Fear And Trembling

Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 1843

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Summary

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Preface-Part 1

Part 2

Parts 3-4

Part 5-Epilogue

Key Figures

Themes

Index of Terms

Important Quotes

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Preface-Part 1Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Preface Summary

The Preface is written under the pseudonym Johannes de Silentio, who argues that everyone doubts too much and too often. Past philosophers have experienced doubt, of course, but not easily. Descartes reached a state of doubt but only after years of arduous study and a long process. Many Greek philosophers also believed it took a lifetime to reach doubt. Today, by contrast, people start with doubt.

Similarly, no one writing today is willing to stop with faith alone. It too is seemingly easily reached. Everyone wants to go further than faith. In prior generations, faith took a lifetime to reach. Today, everyone presumes to have faith and then attempts to go beyond it.

The writer admits to being “nothing of a philosopher” and that “he has not understood the System” (34). But even if faith were something that could be explained, the System would not help anyone understand it or why people have it. Since Johannes is not beholden to the System, he can write freely. Writing is something he does as a luxury, and he assumes most people will ignore his work or criticize him. But he is afraid some will try to place his writing into the System. He begs “every systematic ‘bag-peerer’ at the custom house” to not place this work in the System, since it has nothing to do with it (35). It cannot be divided up in such a way, and he wishes his readers luck.

Prelude Summary

The Prelude tells the story of a man who greatly admires the story of Abraham in the Bible. He encountered the story first as a child but returned to it with greater interest as an adult. Each time he read it, he understood it less. The man is not a thinker, and faith alone is enough for him. But he wishes he could witness the scene with Abraham and his son. He imagines it in four different ways, comparing each with a mother weaning her infant.

In the first, Abraham tells Isaac that Isaac has to be sacrificed. But then Abraham acts as if he were mad. That way, Isaac will not blame God but Abraham for his death and will not lose his faith. The man makes a comparison between a mother weaning her child by blackening her breast so the child will not want it. The breast changes, but the mother is the same, so the child does not lose trust in her.

In the second scenario, Abraham reluctantly kills Isaac but without understanding why. This causes Abraham to be joyless for the rest of his life. The man compares it to a mother hiding her breast so the child thinks it can no longer get milk from her.

In the third scenario, Abraham believes God must be testing him to see how much he loves Isaac. Abraham begs God to forgive him because he even considered doing what God ordered. After all, what sin could be worse? When a mother must wean a child, the man says, both the mother and child grieve over it. After all, a child will never be closer to the mother than it is to her breast.

In the final scenario, Abraham takes Isaac to the mountain and does everything as God has asked. But Isaac sees that Abraham is holding his knife in despair, a tremor passing through his body. As described in the Bible, God does not allow Isaac to be sacrificed. Because Isaac saw that his father flinch, however, his faith was lost. The man notes that a mother always has more food she can feed the child after it is weaned. Every time the man thinks about Abraham, he becomes weary. He is unable to understand Abraham.

Part 1 Summary: “A Panegyric Upon Abraham”

God created the hero and the poet or orator. The hero is a great person, and the poet is a genius who helps the world remember each hero. Every hero will eventually be recognized by a poet and will therefore never be forgotten. (Panegyric simply means “a speech in praise of someone else.”) Indeed, everyone who has ever lived will be remembered depending on three criteria: how much they loved, what they expected from the world, and how much they struggled. One could become great simply by loving oneself, only expecting what is possible, and struggling with the world. Another might be great by loving other people, expecting a higher love, and struggling only with himself. Everyone will be remembered in proportion to how great they strove to be. The greatest person is the one who loves God, expects that which is impossible, and struggles with the same God. Because of his faith in and struggle with God, Abraham is the greatest of all.

The story of Abraham is recounted. Abraham left his home because God asked him to. He trusted God and did not bemoan his fate. God promised Abraham a son so that Abraham could create a family and a nation. But Abraham became too old to have children. Abraham continued to have faith, however, trusting God and desiring the son God had promised but not yet delivered. When God finally blessed Abraham with Isaac, God demanded he sacrifice the son he loved. Abraham kept his faith. He was promised, and therefore expected that he would have, a great name and a great family. He remained faithful and thereby serves as a guide to those who are in pain or doubt.

Abraham did not beg for a different fate or tremble at God’s command; he did not even tell anyone what was asked of him. No one would be able to understand what he was doing. This sacrifice was especially burdensome. Isaac was not just the son of Abraham but a miracle son. He was also said to be the beginning of a great lineage and was the person Abraham loved most in the world. Making it worse, God asked Abraham to do the deed himself. Still, Abraham found the strength to draw the knife. Poets cannot properly immortalize Abraham because he is greater than all other heroes. In fact, Abraham has never been forgotten, even thousands of years later.

