Silence Lambs
Fear and Trembling
Fear and Trembling is Johannes de Silentio’s (Kierkegaard’s) dialectical lyric on the story in Genesis 22 of God’s command to Abraham to sacrifice his son Isaac. Fear and Trembling represents Johannes’ amazed praise of Abraham.
Johannes’ summary of Genesis 22, “that beautiful story of how God tempted Abraham and of how Abraham withstood the temptation, kept the faith, and, contrary to expectation, got a son a second time,” (Kierkegaard 
introduces the three central concepts used by the storyteller to illuminate his Old Testament heroes: ordeal, faith, and repetition.
The key to the situation of Abraham is that he undergoes an ordeal, one imposed by God, whereby God tests or tempts him. Johannes makes this point in each section of his book. An ordeal is a paradoxical category, one that goes beyond the ordinary categories of reason. Johannes is fond of saying that the character of Abraham represents paradox. Abraham can be admired, and he can certainly arouse passion, but he cannot be understood, or, rather, he can be understood only as one understands a paradox. The three problemata display the paradoxical nature of Abraham’s ordeal.
In Problema I, Johannes shows that an ordeal involves a collision of a person with the demands of ethics in which the ethical is suspended by something higher. But since the ethical is the universal, is binding on all individuals without exception and, thus, has no telos beyond itself, but is itself the telos of all individual acts, such an ordeal is paradoxical indeed. It places the individual beyond the universal through a teleological suspension of the ethical. This is Abraham’s situation. God’s command to sacrifice Isaac collides with Abraham’s ethical duty not to harm his son. God’s command “suspends” the ethical demand. It is clear that Johannes does not understand this teleological suspension of the ethical to mean that Abraham was given license, and an easy conscience, to murder his son. He is not so much freed to violate his ethical duty as prohibited from obeying it by the voice of God. All the while, Abraham recognizes and feels the binding character of ethical duty. Indeed, the clarity and validity of the ethical demand tempts Abraham to disobey God. This is why the situation is an ordeal and Abraham is considered to be a tragic hero. Johannes concludes: “Either Abraham was a murderer every minute or we stand before a paradox that is higher than all mediations.” (Kierkegaard 66).
Johannes goes on to say in Problema II that an ordeal, a teleological suspension of the ethical, places the individual in an absolute relation to the absolute, to God, that is higher than the individual’s relation to the ethical. In an ordeal, “the single individual … determines his relationship to the universal [the ethical] by his relation to the absolute [God], not his relation to the absolute by his relation to the universal.” (Kierkegaard 70). Unlike a tragic hero, Abraham would not accomplish a higher ethical purpose by his “sacrifice.” Johannes concludes: “either there is an absolute duty to God, and if there is such a thing, it is the paradox just described … or else faith has never existed because it has always existed, or else Abraham is lost” (Kierkegaard 81).
At the climactic point of each of the first two problemata, where Abraham stands under a teleological suspension of the ethical in a purely individual but absolute relationship to God, the only defense available is to say that his situation is an ordeal, by which he is being tested. Johannes indicates, however, that such a defense is not effective at all, because Abraham cannot prove it is only an ordeal that forces him to sacrifice Isaac and not his own murderous intent. This reveals a final characteristic of an ordeal for Johannes: as a paradoxical category, an ordeal cannot be mediated by thought so as to make the one undergoing an ordeal understandable to others. To say, “It is an ordeal,” explains nothing, for the very nature of an ordeal places a person beyond the universal, communicable, understandable categories of ethical rationality.
Problema III explores the “pledge of silence” extracted from Abraham by his ordeal (Kierkegaard 21). The question raised by this final problema is, “Was it ethically defensible for Abraham to conceal his undertaking from Sarah, Isaac, and Eliezer?” (Kierkegaard 82). Either there is a silence that brings us face to face with the paradox of an individual who stands higher than the universal, or Abraham is lost. Johannes demonstrates that Abraham’s silence has nothing to do with aesthetic secrecy and can only be condemned by ethics, which demands self-revelation at any cost. “Abraham cannot speak, because he cannot say that which would explain everything (that is, so that it is understandable): That it is an ordeal such that, please note, the ethical is the temptation.” (Kierkegaard 115). Even when Abraham does speak he is not understood. In response to Isaac’s question, “Where is the lamb for sacrifice?” Abraham’s answer, “God himself will provide the lamb for the burnt offering,” simply restates, and does not do away with, the paradox (Kierkegaard 116). Why? Because Abraham’s response to Isaac is ironic or, more precisely, an instance of the “speaking in tongues” that is the proper language of an ordeal (Kierkegaard 118). So, Johannes ends where he began, marvelling at the paradox of Abraham.
