Fear and Trembling

Quick Facts

• Full title: Fear and Trembling
• Original title: Frygt og Baeven
• Author: Soren Kierkegaard
• Published: 1843
• Pseudonym: Johannes de Silentio, meaning "John of Silence"
• Main example: Abraham's near-sacrifice of Isaac in Genesis 22
• Main topics: faith, obedience, ethics, paradox, silence, and the single individual before God
• Main labels: Christian philosophy, philosophy of religion, Existentialism

The Problem

Fear and Trembling asks why Abraham is praised as the father of faith instead of condemned as a would-be murderer.

The story is simple and disturbing. God tells Abraham to sacrifice his son Isaac. Isaac is not only Abraham's beloved child. He is also the child through whom God has promised Abraham descendants. Abraham obeys and takes Isaac to Mount Moriah. At the last moment, an angel stops him.

Johannes de Silentio, Kierkegaard's pseudonymous narrator, refuses to make this story comfortable. If ethics means the shared human rule that a parent must not kill a child, then Abraham cannot be explained by ethics. If Abraham is still a hero, then faith must be something stranger and harder than being a decent moral person.

In One Minute

Fear and Trembling says that real faith is not just believing religious claims or admiring Bible stories. Faith can place a person in an "absolute relation to the absolute," meaning a direct responsibility to God that cannot be translated into public moral reasons.

That is why Abraham is so hard to understand. A tragic hero can explain a sacrifice by pointing to a public good. A king may sacrifice himself for a nation. A parent may risk death to save a child. Abraham cannot explain himself that way. He is not giving Isaac up for society. He obeys God alone.

The book's famous phrase is the "teleological suspension of the ethical." Teleological means "for the sake of an end." Suspension means that the normal ethical rule is not destroyed, but is set aside in this one religious case for God's purpose. Johannes does not make this safe or easy. He says Abraham can be admired only if faith is real. Without faith, Abraham is simply terrifying.

The Main Argument

The argument starts by separating Abraham from ordinary moral heroism. Johannes compares Abraham with figures such as Agamemnon, who sacrifices his daughter Iphigenia for the Greek army. Agamemnon is tragic because his act is painful, but it is still publicly intelligible. He gives up a private love for a public duty.

Abraham is different. He cannot say, "I am doing this for the people," or "Isaac must die so others can live." His act violates the universal ethical rule that binds everyone. The ethical, in this book, means the universal: the shared moral order in which actions can be explained and judged by others. Murder is wrong for everyone, not just for people who feel like obeying the rule.

So Johannes gives the reader a hard choice. Either Abraham is not a hero, or there is a religious category higher than the ethical. If there is such a category, the single individual can sometimes stand before God in a way that no public moral language can justify.

This does not mean Kierkegaard is handing people a blank check to break moral rules. The whole book is written with fear and trembling because the difference between faith and fanaticism is not easy to prove from the outside. Abraham cannot appeal to a crowd, a theory, or a social role. He stands alone before God, and that solitude is part of the terror.

Johannes also says Abraham makes two movements. First comes infinite resignation: Abraham gives Isaac up. He accepts that, humanly speaking, he has lost what he loves most. Then comes faith: Abraham believes, "by virtue of the absurd," that he will still receive Isaac back. The absurd is not nonsense for fun. It means something impossible by ordinary human calculation. Abraham trusts God's promise even when God's command seems to cancel it.

Key Ideas With Examples

• Faith: Faith is passionate trust in God when ordinary certainty is unavailable. Abraham does not have a public proof that makes his action look reasonable. He trusts God while facing the loss of Isaac.

• The ethical or universal: The ethical is the shared moral order that applies to everyone. For example, a parent has a duty to protect a child. That duty is not a private preference.

• Teleological suspension of the ethical: This means setting aside a universal moral duty for a higher divine end. The example is Abraham being commanded by God to sacrifice Isaac. The point is not that murder becomes fine. The point is that Abraham's case, if it is faith at all, cannot be explained by normal ethics.

• Knight of infinite resignation: This is the person who can give up what they love most and find peace in the loss. Imagine someone who loves another person but accepts that the relationship is impossible and gives it up inwardly.

• Knight of faith: This is the person who makes the resignation and then trusts that God can restore the finite thing too. Abraham gives up Isaac and still believes he will receive Isaac. The knight of faith does not escape ordinary life. Johannes even imagines such a person looking plain, walking home, eating dinner, and living in the everyday world.

• Paradox: A paradox is a claim that seems impossible from one point of view but must be faced if another claim is true. Abraham is the paradox: he is praised as faithful, yet his action looks ethically indefensible.

• Silence: Abraham cannot explain himself to Sarah, Isaac, or the servants. If he says, "God told me," he still has not made the act ethically understandable. Silence shows the isolation of faith.

• Johannes de Silentio: The narrator is not simply Kierkegaard speaking directly. He admires Abraham but says he cannot understand him. That distance matters. The book teaches by making the reader feel the difficulty instead of handing over a neat doctrine.

Why It Matters

Fear and Trembling changed how modern philosophy talks about faith. It does not treat faith as a weak substitute for evidence or as a polite church habit. It treats faith as a risky, inward, life-defining relation to God.

It also attacks the idea that a philosophical system can explain everything important about human existence. Against the Hegelian mood of his time, Kierkegaard presses the case of the single individual. A system can describe ethics, history, and religion in general terms. It cannot stand in Abraham's place on Mount Moriah.

The book became important for Existentialism because it makes choice, anxiety, inwardness, and responsibility central. It asks what it means to live when the most important decision cannot be made for you by public opinion, abstract reason, or social respectability.

Proponents, Critics, and Opponents

Soren Kierkegaard wrote the book as part of his larger attack on comfortable Christianity and system-building philosophy. He wanted readers to stop treating Abraham as a harmless Sunday school hero. If Abraham is the father of faith, faith is frightening.

Hegel is the major background opponent. Hegelian ethics treats the individual as finding freedom in the universal life of family, society, and state. Fear and Trembling asks whether faith can put the single individual above the universal in relation to God.

Christian readers have often valued the book because it takes faith seriously as obedience, trust, and dependence on God. Other readers worry that the teleological suspension of the ethical is dangerous. If someone claims that God told them to break a moral law, how could anyone tell the difference between faith, delusion, and violence?

Emmanuel Levinas is one famous critic. He argues that Kierkegaard makes the private relation to God too powerful against the ethical demand made by another person. Jean-Paul Sartre later uses Abraham as an example of the anxiety of choice: even if a voice seems divine, the person still has to decide what it means and whether to obey.

Related Pages

• Soren Kierkegaard
• G. W. F. Hegel
• Existentialism