In the Library
Fear and Trembling
Søren Kierkegaard, 1843
- Form
- Form Philosophy
- Difficulty
- Difficulty Moderate
- Reading time
- Reading time 3 hours
- Translated by
- Translated by Translated for The Daily Canon
- Original
- Original da
- Chapters
- Chapters 8
- Length
- Length 41k words
£1.99
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The knight of faith is the only happy one, the heir-apparent of finitude, while the knight of resignation is a stranger and a foreigner.
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About the book
Four times a man retells the same story, and four times it fails to reach the bottom of it. God has asked Abraham for his son, and Abraham, saying nothing to Sarah, nothing to Isaac, nothing to the servants left waiting at the foot of the mountain, sets out to obey. Fear and Trembling, written under the name Johannes de Silentio, John of Silence, keeps circling this three-day journey because it cannot let go of one intolerable thing: from the outside, the man who would kill his child for God and the man of perfect faith look exactly alike. Kierkegaard's Abraham is great not because he will give Isaac up but because he believes, absurdly, against all reason, that he will somehow get the boy back. That belief is what the book calls faith, and it offers no comfort. It is a leap over an abyss with nothing underneath. By the last page the trembling is yours.