To commit oneself to becoming a parent (in this case a father) is thus a particularly poignant experience of objective uncertainty. I cannot know if I will become a father and—if I do—I cannot know what it will be like until I am already in the situation. I can certainly acquire knowledge about what it means to be a father from a third-person standpoint and benefit from learning about the experiences of others. But no amount of information or knowledge is sufficient to prepare me for the first-person experience of becoming a father. Rather, I have to commit myself in advance of the experience and thereby make a leap of faith into the unknown.
The leap is risky because I cannot know who I will turn out to be as a father, or who my child will turn out to be, or what will happen to my child. Furthermore, this objective uncertainty is an ongoing part of being a father. As long as I have a child, I am bound to a future that exceeds my control. To be a father in more than a biological sense—to make fatherhood an integral part of my identity, to care about my child in an active and passionate sense—requires that I sustain an existential, life-defining commitment to my child. This is why parenthood can be such a transformative event, reorienting my deepest relation to the world, making life more palpable and more meaningful. Yet the same existential commitment that makes me receptive to wonder and joy also makes me vulnerable to what happens. Even if my child causes me great grief, and even if a rational calculation would compute that I would be better off not being a parent, I cannot give up the commitment except by giving up my own sense of who I am.
The vulnerability to grief is a common denominator for all forms of secular faith, which are devoted to something or someone who is finite. In keeping faith with my child, I am bound to what Kierkegaard calls “external” factors, since I am devoted to someone whose fate exceeds my control. I can love and care for my child, but my love and care cannot secure the future of my child. The same holds for all forms of secular faith, which are committed to persons or projects that can live on and flourish but also come to an end. Even if my internal resolve is intact and I keep my faith, I can still suffer from an irrevocable loss because of circumstances that are external to my will.
Hence, in secular faith I can lose my object of devotion even if I keep faith. In contrast, Kierkegaard advocates a religious faith that cannot ever lose its object of devotion as long as it keeps faith.
The decisive difference concerns the relation to the future. As Kierkegaard emphasizes, there is a trembling of anxiety in every relation to the future, since we cannot know what will happen and may lose what we want to keep. The more we are devoted to something, the more powerful the anxiety, since our own being is at stake. Thus, if I am a father, the prospect of losing my son is anxiety producing, both because I care about him in his own right and because I would be devastated if I lost him. To live with such anxiety—which is intrinsic to any form of secular faith—is according to Kierkegaard to live “in despair.” As he makes clear in The Sickness unto Death, being in despair is not limited to an experience of existential breakdown. Rather, even the greatest bliss is for Kierkegaard a matter of despair, insofar as “deep, deep within the most secret hiding place of happiness there dwells also anxiety, which is despair.”19 Being in despair, then, encompasses everyone who does not have religious faith. Anyone who lives with any form of anxiety—“an unrest, an inner strife, a disharmony, an anxiety about an unknown something or a something he does not even dare to try to know, an anxiety about some possibility in existence or an anxiety about himself”20—is in despair. Only those who have religious faith are free from despair. Religious faith is a state in which “despair is completely rooted out,” “a state in which there is no despair at all” by virtue of complete faith in God.21
Kierkegaard emphasizes, however, that such freedom from despair cannot be achieved through naive optimism or simple trust that everything will work out. On the contrary, the religious believer must confront the fact that “every anxiety for which he feels alarm can come upon him at the very next instant,” including “horror, perdition, and annihilation.”22 The true test of religious faith does not take place when things are going well, but “when the world commences its drastic ordeal, when the storms of life crush youth’s exuberant expectancy, when existence, which seemed so affectionate and gentle, changes into a pitiless proprietor who demands everything back.”23 The task is to confront the worst possible scenario—to face what Kierkegaard calls “the anxiety of the possible,” the possibility that you will lose everything that matters to you in the world—and still maintain your religious faith. “Only someone who passes through the anxiety of the possible,” Kierkegaard writes, “is cultivated to have no anxiety.”24 If you lose your religious faith when the worst happens to you—when your trust in the world is shattered—you reveal that you never actually had religious faith. The decisive moment is when “a person is brought to his extremity, when, humanly speaking, there is no possibility. Then the question is whether he will believe that for God everything is possible, that is, whether he will believe.”25
When God commands the sacrifice of Isaac, Abraham is brought to such an extremity. Humanly speaking, there is no possibility left for him if he kills Isaac. Following God’s previous command, Abraham has already abandoned his native land and the promise of establishing a new community is altogether dependent on the existence of his son. If Abraham kills Isaac, he will shatter the very possibility of making sense of his life and his actions. He will have uprooted his family for nothing, annulled the birth of his beloved son, and extinguished the future of his people. When he returns from the killing, his own wife will not be able to understand or recognize him: how can he have done this to their son, to her, to everything they had together? Moreover, Abraham will not even be able to recognize himself. Being a father is a life-defining commitment for Abraham, which means that it gives him an identity across time. Even if other things change, he can still recognize himself through his devotion to Isaac and his commitment to their future. In killing Isaac, however, he will do what is unthinkable for himself as a father and undercut any chance of recognizing himself in his deed.