Preface-Part 1 Analysis

In the Preface, Kierkegaard assumes an alias, Johannes de Silentio (36), which roughly translates to John of the Silence. The name could refer to the silence that existed between Abraham and Isaac as Abraham took Isaac up the mountain. It could also refer to Abraham’s silence in general, as he never explains what he does. In this sense, Kierkegaard could imply that he speaks for the “silence” that exists in the minds of the faithful. Since Kierkegaard’s point is that faith cannot be explained rationally, as no one “is capable of understanding” Abraham or his actions, Kierkegaard admits that he cannot adequately communicate faith (43). This inability to describe what faith is makes for a difficult read from the opening pages. Indeed, the Preface explains that the work will not be easy to read because the author does not believe in the current trend of simplifying a book so that it can “easily be perused during the afternoon nap” (34-35). Kierkegaard is bothered also by writers who, like him, cannot adequately explain faith but have the audacity to use the “System” to “go further” beyond faith (33).

The “System” refers to the philosophy conceived by Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, a German thinker whose ideas were ascendant in Kierkegaard’s time. In Hegel’s dialectic philosophy, two opposing sides are contrasted to make an argument based on their contradictions. The process is thus based on stating a thesis, using the antithesis to challenge that thesis, and synthesizing the two to form a higher truth. Truth is thus arrived at through the negative. For Hegel, philosophy was not meant to contradict experience but rather to inform it. He believed that thinking itself is an act, something an individual does. Self-consciousness is the highest form of thought and can lead to absolute knowledge. For Kierkegaard, faith is the negation of absolute knowledge. Faith proves that there are unknowable truths or at least truths that are subjective rather than objective. He asserts his work “is not the System, it has nothing whatever to do with the System” (35). Despite his protestations, Kierkegaard employs a similar structure in his work, using the second half of the book to engage in negatives to test his thesis and synthesizing what he learns to strengthen his argument. Part of Kierkegaard’s intellectual project was to use negation between works to prove a larger thesis. Most of his early works were written under pseudonyms: a pseudonym allows him to transcend the tensions that would exist if one read contradictory works by the same author.

In the Prelude, Kierkegaard sets up the central theme of the work: faith and how it is arrived at. The “man who as a child had heard the beautiful story about how God tempted Abraham” was not interested in going beyond faith but merely wanted to understand it, imagining four possible interpretations of Abraham (38). Kierkegaard establishes a dialectic by contrasting the versions of Abraham with the story about the mother weaning her child. In those stories, the mother seems to represent God, the breast Abraham (as he is between God and the child), and the child Isaac. Each of the four stories then shows what would happen to Isaac (and by extension the reader) if Abraham were not a model of faith. In one, the child loses faith in Abraham but keeps faith in God (40). In the second, the son no longer needs the mother at all just as Abraham would have lost faith in God if he did sacrifice Isaac. In the third, both Isaac and Abraham remain close, for they “mourn together for the brief period of mourning” but experience a loss of faith together (42). And in the fourth scenario, Isaac loses his faith because he sees “a tremor passed through” Abraham as he holds the knife (43). Regardless of what each scenario represents, the reader, like the man Kierkegaard describes, is left wondering about Abraham and his actions. The Prelude helps prepare Kierkegaard’s later argument that Abraham’s greatness arises from struggling with his faith. By showing what might have happened if Abraham chose a different path, Kierkegaard uses dialectical reasoning to imply that greatness arises not from what Abraham did but from what he did not do. He returns to this point later in the work.

In the “Panegyric,” Kierkegaard tells the story of Abraham as he understands it. His version contrasts three paths of life: the aesthetic, the ethical, and the spiritual or religious. The aesthetic is life as it is lived by the individual. The ethical is based on doing what is in the interest of all people; it eliminates individual pleasures or desires for the universal. The spiritual focuses on a direct relationship with God. It is this relationship that Abraham embodies. Kierkegaard writes in contrast to the ethical because the ethical would relate to the absolute knowledge Hegel believes in. The “Panegyric” describes what poets write about. Had Abraham sacrificed himself, he would become a tragic hero, one the poet “can only admire, love and rejoice” in (45). In other words, the hero can sacrifice himself for the ethical but not for the spiritual. And since faith cannot be understood, Abraham will never be understood by a poet who attempts to remember him as a hero. It is only because Abraham did not doubt that he is remembered today instead of “spoken of as a consternation” (57). But because he did not doubt, he endures as a symbol for the faithful everywhere but only that—a symbol of faith rather than of absolute truth. It should not be forgotten that “in a hundred and thirty years thou didst not get further than faith” (58).

These sections contain significant repetition. The Preface, for instance, mentions that everyone is “not content with doubting everything but goes further” (31) and then notes mere paragraphs later that “nobody is content to stop with faith but wants to go further” (33). And the Prelude contains a repetitious structure involving Abraham and a mother weaning her child, each ending with an aphorism starting with the phrase “Happy the person” or child. In the “Panegyric,” Kierkegaard uses the phrase “but Abraham believed” repeatedly (55). He also structures many sentences using the phrases “not one shall be forgotten who” or “one became great by” (46-47). This repetition expresses the theme that religious heroism is found through repeatedly testing and regaining faith. The text highlights this repetition through its structure.