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Mina Wardakhan

900020871

Dr. Melaney

Philosophy and Literature

Fall 08

Fear and TremblingGod said to Abraham kill me a son; Abe said Man! You must be puttin me on.

Highway 61 Revisited, Bob Dylan.

There is a great and fundamental difference between an ethical and a religious

decision. Whereas an ethical decision is based on the universal, which is constituted by

norms, laws, morals, and traditions to name but a few influences, a religious decision is made

based on a relationship with the absolute, which is singular and undisclosed. A religious

decision is also one which has no basis in ethics, is one which ethics does not understand and

which may even be in contradiction to the ethical; such was Abrahams decision to follow

Gods order in sacrificing his son.

The knight who stops at infinite resignation is a Platonic. He revels in the forms,

which are as far removed from his immediate world as heaven is from earth, and whose onlyhope in ever grasping them is in life to come or out of body experience of some sort. They are

ballet dancers and have elevation. And they are unsteady, which shows their strangeness to

the finite world and that they have no place in it yet. (Kierkegaard 41). There is a poem by

HH Pope Shenouda III which he wrote while he was living only as a hermit in a cave in thedesert and which expresses just this, A stranger in the world I live, a guest like my Fathers. I

roam as if a phantom, flickering in front of a seers vision.

Whereas the knight of faith is an alchemist, is one who realizes the truth of the Lords

Prayer, As Above, So Below. He realizes that truth in the sense of understanding and

actualizing it. He lives it, his motions and being express that. The knight of faith is one whose

life is infinitely finite, such that there is not a crack through which the infinite would peek.

(Kierkegaard 39) The knight of faith is able to be like that, to move as such because he who

has made the infinite movement stops there and lives a life in harmony, and gains eternal

consciousness where things are for him only in the realm of infinity whereas the knight of

faith is able to return to the finite world, and immediately re-grasp all he has given up by

virtue of the absurd. He lives like that; his every moment is filled with resignation which

gives him peace of mind yet never devoid of the absurd, which allows him to live in

whichever he chooses, to find pleasure, and to be happy and content with that. (38-41). I find

that Kierkegaard best describes the knight of faith in that he is able to express the sublime in

the pedestrian (41).

The distinction between the ethical and the religious is also clear in the differences

between a tragic hero and a religious person. The hero is ethics beloved son in whom it iswell pleased. He expresses the universal, he lives the universal. He is understood and

disclosed. Yet he is a hero because he is able to live the ethical. Like father, like son, whose

brothers revel in his ability to emulate his father so much, and so precisely. The religious

person, however, lives outside the ethical, beyond it. His relation is to no pool of universals

and ethics, but to an absolute and is itself an absolute relation. There are no intermediaries,

and there is no audience, at least none that understand what is going on underneath his skin. It

is simply stated that in case of the religious person the ethical is the temptation, and is so

precisely because of the absolute break and separation between the individual and the

universal. If Abraham had told Sarah he was going to kill their son, and offer him as a

sacrifice, would he have ever been able to do what he did? Or worse, if he had talked to Isaac

about it, tried to explain that some transcendental entity requires that he be sacrificed, what

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place would have been left for faith? Faith according to Kierkegaard is exactly this ability toact in place where there is none but ones own. And only the religious can have faith.

I am indeed sympathetic to Kierkegaards reading and his interpretation yet there is

the issue which he also raises and that is the issue of a congregation or a society. If all are

religious, if each one is one and is constantly in an absolute relation to the absolute how

harder is it to have a relation with someone else then? How harder still is it to have acommunity? If everyone is a St. George in full armour ready to slay a dragon and rescue a

maiden, who is left to be a maiden? And what does St. George do otherwise?