Fear and Trembling

There is a version of Newcomb’s problem that predates the English language. A man is presented by an infallible predictor with two boxes, the first containing the man’s only son and the second containing either nothing or an eternal blessing. The man must choose to take both boxes or give up his son and take only the second box. If the predictor predicted that the man would take both boxes, the second box is empty— he has his son but no blessing. If the predictor predicted that the man would sacrifice his son, the second box is full, and on top of that, the man is given his son as well! This is the story of Abraham which has confused, troubled, and fascinated countless people, among them one Søren Kierkegaard, 19th century Danish philosopher and author of Fear and Trembling. In this book, Kierkegaard asks why Abraham one-boxed, if he was right to do so, and what that all means for epistemology (this book is where the “leap of faith” comes from). Kierkegaard’s examination of Abraham is refreshing for theists in that it clearly and carefully portrays the psychology of faith and takes seriously the idea that a person can have a relationship with God. Kierkegaard’s examination of Abraham is refreshing for atheists in that it doesn’t shy away from the horror of Abraham’s intent to kill his own son, and it raises the question of whether such an “infallible predictor” can be trusted— is there a scenario where Abraham one-boxes, giving up his son, but the second box is empty?

Fear and Trembling was published in 1843^[1], under the pseudonym Johannes de Silentio. Kierkegaard used pseudonyms in most of his works, sometimes using multiple personas to argue points, such as in his book most likely to concuss a passerby if dropped from a second-story window, Either/Or. Johannes de Silentio is a thoughtful character who admires Abraham, yet “the older he became, the more frequently his mind reverted to that story, his enthusiasm became greater and greater, and yet he was less and less able to understand the story.”

To briefly review the story that so enamored Johannes, here is the Biblical account of Abraham and Isaac in Genesis 22:1-14 (NLT)^[2]:

“Some time later God tested Abraham. He said to him, ‘Abraham!’

‘Here I am,’ he replied.

Then God said, ‘Take your son, your only son, whom you love—Isaac—and go to the region of Moriah. Sacrifice him there as a burnt offering on a mountain I will show you.’

Early the next morning Abraham got up and loaded his donkey. He took with him two of his servants and his son Isaac. When he had cut enough wood for the burnt offering, he set out for the place God had told him about. On the third day Abraham looked up and saw the place in the distance. He said to his servants, ‘Stay here with the donkey while I and the boy go over there. We will worship and then we will come back to you.’

Abraham took the wood for the burnt offering and placed it on his son Isaac, and he himself carried the fire and the knife. As the two of them went on together, Isaac spoke up and said to his father Abraham, ‘Father?’

‘Yes, my son?’ Abraham replied.

‘The fire and the wood are here,’ Isaac said, ‘but where is the lamb for the burnt offering?’

Abraham answered, ‘God himself will provide the lamb for the burnt offering, my son.’ And the two of them went on together.

When they reached the place god had told him about, Abraham built an altar there and arranged the wood on it. He bound his son Isaac and laid him on the altar, on top of the wood. Then he reached out his hand and took the knife to slay his son. But the angel of the Lord called out to him from heaven, “Abraham! Abraham!”

‘Here I am,’ he replied.

‘Do not lay a hand on the boy,’ he said. ‘Do not do anything to him. Now I know that you fear God, because you have not withheld from me your son, your only son.’

Abraham looked up and there in a thicket he saw a ram caught by its horns. He went over and took the ram and sacrificed it as a burnt offering instead of his son. So Abraham called that place The Lord Will Provide. And to this day it is said, ‘On the mountain of the Lord it will be provided.’”

1. Many father Abrahams

Johannes’ first fascination with this story is that there are so many things that could have gone psychologically wrong, even if Isaac emerges alive at every ending.

What if, for example, Abraham hesitated and saw the ram in the bush before the angel spoke to him? He may have sacrificed the ram and returned home with Isaac as in the original story, but he would be forever drawn down by the knowledge both that God had required such a terrible sacrifice and that he had not had the faith to follow through.

What if Abraham had followed God’s command, but in despair, and Isaac noticed and lost his faith in his father’s God?^[3] Isaac may thus have been physically saved, but Abraham would no longer be his spiritual father.

