De Silentio discusses this story in terms of a “teleological suspension of the ethical.” Abraham did not simply dismiss his understanding of what was right and wrong and all reason in favor of a “higher” ethics of divine command,127 but instead put this understanding on hold.128 De Silentio’s portrayal of Abraham is that he somehow believed that God would make this action right, but could not foresee how. Abraham therefore acted in faith that God would be the one who would make things right; he acted out of the belief that justice was fundamentally in the hands of God and not in his own.129 He did not abandon ethics, but instead left ethics in the hands of God, trusting that he would receive Isaac back from the dead, whether in his own lifetime or not.130 John Davenport therefore argues that “the main point of Fear and Trembling . . . is to present the essence of ‘faith’ as eschatological trust.”131
The key point is that Abraham’s anguish was hidden—it was an inward reality which could not be justified outside of his own subjective call by God. Abraham was alone. He could not appeal to the universal common ground of ethics to make himself understood by anyone, unlike De Silentio’s portrayal of “the tragic hero.” For such a tragic hero, to make a sacrifice for “the greater good” (e.g., for the salvation of an entire people) is all too understandable and praiseworthy to the onlooking public. It is an outward act of heroism and easily gains the sympathy and admiration of “the crowd.”132 The anguish of Abraham’s faith (that he “believed God, and it was credited to him as righteousness”)133 was completely subjective: it was hidden.
Fear and Trembling and the Spheres of Existence
A key series of concepts from Kierkegaard are his three “spheres of existence” which permeate his literature.134 They are a way of categorizing different “life-views” according to a person’s telos. The first sphere is the aesthetic: that pertaining to the immediate and the sensory. It is not necessarily vulgar, but is limited to being concerned with the surface experiences of life. The second is the ethical: those who are concerned with doing what is right, that which is required of them either by God, society or both. The third is the religious: that “single individual” who is concerned with God and God alone.135
In light of our discussion on Fear and Trembling, the sphere called “the ethical” can be dangerous to “the religious” because it can take a person away from her own subjective relationship with God. This happens when an individual substitutes their own “hidden inwardness” with the values and expectations of society: thus pursuing the idol of the outward, rather than God alone. In this sense, ethics based on the conventions of society can often be marred by self-righteousness, or the need to be esteemed by either the self or a neighbor, rather than by God. This is the danger of the ethical sphere for Christianity: the danger of outwardness. The ethical is understandable, justifiable, visible—outward. But it has no necessary link to what is inward. For Kierkegaard it was this inwardness that is everything for the Christian. Kierkegaard used Abraham to illustrate the radical nature of living out of the “religious” sphere of life, in which one is answerable to God alone, and which thus carries substantial risks. To be a Christian is to be alone; to be hidden from the understanding of others. To reduce Christianity to a matter of outwardness is to destroy what really counts and to reveal to others what must remain hidden in God.136
The Danger of Worldliness
A persistent theme throughout Kierkegaard’s religious works is the danger of worldliness and fearing “the world” instead of fearing God.137 That is, the danger of living according to the logic and expectations of “the world” or “the crowd” rather than according to what God requires of an individual.138 Kierkegaard saw his society as a mob, chasing what was fashionable intellectually. He advocated for each person to take responsibility for owning her own beliefs and understandings. Instead of measuring herself by others and popular philosophical positions, Kierkegaard claimed that true selfhood was found in relating to God and God alone.139
Kierkegaard typically named Hegel as the figurehead of the trend of systematic speculative thought and the pseudo-Christianity that was derived from it. Followers in the Danish public were more concerned with making Christianity comprehensible to fashionable thinking than they were with God himself. They sought security in “the crowd” rather than their own hidden relationship with God which was completely removed from public concerns. As a corrective, Kierkegaard sought to emphasize the gospel which he understood to speak to the individual and not “the crowd.”140 That is, the individual is to live in the religious sphere by being concerned with the approval of God alone.
Kierkegaard frequently discredited attempts to establish Christianity externally, such as through appeals to the historical sciences.141 This is true also of his signed Works of Love, where he often commented on the illusion of the external in terms of ethics. For instance, he wrote that the act of mercy is an internal matter of the heart and is completely irrelevant to the external ways in which it manifests itself. The act of mercy is equally available to the poor as well as to the rich, and the external manifestation of this inwardness is an illusion and can only serve to distract and tempt one away from the inward truth of mercy.142 Kierkegaard’s concept of “the single individual” is completely inward (subjective), and the only relevance or truth of Christianity is one that is true for “the single individual.” The reduction of Christianity to the outwardness of doctrinal, intellectual or systematic forms is fundamentally flawed. Christianity is only rooted and grounded in faith—hidden in the heart of the individual believer. Pathos (the appropriate movement of the heart) must accompany and characterize the Christian life. As Holmer claims: “to have knowledge of God you must fear him and you must love him. There is no knowledge of God otherwise.”143
Hegel and the Heartless System
Søren Kierkegaard was deeply disturbed by the way in which Hegelian thought was being used to subsume Christianity within itself.144 Such “speculative thought” placed its emphasis on the construction of an exhaustive, all-inclusive system which could understand all things—including human existence and the actions of God.145 Kierkegaard saw in this the danger of reducing all of reality to the outward, with no space left for inward reflection and a person’s own subjective existence.
Kierkegaard linked outwardness with immediacy, and saw immediacy as an illusion which inhibited interaction with the deeper reality of the eternal—that which only could be reached by subjective inwardness.