Chapter 3 - Johannes de silentio’s dilemma

Summary

Each of the three ‘Problems’ in Fear and Trembling culminates in a dilemma:

(I) During the time before the outcome, either Abraham was a murderer at every moment or we are at a paradox that is higher than all mediations. (FT 58/SKS 4, 159)

(II) Either there is an absolute duty to God . . . — or else faith has never existed because it has always existed, or else Abraham is lost. (FT 71/SKS 4, 171)

(III) Either there is a paradox, that the single individual as the single particular stands in an absolute relation to the absolute, or Abraham is lost. (FT 106/SKS 4, 207)

In each case it seems that Kierkegaard’s pseudonym, Johannes de silentio, is attempting to persuade the reader to accept the alternative that involves paradox and an ‘absolute duty’ to God, and thereby accommodates Abraham. Perhaps for this reason the dilemmatic form of the conclusions to the ‘Problems’ is usually assumed to be merely rhetorical, and given little attention. But attending more closely to Johannes de silentio’s dilemma helps to illuminate Fear and Trembling in its historical context, and to clarify how the analysis of Genesis 22 offered in this text differs radically from earlier interpretations.

‘Either/or’: Kierkegaard’s critique of Hegelian theology

The dilemmatic form ‘either … or’ signals the immediate intellectual background to Kierkegaard’s early work. It echoes, of course, the title of his first major pseudonymous work: Either/Or was published a few months before Fear and Trembling, in February 1843, and supposedly written by different authors. But this title itself echoes earlier references to ‘either/or,’ notably in texts by two prominent Danish theologians: Bishop Jakob Peter Mynster and Hans Lassen Martensen. Kierkegaard had a personal connection to both men as well as an interest in their theological work. As Chaplain to Vor Frue Kirke in Copenhagen, Mynster was parish priest to the Kierkegaard family; Søren Kierkegaard heard Mynster preach countless times, and learned much from the bishop about the nature of Christian communication. Kierkegaard was certainly acquainted with Martensen by 1834, for in this year he engaged the theologian – then a junior lecturer in the Teologiske Fakultet at the University of Copenhagen – to give him tutorials on Schleiermacher’s The Christian Faith.