What if Abraham did not truly love Isaac? Then the call to give up his son for God is a temptation rather than a trial, and sacrifice turns to murder, for sacrifice requires love. In other words, Newcomb’s problem is not a problem if the first box is not valued.^[4]

Johannes also points to other well-known stories where a parent is required to sacrifice their child: Agamemnon sacrificed Iphigenia to get favorable winds to take the Greek army to Troy, Jephthah sacrificed his daughter as part of a vow to save the nation of Israel, and the old republican Brutus executed his sons to preserve the integrity of the early Roman republic. Johannes calls these men tragic heroes, for while they did achieve varying levels of acclaim and greatness apart from and even through their sacrifices, none of them came away with both boxes—live children and blessing—as Abraham did.

In essence, there are many versions of Abraham that could be successful in some way, but only one that acts in faith. Johannes puts himself in Abraham’s shoes and imagines the limits of obedience without faith:

“So if (in the quality of a tragic hero, for I can get no higher) I had been summoned to undertake such a royal progress to Mount Moriah, I know well what I would have done. I would not have been cowardly enough to stay at home, neither would I have laid down or sauntered along the way, nor have forgotten the knife, so that there might be a little delay— I am pretty well convinced that I would have been there on the stroke of the clock and would have had everything in order, perhaps I would have arrived too early in order to get through with it sooner. But I also know what else I would have done. The very instant I mounted the horse I would have said to myself, ‘Now all is lost. God requires Isaac, I sacrifice him, and with him my joy— yet God is love and continues to be that for me; for in the temporal world God and I cannot talk together, we have no language in common.’”

Johannes talks of two movements: the first is the movement of infinite resignation, the stoicism of the tragic hero, the noble willingness to sacrifice that allows Abraham to start the journey^[5]. The second movement is trust outside human reasoning, even to the absurd, the leap of faith that goes beyond resignation and into joy^[6]. To quote Johannes again:

“But what did Abraham do? He arrived neither too soon nor too late. He mounted the ass, he rode slowly along the way. All that time he believed— he believed that God would not require Isaac of him, whereas he was willing nevertheless to sacrifice him if it was required. He believed by virtue of the absurd; for there could be no question of human calculation, and it was indeed the absurd that God who required it of him should the next instant recall the requirement. He climbed the mountain, even at the instant when the knife glittered he believed … that God would not require Isaac. He was indeed astonished at the outcome, but by a double-movement he had reached his first position, and therefore he received Isaac more gladly than the first time. Let us go further. We let Isaac be really sacrificed. Abraham believed. He did not believe that some day he would be blessed in the beyond, but that he would be happy here in the world. God could give him a new Isaac, could recall to life him who had been sacrificed. He believed by virtue of the absurd; for all human reckoning had long since ceased to function.”

A rationalist may appreciate that Johannes does not attempt to disguise the irrationality of Abraham’s faith; it is absurd, with no question of human calculation. Is there still some way to justify faith as a method of knowing? The rest of Fear and Trembling attempts to answer that question.

2. It still seems wrong to be willing to kill your child based on faith

Johannes defines Abraham’s action as a teleological suspension of the ethical. The ethical, or universal, is the morality humans share and understand. There are some points on which people disagree (to put it mildly), but that killing one’s children is unethical is fairly universal^[7]. The telos, or purpose, is the special instruction given to Abraham that supersedes the ethical. At face value, this seems risky— if people are allowed to suspend the ethical just because they have a telos, child sacrifice is only one item on a long list of terrible things that follow^[8]. One might be inclined to say that only a good telos can suspend the ethical. However, judging the quality of a telos by human intuition or morality means that we’re not actually leaving the ethical at all, just overriding a lower ethic with a higher ethic. Think back to the “tragic heroes” compared to Abraham. Each one sacrificed their children for a purportedly ethical purpose— Agamemnon and Jephthah to bring martial victory to their nations and Brutus to keep his republic in existence. In other words, their dilemmas of duty to children versus duty to country, while terrible and daunting, are within the realm of human morality and understanding. Abraham, on the other hand, had no ethical reason for sacrificing Isaac, no gain or greater good that he expected in exchange for his sacrifice. Does that make it better or worse that Abraham would kill Isaac? Ethically, it has to be worse! Indeed, Johannes says “But he who gives up the universal [ethical] in order to grasp something still higher which is not the universal—what is he doing? Is it possible that this can be anything else but a temptation? And if it be possible … but the individual was mistaken—what can save him? He suffers all the pain of the tragic hero, he brings to naught his joy in the world, he renounces everything … and perhaps at the same instant debars himself from the sublime joy which to him was so precious that he would purchase it at any price.”

