Few things are more pleasant than finding another volume of the International Kierkegaard Commentary has appeared on the new books shelf in the library. Each focuses on a particular text; the one I am reading at the moment is on Fear and Trembling, and corrects some misreadings. It is worth drawing out a couple of points here.
Johannes de Silentio, pseudonymous author of Fear and Trembling, admires Abraham and celebrates his faith. Abraham left his native land out of faithful love for God. He is also capable of faithful hope – promised a great succession, he did not waver - he waited, and Sarah only bore him a son when she was ninety years old. And when God asked him to sacrifice his son on Mt. Moriah, Abraham’s knew that what was sacrificed would be returned to him; he knew he would receive anew what he was prepared to lose by his own hand.
C. Stephen Evans is right to maintain note that ‘Johannes says that the ‘irrational’ or ‘absurd’ aspect of Abraham’s faith is not his willingness to sacrifice Isaac, but rather Abraham’s ability to receive Isaac back joyfully after having been willing to sacrifice him’ (17). Unlike the ‘knight of resignation’, who would have simply resigned himself to obeying God, giving up the finite and the temporal for the sake of the infinite and the eternal, Abraham is a ‘knight of faith’. What does this mean? He is able to make a leap of faith beyond rational calculation – beyond what appears to be good or right. He knows he will receive Isaac back, whatever happens. He is capable of a faith which is more that simple obedience.
But Silentio, who appears to be so perceptive, is a ‘lower’ pseudonym – he is not yet a Christian like Anti-Climacus. As such, his viewpoint is partial – doesn’t another pseudonym (admittedly, he too is 'lower), Johannes Climacus, note that Fear and Trembling only ‘used sin incidentally’ (CUP, 240)? One must read Fear and Trembling in the context of Kierkegaard's authorship as a whole, remembering the position of the pseudonyms in his overall strategy.
This advice also goes for those who are horrified by what they take to be the moral nihilism of Fear and Trembling. Read Works of Love, as Evans suggests and it is clear Kierkegaard does not think one's duties to God 'could replace or compete with duties towards one’s fellow humans’; he quotes Kierkegaard: ‘God is not a part of existence in such a way that he demands his share for himself; he demands everything, but as you bring it you immediately receive, if I may put it this way, an endorsement designating where it should be forwarded, for God demands nothing for himself, although he demands everything from you' (159). Why, then, Johannes’s suspicion of the ethical? Because the ethical is not the ultimate modality of existence. Yes, to become religious means one must leave the ethical behind - but then, through God, the ethical is received anew as it is grounded in dogmatics, in revelation.
Fear and Trembling is, to be sure, the work of one who is in some sense removed from the ethical sphere, but he is not yet religious, which means he has not yet passed through despair. It is only from his partial perspective that it appears that Abraham chooses the absurd. However, as Kierkegaard maintains in his journals, ‘When the believer has faith, the absurd is not the absurd – faith transforms it …’ (JP, 1:10). Silentio's book is a despairer's book - for doesn't he find in Abraham the infinite that he feels is somehow missing in himself? I a reminded, in Silentio, of the kind of despair analysed in The Sickness Unto Death which springs from a lack of attachment to the world, a lack of definition or finitude; the temptation to fantasy and imagination. Is it coincidence that Silentio sees himself as a poet? Of course not.