Johannes de silentio: Rhetorician of Silence

By JOAKIM GARFF
Translated by BRUCE H. KIRMMSE
If there were no eternal consciousness in a person; if the basis for everything were
only a wild fermenting power, which struggles with its own obscure passions to produce everything great and small; if, hidden beneath everything, there is a bottomless
and inexhaustible emptiness - then what would life be but despair? [... I]f the human
race passes through the world like a ship through the sea, like the wind across the desert, an unthinking and fruitless business; if an eternally insatiable oblivion waits for
its prey, and there were no power strong enough to wrest it free - how empty and devoid of consolation life would be! But precisely for that reason it is not like this, and
just as God created man and woman, he also created the hero and the poet f...].1

The name of the poet is Johannes de silentio. The name of the hero is
Abraham. And the words cited above are the former's panegyric over
the latter. But the panegyric is not only a panegyric. There is also a
logical implication, or at least something that resembles a logical implication, namely that after the if there were not, which introduces
the phrases, there is the prospect of a then. This logical consequence is omitted, however. And for this very reason, the final
therefore has even more force, and it is worth noting that this
therefore is not directly connected with the eternal consciousness
with which the implication began, but rather with the hero and the
poet. The meaning-vacuum which characterizes these obscure passions is apparently filled by these two figures, or rather by what they
have in common with Adam and Eve, by the epic, the story.
Fear and Trembling is a story of this sort, a story about the story in
Genesis 22, which tells of the Abraham who travelled to Mount
1

S0ren Kierkegaard Samlede vcerker [The Collected Works of S0ren Kierkegaard],

A.B. Drachmann, J.L. Heiberg, and H.O. Lange eds., 3d ed. P.P. Rohde ed., 20 vols.,
Copenhagen 1962-1964 [1901-1906], vol. 5, p. 17 (hereafter in the format SV3 5,
17).

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Moriah to sacrifice his son Isaac. But at the same time, the story
forms the basis for a series of philosophical reflections, inasmuch as
Johannes de silentio proclaims that he will employ the form of
problemata to demonstrate the dialectic in the story in order to
[show] what an enormous paradox faith is [,..].2
Something similar will happen in what follows, only in reverse order. It seems to me that the elements which Johannes de silentio extracts from the Abraham story are less pregnant with paradox than
the story he tells about that story. In other words, it is in the area of
narrative and rhetoric, rather than epistemology, that the problems
truly present themselves in earnest.
The Individual, the Universal, and the Paradox of Faith
Johannes de silentio examines his problemata in three sections, all of
which can be read more or less explicitly as replies that are destructive of the position adopted by Judge William. This destruction is not
aimed at the individual components of the judge's conciliating attempt to establish equilibrium between the aesthetic and the ethical,
but rather at the very desire for conciliation. Johannes de silentio is
pretty close to being the very quintessence of irreconcilability. He insists upon the distance between a human value orientation and the
divine revaluation of all values. Therefore he consistently denounces
the human, all-too-human will toward the center, and both the conciliatory William and the mediating Hegel come to feel his lash.
They would certainly be able to approve of his introductory remarks, however. Johannes de silentio defines the relation between the
universal and the individual as a relation in which the individual is
subordinated to the universal, which is the historically specific and
factual form in which the fundamental opposition between good and
evil makes its appearance. Johannes de silentio explains that the
universal reposes immanently in itself, has nothing outside itself that
is its own telos, and is itself the telos for everything outside itself
[,..].3 Therefore, in relation to this universal it is the individual's
ethical task continually to express himself in [this universal], to annul his individuality in order to become the universal.4 On this point
2
3
4

SV3 5,50.
SV35.51.
Ibid.

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William, Hegel, and Johannes de silentio are in more or less complete

agreement.
But that is as far as their agreement extends, however, because
from his premises Johannes de silentio concludes that if the individual is subordinated to the universal, then the universal becomes in
principle identical with the final goal, which means that the universal
is of the same nature as a person's eternal salvation.5 And conversely, this also means that if a person is to relate himself to eternal
salvation this must take place by virtue of faith as the paradox that
the individual is higher than the universal [... and thus] stands in an
absolute relation to the Absolute.6
Beyond good and evil, faith makes possible a suspension of the
ethical because faith receives its motive force from something other
than the historical period in which it exists. And, addressing himself
more or less directly to William and Hegel, Johannes de silentio
writes: It is therefore correct to say that every duty is at root a duty
to God. Duty becomes duty by being referred to God, but in the duty
itself I do not enter into relation to God [...]. If in this connection I
then say that it is my duty to love God, I am really uttering only a
tautology, inasmuch as >God< is here used in the completely abstract
sense as the divine, i.e., as the universal, i.e., as duty.7
Here Johannes de silentio does to William what Marx will later do
to Hegel - he turns him on his head. The duty which the judge had
defined in terms of the universal (because the universal was by definition the ethical) is now shown to be a derived form of duty and as
such relative. God has become something different. He is no longer
the ultimate guarantor of the validity of cultural arrangements but is
almost the opposite, nothing less than the radical reconfiguration of
the principles constituting the human sphere. This becomes apparent
when one observes the paradox which springs from faith and concerns the realm of communication. While, from the point of view of
ethics, everyone is obligated to divest himself of the categories of inwardness and express himself in the external,8 Johannes de silentio
maintains that the paradox of faith is that there exists an inwardness
which is incommensurable with the external [,..].9
5
6
7
8

Ibid.
SV3 5,52.
SV3 5,63.
SV3 5,64.
Ibid.

