Fear and Trembling

Published in 1843 under the name Johannes de Silentio, this philosophical work takes up the biblical story of Abraham commanded to sacrifice Isaac. Kierkegaard distinguishes aesthetic, ethical, and religious ways of life, and he asks how Abraham's act can be faith rather than murder. He develops the figures of the knight of infinite resignation and the knight of faith, and he argues for a teleological suspension of the ethical that cannot be translated into public justification. The book is a set of lyric and dialectical meditations, not a biblical commentary in the historical sense, and it returns throughout to the silence that faith imposes on the single individual.

Bound in red cloth, cover printed with a black and white image. Black slipcase.