Fear and Trembling [Paperback]

Ignore the critical interpretations availible here, and skip directly to Steiner's introduction. What you will find there should convince you that his is the translation worth your money. Quite simply, Steiner writes beautifully, with an almost hypnotizing lyrical precision; I have yet to find another translation of "F&T" that I believe compares to his.

SK argues that faith is a threefold movement which can barely be talked about. Before him, Hegel had narrowed in on faith in his System. Kierkegaard naturally took offence: how can faith be so easily dealt with? How can faith be so compartmentalized? Because for Kierkegaard, faith is large and mysterious: not the stuff of analytic summary. Specifically, Hegel did not describe faith well enough, to say how it comes or goes in a man. And he left it behind to move onto other categories. But K says that faith cannot be casually treated or left behind. A closer look at faith is more important than anything because "faith is the highest passion in a man." Faith is generally downplayed by K's world and our own. Religious faith, mostly, though K will applaud 'leaps of faith' in general, even without religious belief. After all, human consciousness involves faith, he argues.

K develops his idea of faith in "Concluding Unscientific Postscript: to the philosophical fragments." In that volume, Christian faith is the best faith there is. A Christian believes that Christ was God, but has no way of knowing for sure. The less objective certainty, the more subjectivity. The believer is forced to pull into himself. He knows, by way of reason, that God being Man is ridiculous, offensive, and baffling. But he believes it anyway, "by virtue of the absurd." His belief becomes a passion. His inwardness becomes a relation to God. In the words of Oaklander, he contends with "self-activity" and "self-scrutiny." No other religion, besides Christianity, has this "intensification of subjectivity." No other religion expects its members to believe that the Creator became a human person. No other religion offers that extremity of a personal nature.

According to SK, faith ultimately is done by "virture of the absurd." The Absurd is that God became Man: Lord Jesus Christ. The absurd, moreover, is that things may work out in spite of themselves. That 'all is well.' A Knight of Faith (i.e. the ideal Christian, who almost is impossible to find) may sacrifice something in the 'leap of faith' that somehow, some way, he'll get it back again - since with God all things are possible. Just below him is the Knight of Infinite Resignation, who gives something up but nevertheless retains his secret love for it.

Onto Abraham. K, in his own words, is the first to consider the "anxiety" of Abraham, who by faith went to kill his son Isaac, by order of God. But why? Because, by 'virtue of the Absurd' Abraham believed that somehow Isaac would return to him unscathed. By this reasoning, Abraham is not a murderer and neither is he a mentally ill individual. In fact, the Bible clearly states that Abraham loved his son completely, perhaps more than most fathers love their sons. And yet his story is so baffling that K lost sleep over it, for years on end. And we, too, should lose sleep he urges.

I'll leave the finer details to K himself, suffice to say that Abraham is K's Knight of Faith and is a hero to history like Socrates.

In the work, Kierkegaard engages the famous passage in the Old Testament of the bible where Abraham is ordered by God (Yahweh) to sacrifice his son, Isaac. It stands today as the most salient episode in the bible where Plato's EUTHYPHRO dillema is confronted.

Now, what is the EUTHYPHRO dillema, you may ask? The dillema is set out by Socrates in Plato's dialouge of the same name. Basically, it comes down to this: are good and evil intrinsic to the universe itself? Or are the qualities of good and evil decided upon by God (or gods)? If the former is true, then God (or the head of a pantheon of gods) cannot be truly omnipotent, for there is at least one power that even he / she / it must follow. If, on the other hand, good and evil are decided by God(s), then might makes right.

Enter Kierkegaard, who spends the pages of this work acting more-or-less as a defense attorney for Abraham for his even contemplating the murder of his son. For Kierkegaard, the divine-command-theorist, the latter horn of the conundrum (i.e.: might makes right) is the only plausible alternative open for the religious believer. The first horn denies God's sovereign omnipotence over the universe and all of its affairs, which is utterly unacceptable.

So, the Dane offers to us the defense of what he calls the "teleological suspension of ethics." That is to say, while Abraham was acting out of direction from God, he was not subject to the ethical laws of the "everyday" universe that the rest of us live in every day.

That, in brief, is the topic that this book considers. For the complete explanation and polemics of his views, this book is highly recommended. That the subject matter of FEAR AND TREMBLING greatly disturbed Kierkegaard becomes readily obvious in the first pages. If the arguments presented are examined carefully, it is a topic whose implications may very well shock the modern-day theologian as well.