This essay is one long meditation on the faith in God displayed by Abraham in the Old Testament. Kierkegaard begins, “That man was not a thinker. He did not feel any need to go beyond faith; he thought that it must be supremely glorious to be remembered as its father, an enviable destiny to possess it, even if no one knew it…. By faith Abraham emigrated from the land of his fathers and became an alien in the promised land…. He left behind his worldly understanding, and he took along his faith.” Kierkegaard then lays out the underlying problem wrapped up with Abraham’s faith. “If a person lacks the courage to think his thought through all the way through and say that Abraham was a murderer, then it is certainly better to attain this courage than to waste time on unmerited eulogies. The ethical expression for what Abraham did is that he meant to murder Isaac; the religious expression is that he meant to sacrifice Isaac—but precisely in this contradiction is the anxiety that can make a person sleepless, and yet without this anxiety Abraham is not who he is.” Kierkegaard claims himself shattered by this paradox.
Thinking about Abraham is no easy thing. In fact, it is the hardest of things. Kierkegaard compares the heroes of pagan myth to Abraham. “I think myself into the hero; I cannot think myself into Abraham; when I reach that eminence, I sink down, for what is offered me is a paradox. I by no means conclude that faith is something inferior but rather that it is the highest, also that it is dishonest of philosophy to give something else in its place to disparage faith…. I cannot make the movement of faith, I cannot shut my eyes and plunge confidently into the absurd; it is for me an impossibility, but I do not praise myself for that. I am convinced that God is love…. But I do not have faith; this courage I lack.”
Kierkegaard makes the point that Abraham does not calculate. He does not reason. He puts all his trust in God. He puts his trust in the absurd, what cannot ever be. “Abraham I cannot understand; in a certain sense I can learn nothing from him except to be amazed…. Faith begins precisely where thought stops.” For Kierkegaard, the paradox is the tension between the universal and the individual, ethics and faith. “The story of Abraham contains, then, a teleological suspension of the ethical. As the single individual he became higher than the universal. This is the paradox, which cannot be mediated…. A person can become a tragic hero through his own strength—but not the knight of faith…. He who walks the narrow road of faith has no one to advise him—no one understands him. Faith is a marvel…. The paradox may be expressed in this way: that there is an absolute duty to God, for in this relationship of duty the individual relates himself as the single individual absolutely to the absolute…. Faith itself cannot be mediated into the universal, for thereby it is cancelled. Faith is this paradox, and the single individual simply cannot make himself understandable to anyone.” Kierkegaard again goes back to the difference between heroism and faith. “The tragic hero relinquishes himself in order to express the universal; the knight of faith relinquishes the universal in order to become the single individual…. Anyone who believes it is fairly easy to be the single individual can always be sure that he is not a knight of faith…. Humanly speaking, [the knight] is mad and cannot make himself understandable to anyone.”
When you remove all ethics, logic, and comprehension, faith is what remains. “To fight against the whole world is a consolation, to fight against oneself is frightful.” The absurdity of Abraham is the lack of doubt, the absolute faith in God. “At every moment, Abraham can stop; he can repent of the whole thing as a spiritual trial; then he can speak out, and everybody will be able to understand him—but then he is no longer Abraham. Abraham cannot speak, because he cannot say that which would explain everything (that is, so it is understandable): that it is an ordeal such that, please note, the ethical is the temptation…. Faith is the highest passion in a person. There perhaps are many in every generation who do not come to faith, but no one goes further.”
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