Kierkegaard and the Silence of Faith
1 — Kierkegaard the Quiet
Søren Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling is a disconcerting book, not only to its readers but also to its pseudonymous author, Johannes de Silentio, John of Silence. Johannes tries to understand the faith of Abraham, father of nations, but in the end cannot embrace the paradoxes it embodies. Johannes’s name is well chosen. In the end, he remains quiet.
If we take Kierkegaard at his word that his authorship was essentially religious, even in its beginnings in the “aesthetic” works, and if we take Johannes at his word that he does not find faith to be possible for him, or Abraham to make sense for him, then the nature of the faith described, articulated, and defended in Fear and Trembling raises all sorts of questions. It also fails to definitively answer any of them. Are we all, then, whether we believe or not, consigned to Johannes’s silence?
While he admits he can’t understand him, Johannes nonetheless admires Abraham, the central character of the work, as a Knight of Faith. Yet Johannes portrays Abraham’s intended sacrifice of Isaac, at God’s command, to be ethically abominable, on any workable account of the Ethical. Fear and Trembling gets stranger still when Johannes tries to parse the Akedah, the binding of Isaac, as falling under a “teleological suspension of the ethical” — a suspension that he finds…
