For Kierkegaard, devotion in marriage must therefore be subordinated to—or renounced in favor of—a religious devotion to God as the highest good and to eternal happiness as one’s own highest good. He explains the move through the following contrast:
In erotic love, the individual is still involved with another human being and can hear that person’s yes or no. In every enthusiasm-inspired project, the individual still has something external, but in relation to eternal happiness the individual has only himself to deal with in inwardness.38
Even if I commit myself to you in the most wholehearted way, you may negate my will and defeat my hope by saying no. Likewise, even if I devote myself to the project of our marriage with my utmost enthusiasm—being willing to do anything to sustain it—there is still something external to my will, since the project may fail despite my best efforts and most fervent hopes. However, as long as I keep eternal happiness as my absolute telos, my hope is safe from any possible defeat. Unlike in marriage, where I have to deal with another person who may be resistant to my will or leave me behind, “in relation to eternal happiness the individual has only himself to deal with in inwardness.”
Moreover, the inwardness of religious faith disarms the real risks of objective uncertainty. A marriage is objectively uncertain in the sense that it can actually break and leave me shattered. Eternal happiness, however, is objectively uncertain in the sense that it can neither be proved nor disproved. As long as I keep faith in eternal happiness, it cannot be taken away from me, since the only criterion for its existence is my own faith that it will be given to me. No external criteria can refute my hope for eternal happiness, and nothing external to my own will can force me to give it up. Eternal happiness cannot be given to me by the finite, but for the same reason it cannot be taken away from me by the finite. It has nothing to do with anything in the external world, but is entirely a matter of my inward relation to my absolute telos.
The mistake of monasticism, according to Kierkegaard, is to think that such a movement of infinite resignation requires one to withdraw from the world. He gives monasticism credit for recognizing that devotion to God as the highest good—and to eternal happiness as one’s own highest good—requires the renunciation of one’s family and secular aspirations. But for Kierkegaard it is deeply misleading to think that the inward resolution to renounce the finite needs to be expressed in outward behavior. Nothing is accomplished by merely withdrawing to a monastery, since a monastery belongs as much to the world and to finite life as any other place on earth. Anyone who makes the movement of infinite resignation should become “a stranger in the world of finitude,” but he should “not define his difference from worldliness by foreign dress (this is a contradiction, since with that he defines himself in a worldly way).”39 What matters is not outward manifestation—whether I wear a monk’s robe or secular clothes—but inward transformation. Indeed, withdrawing to a monastery may deceive me into thinking that I have already accomplished infinite resignation, though I have not even begun to make the movement. Rather than devote myself to God and to the pursuit of my eternal happiness, I may be enjoying the camaraderie with the other monks, the rousing emotions of our communal singing, and the sense of self-control I attain through the spiritual exercises.
Moreover, for Kierkegaard, the need to withdraw to a monastery testifies to a religious faith that is lacking in strength, since it needs the external support of a pious environment. The one who can truly make the movement of infinite resignation should be able to do it while remaining in the midst of the temptations of worldly joy. For example, a husband who is making the movement of infinite resignation should be able to stay with his wife and children, apparently as devoted as ever to them, even though at every moment he is renouncing his care for them and is ready to give them up. Kierkegaard even recommends such an arrangement as a good exercise for strengthening one’s internal power of renunciation: “The person who relates himself to the absolute telos may very well live in the relative ends just in order to practice the absolute relation in renunciation.”40
We can thus begin to understand why Kierkegaard treats the sacrifice of Isaac as paradigmatic for what it means to have a living religious faith. Even if you do not receive an explicit command from God to sacrifice your son, the absolute telos of eternal happiness requires that you subordinate and ultimately surrender any finite object of your love. This movement of infinite resignation is at the core of what Kierkegaard calls Religiousness A. Religiousness A is not one religion among others, but the genus of which all specific forms of religious devotion (including Christianity) are the species. As Kierkegaard puts it: “infinite resignation is the last stage before faith, so that anyone who has not made this movement does not have faith, for only in infinite resignation do I become conscious of my eternal validity, and only then can one speak of grasping existence by virtue of faith.”41 The infinite resignation of Religiousness A is thus the common denominator for all forms of religious faith worthy of the name. The reason is simple. If you are not willing to sacrifice the finite for the eternal, your living faith—the faith that is revealed by how you actually respond to what happens—is secular rather than religious. You may profess that you believe in God and eternity, but as long as you are not ready to renounce the finite your supposed religious faith is dead, a matter of mere words. Or as Kierkegaard emphasizes: “If it does not absolutely transform his existence for him, then the individual is not relating himself to an eternal happiness; if there is something he is not willing to give up for its sake, then he is not relating himself to an eternal happiness.”42
Nevertheless, in Fear and Trembling Kierkegaard acknowledges that the movement of infinite resignation leaves something to be desired. In making the movement of infinite resignation, I have to give up any particular hope I have for my finite life, teaching myself to say “Oh, well” even if my beloved son dies. According to Fear and Trembling, there is “peace and rest”43 in this movement of infinite resignation, which “reconciles one to existence,”44 but the peace and rest are bought at the price of having to renounce the beloved in this life. If I am Abraham and only able to make the movement of infinite resignation, I will go ahead and sacrifice Isaac—renounce him as an end in himself—but I will give up my hopes for Isaac in this life.
