The Thinker and His Crisis
Soren Aabye Kierkegaard (1813-1855), the Danish philosopher, theologian, and poet, published Fear and Trembling (Frygt og Baeven) in 1843 under the pseudonym Johannes de Silentio ('John of Silence'). The book appeared on the same day as three other works, an extraordinary burst of productivity that inaugurated Kierkegaard's most creative period. At thirty years old, Kierkegaard was grappling with the aftermath of his broken engagement to Regine Olsen - an agonizing personal decision that he experienced as an Abraham-like sacrifice, a renunciation of his deepest love in obedience to what he believed was a higher calling.
The intellectual climate of 1840s Copenhagen was dominated by Hegelian philosophy, which subsumed all of reality - including religion - into a rational dialectical system. For Hegel, faith was a lower stage of consciousness that philosophy transcended and completed. Kierkegaard's entire authorship was an assault on this position. Fear and Trembling argues that faith is not a stage to be surpassed but the highest human achievement - one that philosophy cannot comprehend, much less replace.
Biblical Texts Engaged
Genesis 22:1-19, the Akedah (the Binding of Isaac), is the single biblical text around which the entire work revolves. The KJV renders the key verse: 'And he said, Take now thy son, thine only son Isaac, whom thou lovest, and get thee into the land of Moriah; and offer him there for a burnt offering upon one of the mountains which I will tell thee of' (Genesis 22:2). Kierkegaard subjects this passage to an unprecedented philosophical analysis, reading it not as a Sunday school story of obedience rewarded but as a terrifying encounter with the absolute demand of God - a demand that contradicts morality, reason, and love.
The title invokes Philippians 2:12: 'Work out your own salvation with fear and trembling' - Paul's insistence that the Christian life is not comfortable or assured but involves existential struggle. Hebrews 11:17-19 provides an interpretive lens: 'By faith Abraham, when he was tried, offered up Isaac: and he that had received the promises offered up his only begotten son, of whom it was said, That in Isaac shall thy seed be called: accounting that God was able to raise him up, even from the dead.' Kierkegaard takes seriously the Hebrews author's claim that Abraham believed God could raise Isaac from the dead - that faith involves believing 'by virtue of the absurd.'
Kierkegaard's hermeneutical approach is neither historical-critical nor allegorical but existential: he reads Genesis 22 as addressing the reader directly, asking whether you could do what Abraham did, and what it would mean if you could.
Core Argument
Fear and Trembling poses three 'problems' (Problemata), each of which challenges the Hegelian identification of ethics with the highest human achievement.
Problem I: 'Is there a teleological suspension of the ethical?' Kierkegaard argues that Abraham's willingness to sacrifice Isaac represents a case where the ethical - the universal moral law that prohibits murder and demands parental love - is suspended by a higher, divine command. In Hegelian ethics, the universal is the highest category; the individual's duty is to conform to the universal. But Abraham stands as 'the single individual' in absolute relation to the absolute (God), a relation that exceeds and suspends the ethical universal. If Abraham is right, then faith is not a lower stage to be sublated into philosophy but a higher category that philosophy cannot grasp.
Problem II: 'Is there an absolute duty toward God?' Kierkegaard argues that there is - and that this duty can require what ethics prohibits. The ethical says: 'You shall not kill your son.' God says: 'Sacrifice your son.' Abraham obeys God, not because he is a fanatic or a madman, but because faith operates in a dimension that ethics cannot reach. This does not make Abraham admirable in the ordinary sense; it makes him terrifying.
Problem III: 'Was it ethically defensible of Abraham to conceal his purpose from Sarah, from Eleazar, from Isaac?' Kierkegaard argues that Abraham's silence - his inability to explain what he is doing - is essential to the structure of faith. A tragic hero (Agamemnon sacrificing Iphigenia, for example) can explain his action because it falls within the ethical universal: he sacrifices the particular (his daughter) for the general (the Greek army). But Abraham cannot explain, because his action does not serve a universal purpose. He acts 'by virtue of the absurd' - believing that God will somehow restore Isaac, though reason says this is impossible.
Intellectual Context
Kierkegaard's primary target is Hegel, whose Phenomenology of Spirit (1807) and Philosophy of Right (1820) had reduced religion to a stage in the development of Absolute Spirit - a necessary but ultimately transcended form of consciousness. For Hegel, Abraham's story is a moment in the dialectical development of ethical consciousness; for Kierkegaard, it is an irreducible encounter between the single individual and the infinite God that no dialectic can contain.
Kierkegaard was also responding to the Danish 'Golden Age' theologians, particularly Hans Lassen Martensen and Bishop Jakob Peter Mynster, who had domesticated Christianity into a comfortable cultural religion. Fear and Trembling is an assault on this bourgeois Christianity: if faith is really like Abraham's, then it is the most terrifying thing in the world, not a source of social respectability.
