Fear and Trembling
Søren Kierkegaard(1843)
Extract
The knight of faith is the only happy man, the heir to the finite, while the knight of resignation is a stranger and a foreigner.
A father takes his son up a mountain to sacrifice him because God has asked it, and the philosopher who contemplates this scene cannot get past it, cannot understand it, can only circle the story of Abraham and Isaac with increasing vertigo and awe. Published in 1843 under the pseudonym Johannes de Silentio, a name confessing the author's inability to speak from within faith itself, the work distinguishes the knight of infinite resignation, who renounces the world, from the knight of faith, who renounces it and then receives it back by virtue of the absurd. Abraham cannot be explained or admired from a safe philosophical distance. He can only be believed or refused. Faith is not comfort; it is a sword.
If you loved this
Dostoevsky dramatises the same crisis of faith Kierkegaard philosophises: Abraham's knife becomes Ivan's rebellion.
The original text Kierkegaard circles: God demanding the impossible and refusing to explain.
Camus asks Kierkegaard's question — what justifies going on? — but refuses the leap of faith.