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1-Page Summary of Fear And Trembling
Overall Summary
Søren Kierkegaard writes this book under the pseudonym Johannes de silentio, which translates into “John of the silence.” The book opens with a discussion about how so many people want to go beyond faith, but they don’t realize that they have had faith at some point in their life. Faith is something that people either go beyond or mistakenly believe they can achieve quickly and easily. Doubt used to take a lifetime to perfect; now people want it immediately. He is writing this book because he enjoys writing and believes that it will be ignored or criticized by others.
In the story, Abraham and Isaac are walking up a mountain to sacrifice Isaac. The author mentions four possible scenarios that would explain why Abraham was willing to kill his son: he told him what was going to happen before they went on the mountain; he lost faith in God after sacrificing the ram because he thought it wasn’t enough; he didn’t bring Isaac all of the way up with him but just went up there himself and asked for forgiveness from God; or, maybe it’s something else entirely.
Soren Kierkegaard believes that Abraham was a truly great man. He often refers to him as the “father of faith”. His story begins when God asks him to leave his life behind and go out into the desert, which he does because he has faith in God’s promise that he will have a son with Sarah and his descendants will spread all over the world. Even though both Abraham and Sarah were very old, they had Isaac who is born miraculously. However, God tests Abraham one more time by asking him to sacrifice Isaac; fortunately for Abraham, before taking this irrevocable step of killing Isaac, God intervenes. In Kierkegaard’s opinion it is not just about how well people can follow instructions but also about their journey towards achieving something great – in this case it was sacrificing his own son on Mount Moriah. This proves that despite being an old man at the time (he was 100 years old), Abraham still had enough strength left inside him to achieve greatness even if it meant breaking some ethical norms along the way (norms such as ‘thou shall not kill’).
Kierkegaard discusses two ways of having faith. The first is infinite resignation, where a person must make an enormous sacrifice and then reconcile themselves to the pain that this causes them. This type of faith is difficult to understand because it means sacrificing something you love without knowing if or when you’ll get it back. However, the second way of having faith—taking back what you sacrificed on the strength of absurdity—is even more difficult to understand because it involves believing in something that seems impossible at face value and flies in the face of all human understanding. For example, someone with faith would believe that they’d be able to get their loved one back after giving up hope for them in this life; otherwise known as taking back what was sacrificed on the strength of absurdity.
Søren Kierkegaard believed that faith was a difficult concept to understand. He thought it would be impossible for anyone to have true faith, but he knew people who claimed they did. If he ever met someone with true faith, then he’d travel anywhere in the world to meet them and learn what made them so special. Furthermore, if someone lost their faith then they could never get it back again because once you’ve had real faith you’ll never give it up. For this reason, modern society should either ignore Abraham or try to understand him as a whole person instead of focusing on one event in his life. To better understand him, we can examine the events of his life through three different problemata (Greek: “problems”): Fear & Trembling, Sickness Unto Death, and Works Of Love.
