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Essay on Faith in Fear and Trembling by Kierkegaard

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Kierkegaard believes that true faith can only be attained through a double movement of giving up rationality or logic, while at the same time believing one can understand logically. In “Fear and Trembling” Kierkegaard relates true faith to the Knight of infinite resignation and the Knight of faith; in this paper, I will examine this claim and show why Kierkegaard’s analogy is an excellent metaphor for the double movement which is required in one’s quest to attain faith and why. Kierkegaard’s position on faith is represented with the Knight of infinite resignation and the Knight of faith. The Knight of faith is regarded as the one who believes in that which is absurd. For, he is the knight that is able to believe in the things that are …show more content…

So now, not only is Abraham faced with killing his own son, he is also supposed to still be considered in a religious context to be sacrificing his son. The Knight of infinite resignation sees this contradiction, this logical impossibility, and is aware of how this command defies rationality. This knight accepts that, in this life, his beloved son is going to die and that his hand will be the one to deliver this task. The main point Kierkegaard makes is when he goes on to say that to have faith, one must have experienced both of these stages. One must experience the stage of infinite resignation before being able to attain faith. “Infinite resignation is the last stage before faith, so that anyone who has not made this movement does not have faith” (Kierkegaard 75). Kierkegaard goes even further on to explain why, “for only in infinite resignation does my eternal validity become transparent to me, and only then can there be talk of grasping existence on the strength of faith” (75). Kierkegaard’s position is made clear, only after one has had to make a decision from a place contradiction, can one truly have faith. Faith is not just blindly going along and believing against rationale just because that is what you have been raised or told to do. He addresses this by describing a young girl, “Thus that of a young girl in the face of all difficulties rests assure that her desire will be

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