Fear and Trembling

Summary

Fear and Trembling: Dialectical Lyric appeared in Copenhagen on 16 October 1843 under the pseudonym Johannes de silentio, 'John of silence', the same day as Repetition. Its subject is Genesis 22, in which God commands Abraham to take his son Isaac to Mount Moriah and offer him as a burnt offering. Johannes is not a believer who can explain faith but an admirer who confesses he cannot understand it. He opens by complaining that his contemporaries want to 'go further' than faith, as though it were an elementary stage that Hegelian philosophy had surpassed, when in fact no one has even reached it. A section called 'Tuning Up' (Stemning, also translated 'Attunement' or 'Exordium') retells the story four times, each version describing an Abraham who fails in some way: one who pretends to be a monster so Isaac will keep faith in God, one who obeys but loses his joy, one who begs forgiveness for having been willing, one whose despair Isaac sees. Each is followed by an image of a mother weaning her child. The 'Speech in Praise of Abraham' then celebrates the patriarch's greatness: he believed, against all understanding, that he would sacrifice Isaac and still receive him back in this life. Johannes distinguishes two figures. The knight of infinite resignation, like a young man who gives up a princess he can never marry, renounces the finite and finds peace in eternal consciousness; Johannes can make this movement himself. The knight of faith makes a second movement, 'by virtue of the absurd', and receives the finite back, living in the world so ordinarily that he looks like a tax collector. The core of the book is three Problemata. Problema I asks whether there is a teleological suspension of the ethical: whether Abraham, as a single individual, stands in an absolute relation to God above the universal ethical demand that a father love his son. Unlike tragic heroes such as Agamemnon, Jephthah and Brutus, who sacrifice children for a higher ethical good the community can understand, Abraham has no such justification; either faith is a paradox or Abraham is a murderer. Problema II asks whether there is an absolute duty to God. Problema III asks whether Abraham was ethically defensible in concealing his purpose from Sarah, Eliezer and Isaac, and works through stories of silence and disclosure: Agnete and the merman, Tobias and Sarah, Faust, and the bridegroom who abandons his marriage on an augur's prophecy. Abraham cannot speak because nothing he could say would be understood. The epilogue repeats that faith is the highest passion and that each generation must begin it afresh.

Top Lessons

• Faith is harder than its admirers admit

  Johannes insists that people who praise Abraham on Sunday would be horrified by a parishioner who did the same thing on Monday. The book forces readers to face the terror of the story before claiming to understand it.

• Resignation and faith are two different movements

  Infinite resignation renounces the finite for an eternal consolation; faith renounces and then receives the finite back with joy. The distinction separates detached spirituality from a faith that returns to ordinary life.

• When ethics cannot be spoken

  Problema III asks whether a person can be justified in keeping silent about a decision others cannot understand. The question bears on confession, secrecy and the limits of explaining oneself to family or community.

• The tragic hero versus the single individual

  Agamemnon can weep with the Greeks because his sacrifice serves the state; Abraham has no shared reason to offer. The contrast shows what a purely communal ethics can and cannot recognise.

Verified Quotes

Medical Lens

The book matters to psychiatry chiefly through the vocabulary of anguish, dread and inwardness that Kierkegaard developed here and in The Concept of Anxiety (1844), later absorbed by existential psychotherapy (Binswanger, May, Yalom) and by Sartre. Abraham's three-day journey is an extended study of anticipatory dread and of a decision that cannot be shared. The repeated weaning images in 'Tuning Up' have attracted psychoanalytic readings about separation. Infinite resignation can be read alongside grief work: holding a lost love eternally while renouncing it in time. Biographical readings that connect the book to Kierkegaard's 'melancholy', inherited in his own account from his father, are common but interpretive. From the side of medical ethics and forensic psychiatry, the obvious modern question, whether someone who hears a command to kill a child is psychotic, is precisely the reduction the book anticipates and resists; it should be discussed as a philosophical problem, not settled by diagnosis.

• Tuning Up (Exordium/Attunement)

  Four retellings of the journey to Moriah, each followed by an image of a mother weaning her child by blackening her breast.

• Speech in Praise of Abraham

  Abraham's long waiting for a child in old age and the three-day ride to Moriah described as an ordeal of expectation and dread.

• Preamble from the Heart

  The lad who renounces the princess and transforms lost love into eternal remembrance, a model of resignation set beside grief.

• Problema III

  Studies of concealment, the demonic, and the relief or impossibility of disclosure, including the merman's repentance and Sarah of Tobit's dread on her wedding night.