The “true” Abraham, however, makes a second movement simultaneously with the movement of infinite resignation: the movement of faith. This movement holds that everything is possible for God, even if it seems impossible or absurd from a human perspective.45 Thus, even in sacrificing Isaac, Abraham keeps faith in God’s promise that Isaac will live a flourishing life. By virtue of his religious faith, Abraham can renounce his son while at the same time believing that he will get him back. Indeed, Kierkegaard emphasizes that even in killing Isaac, “Abraham had faith specifically for this life—faith that he would grow old in this country, be honored among the people, blessed by posterity, and unforgettable in Isaac.”46 Likewise, Kierkegaard’s modern version of Abraham—the knight of faith—is presented as someone who is utterly committed to finite life. Unlike his counterpart the knight of infinite resignation, who can make only the first movement of renunciation, the knight of faith can make the double movement through which he fully expects to receive the finite even after having given it up. Whereas the knight of infinite resignation becomes “a stranger and an alien”47 in the world of finitude, the knight of faith is described as “the only happy man, the heir to the finite,”48 since he has “this security that makes him delight in finitude as if it were the surest thing of all.”49
These descriptions of the knight of faith have led many Kierkegaard scholars to claim that he has found a way to combine devotion to God with devotion to finite life.50 Yet the double movement of religious faith actually denies the experience of finitude by precluding the experience of irrevocable loss. To say that Abraham embraces finite life is a hollow claim, since his
religious faith insulates him from ever acknowledging the finitude of the finite. Regardless of what happens to Isaac, Abraham has faith that his son will emerge unscathed, which deprives him of the capacity to care for Isaac. He can even kill Isaac without thinking that this act compromises his love for his son and without worrying about what it will do to Isaac. Kierkegaard underscores this point through a scenario in which Isaac actually dies and Abraham still keeps faith:
Let us go further. We let Isaac actually be sacrificed. Abraham had faith. He did not have faith that he would be blessed in a future life but that he would be blessed here in the world. God could give him a new Isaac, could restore to life the one sacrificed. He had faith by virtue of the absurd, for all human calculation ceased long ago.51
Through his faith in God, Abraham can thus retain his hopes for his beloved son in this life, even when he is literally destroying Isaac’s life. To construe this double movement of religious faith as a genuine commitment to finite life is fatally misleading. In practice, the one who makes the double movement of religious faith is even more brutally indifferent to the fate of the finite than the one who performs the single movement of infinite resignation. The knight of infinite resignation kills Isaac, but at least he recognizes the loss of Isaac. The knight of faith also kills Isaac, but through the double movement of religious faith he does not recognize the actual loss of Isaac because he is fully confident that he will get him back even though he has taken his life. He can stand there with Isaac’s severed head in his hand and still believe that he will live happily ever after with his son.
The brutal effects of such faith are evident from Kierkegaard’s own text. Early on in Fear and Trembling, we are presented with four alternative stories of the sacrifice of Isaac, in which the fathers fail to live up to the supposed greatness of the “true” Abraham who is a knight of faith. What all the Abrahams have in common is that they love Isaac and nevertheless follow God’s command to sacrifice him. Unlike the true Abraham, however, the failed Abrahams cannot overcome the conflict between their love for Isaac and their obedience to God. The first Abraham is resigned to sacrificing Isaac, but he tries to explain to Isaac why he will kill him. When Isaac cannot understand him (and how could he understand why his father would kill him?), Abraham instead pretends to be a madman who wants to kill Isaac out of his own desire, so as to spare Isaac the anguish of having been sentenced to death by God himself. The second Abraham does exactly what the true Abraham does—he travels for three days to Mount Moriah, where he is ready to sacrifice Isaac—but after the event he loses all his joy in the world, since he cannot “forget that God had ordered him to do this.”52 The third Abraham also does exactly what the true Abraham does, but is then seized by remorse because he has been willing to sacrifice his son. The fourth Abraham, finally, also sacrifices Isaac but as he draws the knife he cannot suppress how dreadful it is to kill Isaac. His left hand is “clenched in despair” and a “shudder” goes through his whole body.53
The true Abraham, by contrast, is not torn between his love for Isaac and his obedience to God. He does not try to explain anything to Isaac or to protect him from the terror of the ordeal. Furthermore, he loses none of his happiness in the world and feels no remorse because of the sacrifice, but is immediately ready to “rally to finitude and its joy”54 when Isaac is given back to him. Finally, as he draws the knife to kill Isaac, his hand is not clenched in despair and no shudder passes through his body:
He did not doubt, he did not look in anguish to the left and to the right, he did not challenge heaven with his prayers. He knew it was God the Almighty who tested him; he knew it was the hardest sacrifice that could be demanded of him; but he knew also that no sacrifice is too severe when God demands it—and he drew the knife.55
This steadfastness of the true Abraham is held up as exemplary of religious faith and celebrated as the greatest virtue of all. But it is easy to see that the consequence of Abraham’s religious faith is that he is utterly reckless with regard to Isaac. Abraham loves Isaac with all his heart, but because of his religious faith Abraham is deprived of the ability to care for Isaac, in the sense of being responsive to what happens to him. He does not try to protect Isaac, feels no remorse for sacrificing him, and does not tremble when he draws the knife to kill him, since he has complete faith that Isaac will be restored no matter what happens to him.