The book also engages the aesthetic tradition. Kierkegaard opens with four alternative retellings of the Abraham story - imagined variations in which Abraham loses faith, goes mad, or despairs - before turning to the philosophical analysis. This literary strategy underscores his point: the story's meaning cannot be extracted from its narrative form and reduced to a philosophical proposition.
Reception and Critique
Fear and Trembling was largely ignored during Kierkegaard's lifetime but became one of the most influential philosophical texts of the twentieth century. Its impact falls along several lines.
The existentialist tradition - Heidegger, Jaspers, Sartre, Camus - drew on Kierkegaard's categories of anxiety, the absurd, and the individual's radical freedom. Heidegger's concept of 'authenticity' (Eigentlichkeit) in Being and Time (1927) is indebted to Kierkegaard's analysis of the single individual's confrontation with existence. Sartre, in Existentialism Is a Humanism (1946), cited Kierkegaard's Abraham as an illustration of radical choice - though Sartre removed the religious dimension that was essential for Kierkegaard.
Jewish reception has been particularly rich. Martin Buber critiqued Kierkegaard's Abraham in Eclipse of God (1952), arguing that one can never be certain that a command to violate morality comes from God rather than from the demonic - a critique that gained force after the Holocaust. Emmanuel Levinas, in 'Existence and Ethics' and Proper Names (1976), argued that Kierkegaard's 'teleological suspension of the ethical' is dangerous because it subordinates the ethical demand of the Other (the face of Isaac) to an abstract divine command. For Levinas, ethics - the infinite responsibility for the other person - is 'first philosophy,' and no religious experience can override it.
Reformed and Catholic theologians have also debated the work. Karl Barth, in Church Dogmatics (II/2), engaged Kierkegaard's reading of Genesis 22 at length, arguing that the story is fundamentally about God's grace in providing a substitute rather than about Abraham's subjective experience. Catholic critics (Henri de Lubac, Hans Urs von Balthasar) have argued that Kierkegaard's radical individualism underestimates the communal and sacramental dimensions of faith.
Legacy and Influence
Fear and Trembling inaugurated existentialism as a philosophical movement, though Kierkegaard himself would not have recognized the label. It established the vocabulary - anxiety, the absurd, the leap of faith, the single individual - that defined twentieth-century philosophy's engagement with the human condition. It also demonstrated that rigorous philosophical analysis could be conducted through literary and poetic means, influencing the phenomenological tradition's attention to lived experience.
The book's influence extends beyond philosophy into theology, literature, and psychology. Paul Tillich's concept of 'ultimate concern,' Reinhold Niebuhr's analysis of faith and anxiety, and Rudolf Bultmann's existentialist hermeneutics all draw on Kierkegaard. In literature, Franz Kafka's parables of absurd authority and Flannery O'Connor's fiction of grace and violence are deeply Kierkegaardian. In psychology, Rollo May's concept of existential anxiety and Irvin Yalom's existential psychotherapy trace their lineage through Kierkegaard.
Key Passages
From the 'Attunement' (Stemning): 'If there were no eternal consciousness in a man, if at the foundation of all there lay only a wildly seething power which writhing with obscure passions produced everything that is great and everything that is insignificant, if a bottomless void never satiated lay hidden beneath all - what then would life be but despair?'
From Problema I: 'The ethical as such is the universal, and as the universal it applies to everyone... If this be the case, then Hegel is right... then Abraham is lost... But there is a teleological suspension of the ethical... In Abraham's case the whole of the ethical is an expression of the will of God.'
From the 'Epilogue': 'Faith is the highest passion in a man. There are perhaps many in every generation who do not even reach it, but no one gets further... One must not let oneself be deceived by the glib assertion that faith is a lower form that must be sublated.'
Contemporary Relevance
Fear and Trembling speaks to contemporary debates about religious extremism, the limits of moral reasoning, and the nature of faith in a secular age. The question Kierkegaard raises - whether there is a duty that transcends ethics - has been sharpened by the reality of religiously motivated violence. Does Kierkegaard's 'teleological suspension of the ethical' provide cover for fanaticism? Defenders argue that Kierkegaard's Abraham is characterized not by certainty but by 'fear and trembling' - by the agonizing awareness that faith cannot be rationally justified.
The book also addresses the contemporary crisis of meaning. In a world where Hegelian systems have been replaced by technological rationality and consumer culture, Kierkegaard's insistence that existence cannot be reduced to a system - that the individual stands before God in a solitude that no institution, ideology, or technology can mediate - retains its power. Philosophers as diverse as Alain Badiou (Saint Paul: The Foundation of Universalism, 2003) and Slavoj Zizek (The Puppet and the Dwarf, 2003) continue to engage Kierkegaard's analysis of faith as a radical break with the established order.