Kant^[9] recommends against sacrificing children no matter who’s asking, arguing “if God should really speak to a human being, the latter could still never know that it was God speaking … But in some cases the human being can be sure that the voice he hears is not God’s; for if the voice commands him to do something contrary to the moral law, then no matter how majestic the apparition may be, and no matter how it may seem to surpass the whole of nature, he must consider it an illusion.”

Johannes acknowledges the terror of the leap of faith—going beyond the ethical without any Kantian reason—but maintains his admiration of Abraham, who obtained a greatness (or righteousness) not accessible through reason alone. In the Newcomb variation we started with, Kant two-boxes and walks away with his son^[10] while Abraham one-boxes and walks away with his son and an eternal blessing, suggesting that there is something in Abraham’s decision theory that Kant is missing. While Abraham has no universalizable reason for his action, his personal encounter with God provides a purpose he can put his weight on.

The phenomenon of individual purpose described here inspired the existential movement of the 20th century. However, unlike the atheistic existentialism that builds meaning on the self, Abraham’s telos comes from his relationship with God. Only such a personal relationship can produce the teleological suspension of the ethical; an impersonal god can only manifest universal ethics^[11]. The question of who or what is worth putting faith in is at the heart of the human condition, and oceans of ink have been spilled to answer it. Johannes de Silentio doesn’t have a fully satisfactory answer to this question, but does nod to empiricism in saying that the results of a leap of faith show whether it was well-grounded.

3. Faith and silence

The final section of Fear and Trembling deals with the question of why Abraham didn’t (or couldn’t) tell Isaac or Sarah or anyone else what God had commanded him. If he really had faith, why keep silent about it? Was Abraham afraid that they would stop him, or that Isaac would run away? Presumably there came a point on the mountain where Abraham’s intent was made clear to Isaac, but no mention of Isaac’s response is made except that he was bound, and that he later grew up to follow Abraham’s God.

Johannes argues that Abraham was silent because he could not communicate his faith and purpose. It was real to him, but there was no way for him to make it intelligible in words to another person. To use Johannes’ words, “Abraham is able to say the most beautiful things any language can express about how he loves Isaac. But it is not this he has at heart to say, it is the profounder thought that he would sacrifice him because it is a trial. This latter thought no one can understand, and hence everyone can only misunderstand the former.”

The incommunicability of faith is the final theme of Fear and Trembling. There is a solitude in personal, subjective experience (another foundational theme of existentialism), and if it is difficult to agree on universal ethics, how much harder is it to communicate a personal encounter with God?^[12] How could an observer possibly judge whether such a phenomenal (in the literal sense) experience was true or the product of some delusion? Even if the observer was convinced, as Johannes is, that the faith they see is well-grounded, how can they hope to step into that faith themselves?

“So I can perceive that it requires strength and energy and freedom of spirit to make the infinite movement of resignation, I can also perceive that it is feasible. But the next thing astonishes me, it makes my head swim, for after having made the movement of resignation, then by virtue of the absurd to get everything, to get the wish whole and uncurtailed— that is beyond human power, it is a prodigy.”

In the end, Johannes de Silentio isn’t able to take the leap of faith, and while his description of Abraham is thought-provoking, it doesn’t ground faith with the unassailable logic that would convince Kant or Hegel (indeed, would it even be faith if it was entirely logical?). Even describing faith seems like a doomed task due to its personal nature. If Johannes de Silentio can’t grasp faith after a lifetime of study and the clear desire to be like Abraham, where does that leave everyone else? The epigraph of Fear and Trembling gives one final hint:

“What Tarquinius Superbus spoke in his garden with the poppies was understood by his son, but not by the messenger.”

What is the message here that Johannes conveys and yet does not understand? You may be close to infinite resignation yourself, and there is some satisfaction in it, a numbness to pain but also a numbness to joy. Johannes has reached infinite resignation and has observed the leap of faith, but only as a spectator, as if watching someone ride a bike or hit a baseball could furnish the same sensations as doing it yourself. For Johannes, faith is the ultimate mental achievement, a leap inaccessible to human effort. But if you were to ask Abraham, faith might be the simplest thing of all, not the absence of doubt but the willingness to take a step.

Footnotes