The ordeal of Abraham involves sacrifice and loss. Johannes marvels at the composure of his hero in the midst of such loss and speaks of the comfort his example gives to all others who suffer loss. But Johannes makes it clear that what ultimately interests and amazes him is not the resilience of his hero in loss, but the way in which he regains what has been lost, his restoration.
Johannes explores the marvel of the restoration of Isaac to Abraham in the “preliminary expectoration” that precedes the three problemata. Abraham, Johannes says, “through a double movement . . . attained his first condition, and therefore . . . received Isaac more joyfully than the first time” (Kierkegaard 36). This double movement occurs “by virtue of the absurd, for all human calculation ceased long ago.” (Kierkegaard 36) Isaac is bound and lying on the altar. Abraham has the knife in hand and is prepared to sacrifice his son. It is only the voice of God that stays his hand; it is only after God speaks that Abraham sees the ram caught in the thicket. And yet the paradoxical faith of Abraham is that even with knife in hand, against all reason and evidence, he believed God would not require Isaac. “By faith Abraham did not renounce Isaac, but by faith Abraham received Isaac.”(Kierkegaard 49).
Johannes illuminates the double movement by virtue of the absurd that constitutes faith through his well-known contrast between the knight of infinite resignation and the knight of faith. The initial movement is a negative one, whereby actuality is given up or renounced or resigned. The knight of infinite resignation has renounced all of actuality and, therefore, exists within finitude as a stranger. The knight of faith also makes the movement of resignation, but goes on and makes a second movement, a movement in which the actuality previously negated or renounced is restored. The knight of faith “after having made the movements of infinity, makes the movements of finitude” or, more exactly, continuously receives the finite as a result.” (Kierkegaard 46).
How does this happen? How does the knight of faith receive back again the finite which has been resigned? This is the paradox, the marvel of faith. According to Johannes, “it takes purely human courage to renounce the whole temporal realm,” while it takes “a paradoxical and humble courage to grasp the whole temporal realm by virtue of the absurd, and this is the courage of faith.” (Kierkegaard 49). The phrase, “by virtue of the absurd,” indicates that the second moment of the double movement, the moment that is faith proper, unlike the Stoic self-starvation of the knight of infinite resignation, is not an immanent human possibility at all. It occurs only “by virtue of the fact that for God all things are possible.” (Kierkegaard 46). This paradoxical second movement transcends the categories of human reason.
“The absurd does not belong to the differences that lie within the proper domain of the understanding…. The moment the knight executed the act of resignation, he was convinced of the impossibility, humanly speaking; that was the conclusion of the understanding … [F]or the understanding continues to be right in maintaining that in the finite world where it dominates this having was and continues to be an impossibility. The knight of faith … can be saved only by the absurd, and this he grasps in faith.” (Kierkegaard 45).
While Johannes can describe the way others, prototypically Abraham, make this movement, he says he is incapable of making it himself.
For Johannes, therefore, faith is characterized not by giving something up, but by receiving something. The knight of faith is so far from being a stranger in the finite world that the knight can be mistaken for a tax collector, fully immersed in finitude, with no external sign of heterogeneity. The difference, and it is an absolute difference, is that the knight of faith does not live in the finite immediately, but in the second immediacy of the double movement of faith whereby the finite is received from the hand of God (Green 98). Abraham received Isaac back, but in a wholly new way. It is the same Isaac, the same finite world, and yet not the same, for now Isaac, the finite, is received from the hand of God by virtue of the absurd, when impossible in human terms. The double movement of faith is nothing less than “a new creation by virtue of the absurd.” (Kierkegaard 40).
In conclusion, one application that might be derived from Fear and Trembling is that the story of the ordeal of Abraham is the ordeal for the reader or hearer of the story. The purpose of the story is to test us and take from us traditional, but inadequate views. The story of Abraham’s ordeal negates any attempt on our part to domesticate or own the promise of God’s grace. By taking away such inadequate views, the story opens up space for a new discovery of God, or, a discovery of a new God. This God is not to be found in the story directly, but only beyond the traditional options made impossible by the story. To use Kierkegaard’s concepts, one could say that the story of Abraham provides the absurd by virtue of which a new birth of our view of God can be accomplished.
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Silence of the Lambs – Part 2
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