Faith as the Paradox

The Quote

"Faith is precisely the paradox that the single individual as the single individual stands in an absolute relation to the absolute."

— Søren Kierkegaard (Johannes de Silentio), Fear and Trembling, Problema III

Original language: Danish

Historical Context

This passage comes from Fear and Trembling (1843), published under the pseudonym Johannes de Silentio. The work revisits the biblical story of Abraham, who was commanded by God to sacrifice his son Isaac. The narrator, who admits he cannot understand Abraham as a "knight of faith," uses the story to examine the tension between ethical obligation and a religious relation that seems to exceed it.

The statement appears in Problema III, which asks whether Abraham's action can be ethically disclosed — whether it can be made intelligible within the ethical sphere, or whether it belongs to a category that ethics cannot accommodate. The pseudonymous authorship is central to the method: Johannes de Silentio is not Kierkegaard's direct mouthpiece, and the book should be read as an exploration of a problem rather than a doctrine to be repeated.

Kierkegaard wrote in nineteenth-century Denmark, where the established Lutheran church had made Christianity a matter of social respectability and inherited custom. His criticism of "Christendom" — the cultural identification of faith with public conformity — was not a rejection of faith itself but an effort to recover its difficulty and inwardness. Fear and Trembling confronts the reader with the possibility that genuine faith is not a comfortable possession but a paradox that cannot be dissolved into ethical or intellectual categories.

Meaning

The sentence defines faith as a paradox. The paradox consists in the relation between two terms: "the single individual as the single individual" and "the absolute." The repetition "as the single individual" is deliberate. It emphasizes that faith is not a relation that the individual bears as a member of a universal ethical community — as a citizen, a parent, a moral agent whose obligations are publicly intelligible. It is a relation that the individual bears precisely in their singularity, as this particular person, before the absolute.

The "absolute" here is God, but the term is chosen to mark the contrast with the ethical, which for Kierkegaard represents the universal. The ethical, in the Hegelian framework Kierkegaard engages, is the sphere in which the individual's particularity is subsumed under universal moral law. Abraham's binding of Isaac cannot be justified within this sphere, because the command to sacrifice one's child violates the most fundamental ethical obligation. If Abraham's action is to be understood, it must belong to a different category — one in which the individual's relation to the absolute is not mediated by the universal.

The paradox is that this relation is both absolute (it concerns God, the highest) and singular (it belongs to this individual, in this situation, without public justification). Faith, on this account, is not a general belief that anyone could hold by examining the evidence. It is an inward commitment that cannot be fully communicated or justified to others.

Philosophical Interpretation

The passage has been read in sharply different ways, and part of responsible engagement with Fear and Trembling is acknowledging that these readings disagree. Some interpreters treat the book as a theological argument about the superiority of faith over ethics. Others read it as a philosophical analysis of the limits of ethical universality, asking whether there are commitments that cannot be reduced to publicly shareable reasons. Still others read it as a work that deliberately refuses to resolve the tension it presents, leaving the reader before a problem rather than a solution.

The pseudonymous authorship complicates any straightforward interpretation. Johannes de Silentio claims that he cannot understand Abraham, and the book's indirect form — with its multiple retellings of the Abraham story, each emphasizing a different aspect — is designed to place the reader before the difficulty rather than to resolve it. Kierkegaard's own signed authorship, in works like Works of Love and Practice in Christianity, develops a different account of the religious life, one that emphasizes imitation of Christ rather than the paradoxical faith of Abraham.

The philosophical significance of the passage extends beyond theology. It raises the question of whether there are forms of commitment that cannot be made fully transparent to public reason. This question has been taken up by thinkers in ethics, political philosophy, and the philosophy of religion, and it remains central to debates about the relationship between individual conscience and communal norms. The passage does not offer a general rule permitting individuals to suspend ethical obligations; it presents a difficult philosophical and literary problem about the structure of faith and its relation to the ethical.

Related Concepts

• Faith: The passage defines faith as a paradox that exceeds ethical universality, not as a belief based on evidence or custom.
• Meaning: Faith, for Kierkegaard, is a relation that gives meaning to a life, but it does so through a commitment that cannot be fully articulated or justified to others.

Related Learning

• Explore the Fear and Trembling archive entry for the full context of Kierkegaard's pseudonymous meditation on Abraham.
• The Faith page examines how Kierkegaard, Buddhism, and Confucianism approach the relationship between belief, knowledge, and meaning.

Sources

1. Søren Kierkegaard. Fear and Trembling / Repetition. Translated by Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983. Problema III.
2. "Søren Kierkegaard." Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/kierkegaard/
3. "Søren Kierkegaard." Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy. https://iep.utm.edu/kierkegaard/