Nevertheless, Abraham is able to face the prospect of killing Isaac without despair, since he believes that for God everything is possible. In Kierkegaard’s account, Abraham can even go through with the killing of Isaac and still maintain his “trusting expectation” that his life will be saved. Even though Abraham cannot know how it will be possible, he has faith that God will enable him to go on and to flourish even if his entire world is devastated. This is why Abraham is celebrated as a hero of religious faith in Fear and Trembling. The benefit of religious faith is supposed to be that it saves you from all forms of despair and enables you to go on with your life regardless of what happens. As Kierkegaard explains in The Sickness unto Death, “the believer has the ever infallible antidote for despair—possibility—because for God everything is possible at every moment.”26
To prove that you have such faith, however, there has to be a way of testing it. It is easy enough to claim that you believe everything is possible for God, but the vital test is to prove that you believe it through how you act and how you respond. In The Sickness unto Death, Kierkegaard describes the test as follows:
Imagine that someone with a capacity to imagine terrifying nightmares has pictured to himself some horror or other that is absolutely unbearable. Then it happens to him, this very horror happens to him. Humanly speaking, his collapse is altogether certain….At this point, then, salvation is, humanly speaking, utterly impossible; but for God everything is possible! This is the battle of faith….The believer sees and understands his downfall, humanly speaking (in what has happened to him, or in what he has ventured), but he believes. For this reason he does not collapse. He leaves it entirely to God how he is to be helped, but he believes that for God everything is possible. To believe his downfall is impossible. To understand that humanly it is his downfa
ll and nevertheless to believe in possibility is to believe. So God helps him also—perhaps by allowing him to avoid the horror, perhaps through the horror itself….27
While this passage does not explicitly invoke the example of Abraham, it illuminates the test of religious faith that is at the center of Fear and Trembling. If Abraham kills Isaac, his collapse and downfall are—humanly speaking—altogether certain. There will be no possible support from his loved ones and no possible way to make sense of his life, since his own action will have made him unrecognizable to himself. In short, his life will be “absolutely unbearable” and “humanly speaking, utterly impossible.” When Abraham raises the knife to kill Isaac, he understands all this—he understands that “humanly it is his downfall”—and yet he believes that God will make it possible for him to go on with his life. Even in full knowledge that he is killing Isaac, Abraham keeps faith that God will give him a “new Isaac” or “restore to life the one sacrificed.”28 Abraham does not believe that Isaac will be given back to him as a matter of fact, and he does not know how it will happen. Rather, Abraham renounces all forms of calculation and “leaves it entirely to God how he is to be helped.”
III
The example of Abraham may seem extreme, but the formal features it exhibits are necessary for the test of religious faith that Kierkegaard envisages throughout his work. As long as you are supported by your family, your friends, or your community, what enables you to go on with your life may be a secular rather than a religious faith. To test if your religious faith is living or dead—to test if you actually trust in God or merely say that you do—you need a scenario in which you do not rely on anything other than faith in God. This is why the Danish words for “test” and “trial,” prøve and prøvelse, are consistently used to describe Abraham’s sacrifice in Fear and Trembling. A living religious faith must be able to overcome even the most extreme loss without recourse to anything other than faith in God. If you have faith in God, no circumstance can bring you to despair. If you have faith in God, you cannot be broken.
We can thus further specify the difference between secular and religious faith. My secular faith that life is worth living may carry me through devastating experiences, but it is essentially fragile, since I cannot sustain it on my own. My secular faith—my ability to hope for the future—relies on others who recognize me, as well as on my own ability to recognize myself. Even if I am all alone, my own sense of myself is inseparable from how I have been received by others and how they have given me resources to live on. Thus, if my son dies, I may be able to go on with my life despite the terrible grief, but at every step of the way I will depend on the world of which I am a part. If I can recollect my love for my son—if I can recognize myself as a loving father who inadvertently lost his son—I may be able to work through the grief and renew my commitment to the future. The pain will never entirely go away, but the memories of what we shared together may give me sustenance. If I am fortunate enough, the experience of having loved will enable me to love again. However, if there is no one to console me, no one to hold and comfort me, no one who gives me hope for a viable future, I may succumb to despair. Moreover, if I utterly betrayed or even killed my son—if I sacrificed him for no justifiable reason—I will have destroyed my own sense of myself, my own ability to love, and will be bound to despair. There will be no way to go on, since my world will have collapsed and my identity will be irreversibly broken.
The risk of such despair is built into any life-defining commitment. To have a life-defining commitment is to acknowledge that I am not self-sufficient but essentially a relational being. My identity is not given but relies on forms of recognition that must be upheld or transformed and that remain fragile at their core. My life-defining commitments give me a world and an identity, but they also underline my finitude and the risk that my world can break down.
In secular faith, the risk of despair is not only a negative threat but also intrinsic to my positive identity and engagement. The risk of despair—the anticipation that my world can break down—recalls me to what matters in my life and why it remains important what I do. My very life is at stake in my finite relations.
