abraham is the father of faith?
The answer lies, at least partly, in this frightfulness itself. Our own anxiety upon hearing the story allows us to understand Abraham’s anxiety in his situation. Abraham did not know it was a test, he did not have the comfort of knowing the ending as we who read the story do. If Johannes de silentio was to speak about Abraham, he declares that he would “suck all the anxiety and distress and torment out of a father’s suffering in order to be able to descibe what Abraham suffered while still believing through it all.” (p.45) Abraham was promised by God that “in his seed all the generations of the world would be blessed” (p.14) but he grew so old that it seemed absurd that the promise would ever be fulfilled. And yet he believed, and he was a hundred years old before he was blessed with a son. Isaac was the realization of a life of devotion and belief in the preposterous, and it was just as preposterous that God should demand him back, offered as a burnt sacrifice. Isaac was Abraham’s hope and belief fulfilled, in addition to being his only son. “[Abraham] must love Isaac with all his heart...only then can he sacrifice him, for it is indeed this love for Isaac which by its paradoxical opposition to his love of God makes his act a sacrifice.” (p.65) This paradox, which is faith, is made intelligible through the distress and anxiety which surrounds it. In order to grasp the frightfulness which is Abraham’s position, it’s necessary to understand how much Isaac meant to him. He loved his son, if possible, even more than he loved God (Ibid.) and his belief is all the more terrible and wonderful for this. Abraham cannot say “I love Isaac more than anything in the world and that is why it is so hard for me to sacrifice him” (p.62), any expression he can give in the universal will cause him to be perceived (and perceive himself) as being in temptation. (p.53) Therefore we cannot learn of Abraham’s anxiety through his own words and must perceive indirectly. Johannes emphasizes how “Abraham loved Isaac...in such a way that not many a father in the king’s realms and lands would dare to claim that he loved in this way.” (p.25) The anxiety and distress which surrounds Abraham’s situation, the conflict between his great love for Isaac and his transcendant love for God, is one way that we have access to Abraham’s subjective truth.
The suffering, the anxiety of Abraham’s situation is not just present in the moment he binds Isaac, not just when he held the knife. It is a constant repetition of the movement of faith which brings Abraham to Mount Moriah, and this reaffirmation of belief in God is one of the means through which we have access to his subjective truth. Johannes de silentio shows us four Abrahams that fell short of faith, and each did so at a different moment (p.8-11). If each could fail at different times, then it follows that for the real Abraham, who did not fail, faith was present at all times. And yet it is not as though one attains faith once and then has no choice but to believe. Every step Abraham takes requires a reaffirmation of faith. We appreciate that there were many opportunities for him to err, and that faith is not simply one act but a constant repetition, a reaffirmation of his belief. “Every person may still venture to turn back before beginning something like this and every moment can turn back repentantly.” (p.45) Abraham did not arrive at Mount Moriah, knife in hand. It took him three days, three days in which “he could still turn back, could repent the misunderstanding that he was called to be tried in such a conflict, could acknowledge that he lacked courage”. (p.26) Nor is it possible to ‘postpone faith’ until the last moment, that is to say believe that Isaac would not be sacrificed by virtue of a blind conviction. This conviction cannot be called faith because though “one can learn much from [it], one thing that cannot be learned [from it] is how to make the movements” because conviction “dares not look impossibility in the eye in the pain of resignation.” (p.40) The only way that Abraham can have faith is if in each step he felt the anxiety of resignation but still believed by virtue of the absurd that God would not take Isaac. The repetition of his movement of faith helps us to understand Abraham’s subjective truth better, because after hearing the traditional religious account a listener might journey toward his own Mount Moriah without the understanding that every moment is a repetition of the double movement of faith. He might venture forth without a Johannes de silentio who would ‘saddle up and ride with him’, whispering in his ear that at every moment he can turn back and acknowledge that he lacks courage. (p.26) Without this voice, he might believe not through faith but through a hollow conviction, one that does not even make the movement of resignation, let alone the transcendant movement of faith. Only if we recognize that Abraham reaffirmed his faith through constant repetition, and that it was an authentic faith that dared to look the absurd in the eye and believe regardless, only then do we fully grasp the greatness and fearfulness of his deed.
But how can we distinguish between Abraham and the misguided listener who hears the ‘cheap edition’ of Abraham and acts, as a murderer, in temptation? Can we, who can only understand others through the universal, even distinguish between the two? Johannes de silentio recognizes that it would be simple if “those who have faith...[could] post some criteria by which to distinguish this paradox from a temptation.” (p.49) Yet we have already established that those who have faith cannot express their situation in the universal, because when it is mediated they will always be perceived as being in temptation. (p.53) So it seems that only the individual himself can determine whether he is in a state of temptation or a knight of faith, and cannot share this knowledge with anyone else. “Nevertheless”, says Johannes, “it is surely possible to construct out of the paradox some distinguishing characteristic that one not in [the situation themselves] can also understand.” (p.69) He argues that the counterfeit knight, the murderer, will be sectarian. He will not be able to withstand the absolute isolation, the frightful apartness that characterizes the knight of faith. The knight of faith understands that his situation is unspeakable, and that if “another individual is to go the same way he must become the single individual in exactly the sameway and does not need anyone’s guidance”. (p.70) For this reason the true knight of faith will be a witness but never be a teacher, whereas the murderer does not understand or cannot withstand this solitude and will choose “worldly admiration of their proficiency”. (Ibid.)
Characterizing the counterfeit knight as a sectarian, a teacher seems to imply that the he is something close to a religious fanatic. If these criteria have been set up to prove that a religious fanatic cannot be a true knight of faith, then they are unnecessary as Johannes de silentio’s examination of the story of Abraham provides many distinguishing characteristics of Abraham’s faith that contradict what we usually understand by the faith of a religious fanatic. Firstly, Johannes emphasizes that Abraham’s was a this-worldly faith. “He did not believe that he would be blessed some day in the hereafter but that he will become blissfully happy in this world.” (p.30) It is not a faith that hopes for reward in a future life but rather a reward in the here and now. Secondly, Abraham was willing to sacrifice ‘the best he owned’, the dearest thing to him in life. Isaac was not a religious enemy, Abraham bore him no ill will but on the contrary loved him above all others. Thirdly, there is no benefit to the universal in sacrificing Isaac. (p.69) No one in the world, much less Abraham, can gain anything through the sacrifice. Lastly, Abraham is acting completely outside the ethical, and his situation is not even intelligible within the universal. He is not subject to any ethical or moral law, and he makes no attempt to explain or justify his actions within the universal (precisely because this is impossible). If anything, the criteria of distinguishing the counterfeit knight as sectarian and a teacher are making explicit what was already clear in Johannes’s discussion of faith: the knight of faith cannot be a fanatic.
If the danger in peddling a cheap edition of Abraham is that some poor individual in mental confusion might do likewise, then we can do no better to combat this than to scrutinize Abraham’s greatness. We can ensure that Abraham’s subjective truth can be understood by emphasizing the depth of his anxiety, his distress and suffering at being asked to give up his only son whom he loved with all his heart. We can better appreciate his faith when we realize that it is a constant repetition, and that he could have turned back at any moment but continued to believe by virtue of the absurd and did not doubt, even when the knife flashed in the sun. If we do this, then there is no danger but on the contrary a great reward in speaking about Abraham, because we are able to access his subjective truth and better understand the movement of faith.
