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Does Fear and Trembling defend Abraham, or show that nobody could?

Aoife Kilbride Fellow
· 3 replies
Faith & reasonModern EuropeanExistentialismImmanuel Kant#abraham#ethics#faith#kierkegaard
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Its coordinates: 6.1 Philosophy of Religion

Our seminar in Galway split down the middle on Fear and Trembling (1843), and I'd like more voices.

The book is signed by a pseudonym, Johannes de silentio. Johannes keeps returning to Abraham on the road to Mount Moriah and keeps saying that he cannot understand him. He can understand the tragic hero, like Agamemnon sacrificing Iphigenia for the sake of the state, because the tragic hero gives up one ethical duty for a higher ethical duty, and everyone can weep with him. Abraham has no such reason. Either there is an absolute duty to God that suspends the ethical, or Abraham is lost, and simply a murderer who meant well.

Half our seminar read this as a defence of faith: Johannes shows there is a "teleological suspension of the ethical," and Abraham is the knight of faith. The other half read it as an exposure. Johannes describes faith so that we see how terrible it is, and how impossible it would be to recognise a real Abraham from a madman.

Kant had answered the story in advance. Abraham should have said: that I ought not to kill my son is certain; that you, the voice, are God, I can never be certain.

As a Catholic I find myself disturbed by both readings.

  • Is Johannes a defender, a witness or an ironist?
  • Does Kant's reply settle it, or miss the point?

Book corner: Fear and Trembling.

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3 replies

  1. Miriam Adler

    Fellow

    Levinas wrote a sharp response to Kierkegaard on exactly this. For him, the high point of the story is not Abraham's obedience to the first voice, telling him to sacrifice Isaac. It's that Abraham listened to the second voice, the one that called him back to the ethical and stopped his hand.

    Jewish readings of the Akedah have often gone that way too: the story ends with a ban on child sacrifice, not a model for it. So I'd say Johannes has chosen the most frightening moment to admire. Whether he admires it or only stares at it, I'm not sure.

  2. Lars Eriksen

    Fellow

    Reading it in Danish on Sunday afternoons, I'm struck by how much the tone of Frygt og Bæven matters. Johannes is lyrical, then mocking, then anguished, sometimes within a page. He makes fun of his contemporaries who "go further" than faith without ever reaching it.

    So I'm with the ironist reading, but in a specific sense. Kierkegaard isn't defending Abraham. He is defending the difficulty of faith against a comfortable Christianity that thought it had understood him. Kant's reply is perfectly sensible, and that, for Johannes, is exactly the trouble.

  3. Tendai Moyo

    Reader

    A lay preacher's view, since this text comes up in sermons more than people think. When Genesis 22 is read in church, preachers usually rush to the ram in the thicket, as if the story were about the happy ending.

    What Johannes de silentio does, I think, is refuse to let us rush. He keeps Abraham on the road for three days. Whether or not he defends Abraham, he makes the preacher's easy version impossible.

    On Kant: I agree with his reply as a rule for my congregation. If someone tells me God has told them to harm a child, I will call the police, not the bishop. But Kant's reply is a rule for us, not a reading of Genesis. The story does not let Abraham doubt the voice. That is exactly why it frightens me, and why I read Johannes as a witness rather than a defender.