For Kierkegaard, by contrast, religious faith is supposed to annul the risk of despair. If you have religious faith, you believe that you can lose everything and still be saved, since for God everything is possible.
Religious faith thus requires a double movement, whereby you renounce trust in the world in favor of trust in God. Rather than rely on finite relations, you place your faith in God. The first movement of religious faith is what Kierkegaard calls infinite resignation, which plays a central role in Fear and Trembling but is most fully elaborated in the Concluding Unscientific Postscript. Infinite resignation does not mean that you give up hope, but that you renounce all forms of hope that depend on a finite world. Instead you maintain that the highest good is an “eternal happiness” beyond the finite. The task is to make eternal happiness into your absolute telos: the goal or end for which you strive. At the same time, you can never achieve eternal happiness as long as you are finite, so the striving for the absolute goal becomes a task that cannot be finished in this life. Rather, the striving for eternal happiness is expressed through the renunciation of all finite goals as inadequate.
In accordance with his emphasis on a living religious faith, Kierkegaard underscores that such renunciation cannot be merely theoretical but must be enacted in practice. To make the movement of infinite resignation you must demonstrate to yourself that you are willing to give up everything that is finite for the sake of eternal happiness. “If to him an eternal happiness is his highest good,” Kierkegaard writes in the Postscript, “this means that in his acting the finite elements are once and for all reduced to what must be surrendered in relation to the eternal happiness.”29 And again: “If there is something he is not willing to give up for its sake, then he is not relating himself to an eternal happiness.”30
To make the movement of infinite resignation, however, is not to leave the finite behind. Rather, it is to live in the finite while being literally insensitive to the fate of the finite. As Kierkegaard puts it, “when the individual has the absolute orientation toward the absolute telos, everything is changed, the roots are cut. He lives in the finite, but he does not have his life in it….Just as the dentist loosens the gum tissue and cuts the nerve and lets the tooth remain, so also is his life in finitude loosened, and the task is to have the tooth not grow fast again.”31 Kierkegaard is here talking about an inward transformation. When the individual severs the nerves that make him sensitive to the finite, his outward life may still appear to be the same. He can pursue finite goals and maintain his worldly relations, but through the movement of resignation his bonds to them are loosened in such a way that he is ready to renounce them if that is required.
Nevertheless, just as the tooth may grow fast again, the threads that bind the individual to the world may reassert themselves. He continues to live in the finite and therefore runs the risk of devoting himself to a finite goal or a finite being as an end in itself. This is why Kierkegaard stresses that the movement of resignation cannot be made once and for all but constantly has to be undertaken anew, to ensure that one never treats anyone or anything finite as absolute (an end in itself) but only as relative:
The individual is certainly in the finite (and the difficulty is indeed to preserve the absolute choice in the finite), but just as he took away the vital power of the finite in the moment of resignation, so the task is to repeat this. Suppose the world offers the individual everything. Perhaps he accepts it, but he says: Oh, well, but this “Oh, well” signifies the absolute respect for the absolute telos. Suppose the world takes everything away from him; he may wince, but he says: Oh, well—and this “Oh, well” signifies the absolute respect for the absolute telos.32
Kierkegaard here describes how you can remove your dependence on external factors by continua
lly making the movement of resignation. Regardless of what happens in the external world—regardless of whether everything is given to you or everything is taken away from you—your response should be the same (“Oh, well”). Through the movement of resignation, you free yourself from “the vital power of the finite” by not allowing anything that happens to confirm or shatter your hope. You still live in the finite, but you do not have your life—your heart—in it. Your hope is invested in an eternal happiness and this hope cannot be refuted by anything that happens in or to the finite.
Hence, for all his insights into the dynamic of marriage, Kierkegaard holds that it must be subordinated to the absolute goal of eternal happiness. “Do not forget that marriage is not the absolute telos, and therefore what is absolutely true of the absolute is only imperfectly true of marriage.”33 If I stake my happiness on marriage, the fate of my commitment is not only up to me; it also depends on how you receive what I do. Being committed in marriage entails that I cannot sovereignly decide the meaning of my actions or the terms of my commitment. I have to be responsive to what you say and do, which includes the risk that you may end our marriage. Indeed, even if I devote myself completely to you, there is no guarantee that you will remain faithful. “Deep within every person’s soul,” Kierkegaard reminds us, “there is a secret anxiety that even the one in whom he has the most faith could also become unfaithful to him.”34 As he emphasizes: “No merely human love can completely drive out this anxiety, which can very well remain hidden and undetected in the friendly security of a happy life-relationship, but which at times can inexplicably stir deep within and which, when the storms of life begin, is immediately at hand.”35 In contrast, God “remains faithful, every day of your life, whatever happens to you; he remains faithful to you in death; he meets you again in the hereafter as a trustworthy friend.”36 The demanding task is to keep faith in God. As long as you have “given yourself completely to him, had your whole life in him,” he will never let you down, since “he himself eternally guarantees” his own fidelity.37
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