Kierkegaard predicted that his 1843 work Fear and Trembling would be translated into many different languages, and would secure its author's place in history. He was right. But Fear and Trembling has also led to an enduring caricature of Kierkegaard as advocating a dangerously irrational and individualistic form of religious faith.
The book is written under a pseudonym, Johannes de silentio, who discusses the biblical story of Abraham's obedient response to God's command to sacrifice his only son, Isaac. Largely on the basis of this story, Abraham has come to be regarded within the Judeo-Christian tradition as the "father of faith". Reflecting on Abraham's willingness to kill his own son therefore provides Kierkegaard with an opportunity to raise difficult questions about the nature, and the value, of Christian faith.
In his lectures on the Book of Genesis in the 16th century, Martin Luther praised Abraham for his uncritical obedience to God – for the "blind faith" exhibited by his refusal to question whether it was right to kill Isaac. In the late 18th century, Immanuel Kant took the opposite view, arguing that Abraham should have reasoned that such an evidently immoral command could not have come from God. For Luther, divine authority trumps any claim on behalf of reason or morality, whereas for Kant there can be nothing higher than the moral law.
In Fear and Trembling, Kierkegaard follows Kant in emphasising that Abraham's decision is morally repugnant and rationally unintelligible. However, he also shows that one consequence of Kant's view is that, if nothing is higher than human reason, then belief in God becomes dispensable. Unlike both Kant and Luther, Kierkegaard does not promote a particular judgment about Abraham, but rather presents his readers with a dilemma: either Abraham is no better than a murderer, and there are no grounds for admiring him; or moral duties do not constitute the highest claim on the human being. Fear and Trembling does not resolve this dilemma, and perhaps for a religious person there is no entirely satisfactory way of resolving it.
The dilemma is not unique to Abraham's situation. Kierkegaard was writing for 19th-century readers who regarded themselves as Christians – that is to say, as people who believed in the authority and goodness of God. By emphasising the difficulty of understanding Abraham's response to the divine command, he emphasises the difficulty of faith itself. Implicit in his analysis of the story of Abraham is the question: would you do what Abraham did? How could you do such a thing? It seems unlikely that anyone who really thinks about these questions would conclude that he or she would have acted as Abraham did. Just as Abraham's faith is tested by God in the Book of Genesis, so the reader's own faith is tested by personal reflection on the biblical story.
Kierkegaard's point in Fear and Trembling is not to recommend blind faith in God, but to unsettle his readers' blind faith in themselves. That is to say, he seeks to challenge their complacent assumption that they are Christians. Only when this assumption was abandoned, he thought, could people embark on the task of becoming a Christian.
However, Kierkegaard's Abraham does not just provide a paradigm of religious faith. If he is an admirable figure in spite of his murderous intentions, this is because he confronts with courage the loss of the person whom he loves most dearly. According to Kierkegaard, Abraham is a hero not by virtue of his obedience to God's command, but because he maintains his relationship to Isaac after giving him up.
When Abraham raises his knife over Isaac's body, this symbolises the fact that every human relationship is haunted by the prospect of death. Love always ends in loss, at least within this life. One response to this existential fact – perhaps the most common response – is to avoid the issue of mortality as much as possible. An alternative response is to face up to the inevitable pain of loss and to relinquish the beloved in advance, so to speak, by giving up hope of enjoying a happy relationship within this lifetime. (This "movement of resignation" is described as "monastic", although it does not literally entail becoming a recluse. It is an internal movement, an adjustment of expectations.) In Kierkegaard's view, this is more noble than the first option, but it is very far from the courage of Abraham, who continues to love Isaac and enjoy his relationship to him in full awareness of the suffering that his death would bring. This aspect of the interpretation of Abraham offered in Fear and Trembling suggests that, far from being an individualist, Kierkegaard regards human relationships as essential to life.
In this text, the question of how to respond to the suffering associated with love and loss is closely connected to the question of how to live in relation to God. As many philosophers have pointed out – and as countless ordinary people have experienced at first hand – human suffering presents a great challenge to belief in a just, loving, all-powerful God. For Kierkegaard, the testing of Abraham accentuates this challenge, and Abraham provides inspiration precisely because he manages to hold together an apparently irreconcilable contradiction: he believes that the God who commands him to do what is most terrible and painful is also the God who loves him. Again, according to this interpretation, the story of Abraham only testifies to the extraordinary difficulty of religious faith.