Abraham’s brutality is a direct effect of giving up secular faith through the double movement of religious faith. Only by maintaining my secular faith as a father can I be responsive to Isaac’s fate. To be responsive I have to be devoted to his well-being, but I also have to believe that his well-being is fragile and that his life can be lost. The precariousness of Isaac’s life is an intrinsic part of why I care for him, and in caring for him I am therefore beholden to external factors.
In contrast, the double movement of religious faith aims to remove the dependence on external factors, so that my love for Isaac can become an entirely internal affair. In the first movement of infinite resignation, I give up my care for Isaac’s fate in the external world. Whether I express my infinite resignation by actually killing Isaac or by spiritually renouncing my care for what happens to him (saying “Oh, well,” whether he lives or dies), the principle is the same. By demonstrating to myself that I can sacrifice any concern for external outcomes—any concern for the worldly fate of what I love—I deprive the finite of its power over me. This in turn paves the way for the second movement of faith, which holds that I will receive Isaac even though I have renounced or killed him. The second movement depends on faith in a God for whom everything is possible, but it could never be sustained without a continuous movement of infinite resignation. To keep my faith that I will get Isaac regardless of what happens, I have to keep renouncing my care for what actually happens (e.g., that I am killing him).
Accordingly, Kierkegaard emphasizes that the double movement of religious faith must be made simultaneously. At every moment in his sacrifice of Isaac, Abraham has to make both the movement of infinite resignation and the movement of faith. Only through such a double movement can he kill Isaac while at the same time maintaining that he loves him. As long as he makes the double movement, he can never experience the devastating loss of Isaac, since at every moment he renews his faith that his son will be given back to him. This is how Abraham’s love of Isaac becomes an entirely internal affair, where any concern for Isaac in his own right is eliminated. By virtue of his religious faith, Abraham is no longer responsive to what actually befalls Isaac, or to how he may be feeling, except insofar as it aligns with Abraham’s own hopes. The impact of any negative outcome is immediately renounced in favor of the faith that he will receive exactly what he wants, since God can do anything that is needed to arrange it. That is how Abraham sacrifices his care for Isaac. Because Abraham believes that he ultimately cannot lose his son, he can take Isaac’s life.
IV
The same carelessness is evident in the modern knight of faith, even if it is less immediately apparent and portrayed as an affirmation of finite life. The modern knight of faith walks the streets of Copenhagen rather than the path to Mount Moriah and seems to belong “entirely to the world.”56 He “finds pleasure in everything, takes part in everything, and every time one sees him participating in something particular, he does it with an assiduousness that marks the worldly man who is attached to such things.”57 For those readers who think that a genuine attachment to finite life can be combined with a living religious faith, he is the true hero of Fear and Trembling.
Yet, as soon as we observe how the knight makes the double movement of religious faith, we can see that he continually renounces any actual attachment to the world and any actual experience of finitude. Fear and Trembling makes this clear through a parable of how the knight falls in love with a princess. As Kierkegaard explains, when he is here talking about romantic love he is using it as an example of the dynamics
of any wholehearted commitment, demonstrating how one should respond to it if one is a knight of faith. The parable is meant to show how the double movement of religious faith works in practice, but it also reveals what motivates the movement in the first place and how it is a defense mechanism against the threat of loss.
On Kierkegaard’s own account, the knight is wholeheartedly committed to the beloved before he begins to make the double movement of religious faith. Indeed, “this love is the entire substance of his life”58 and he is willing to embrace it:
He is not cowardly; he is not afraid to let the love steal into his most secret, his most remote thoughts, to let it twist and entwine itself intricately around every ligament of his consciousness—if his love comes to grief, he will never be able to wrench himself out of it. He feels a blissful delight in letting love palpitate in every nerve, and yet his soul is as solemn as the soul of one who has drunk the poisoned cup and feels the juice penetrate every drop of blood—for this is the moment of crisis. Having totally absorbed this love and immersed himself in it, he does not lack the courage to attempt and to risk everything. He examines the conditions of his life, he convenes the swift thoughts that obey his every hint, like well-trained doves, he flourishes his staff, and they scatter in all directions. But now when they all come back, all of them like messengers of grief, and explain that it is an impossibility, he becomes very quiet, he dismisses them, he becomes solitary, and then he undertakes the movement.59
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