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And because, from the point of view of ethics, inwardness is obligated to suspend its own incongruity with the universal and submit to
the latter's demand to reveal oneself, this revelation has an eminently
verbal character. Thus, from the point of view of ethics, Abraham is
obligated to tell Sarah, Eliezer, and Isaac about what he is contemplating doing. But Abraham remains silent, and he cannot speak therein lies the distress and the anxiety. For indeed, if I cannot make
myself understood when I speak, then I am not speaking [...].10Thus
because of his absolute relation to the Absolute, Abraham is driven
away from the realm of the universal and of communication, a realm
in which the paradoxical duty could be formulated but - according to
Johannes de silentio - in which it would be meaningless.
If this silence is paradoxically motivated by something beyond the
realm of communication, then it remains a paradox - or at least a
problem - for every text that wishes to reproduce it: How can one
speak about the silence without breaking it? That is, how can one describe Abraham without re-inscribing him in the very realm of communication from which he has been ideologically suspended?
The book's problemata pose these sorts of questions but do not answer them. Let us therefore make a mental note of this and pay careful attention to the text.
Johannes de silentio: Rhetorician of silence
In his preface, Johannes de silentio introduces himself and his book
with the pathos of distance: The present author is by no means a
philosopher. He is, to put it poetically and elegantly, a supplemental
clerk who neither writes the system nor makes promises about the
system, who neither pledges anything about the system nor binds
himself to the system.11 If this supplemental clerk writes, it is because for him it is a pure and simple luxury, which becomes more
pleasing and obvious as fewer buy and read what he writes.12 Thus
he is also well aware of the fact that the work he is sending forth into
the world will scarcely attract any attention in an age when people
have crossed out passion in order to serve scholarly knowledge.13
10
11

12
13

SV3 5,102; cf. 56.

SV3 5,11.
Ibid.
Ibid.

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This, however, is not the reason - or at least it is not the only reason
- that he has inscribed silence into his name. Johannes de silentio
owes his name fully as much to the fact that in many respects the
book has chosen as its theme silence - the negative presence of language in silence. He writes not only from silence, but also about silence.
Or rather, this is what he wants to do, but is unable: the silence, of
course, does not expand along with the text; on the contrary, the
more the text expands, the less silence there is. Thus in order to maintain Abraham as the representative of the paradox, whose silence
may not be abolished in the communicative realm of the text, Johannes de silentio must establish a distance between his own thought
and the unthinkability of the paradox. And he does so with thoroughness: I can make the great trampoline leap whereby I go over into
infinity. My back is like a tightrope dancer's, twisted in my childhood
- therefore it is easy for me.14 When, on the other hand, [I] have to
contemplate Abraham, then it is as if I were destroyed [...]. I strain
every muscle in order to get a look, and at that very instant I am
paralyzed.15
Despite the silence he has inscribed in his name, Johannes de silentio is a particularly talkative fellow, which itself of course reveals how
inadequately he relates himself to Abraham's silence. If he points out
the distance as much as he does,16 it is not so much in order to point
out his personal limitations as out of consideration for the task the
book sets out to accomplish and which near the outset is formulated
in terms which almost seem to be an imperative. What the book sets
out to bring about is not the artistic weaving of fantasy, but the
shiver and shudder of thought.17
With this imperative the work proclaims its connection with the
idealist tradition's concept of the sublime as that which intrudes upon
the self-understanding of enlightened humanism and also goes beyond the merely aesthetic by confronting a person with impressions
that break in upon contemplation's peaceful relation to beauty. The
alien character of the sublime - or the almost violent effect it has
upon the power of imagination - fills the subject with fear. And trembling.
14
15

16
17

SV35.35.
SV3 5,32.
SV3 5,36.45.47 et passim.
SV3 5,13.

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And yet, as Kant so famously asserted, the danger is not really a

serious one. The sublime eludes every sort of representation, but at
the same time it awakens the notion of a world beyond what man
can conceive. In other words, fear of what is alien is accompanied by
an awe of reason's conciliating capacity of distancing itself from the
chaos that the sensible world can display quite unexpectedly.
When Johannes de silentio demands the shiver and shudder of
thought, he is thinking of the sublime, which has evaded the conciliation of reason and which remains something alien and terrifying, a
calamity which resists both the social and philosophical center, because - as we are ceaselessly warned - Abraham cannot be mediated.18 One cannot weep over Abraham. One approaches him with
a horror religiosus, as Israel approached Mount Sinai.19
This is precisely what we will not do, however, because everyone
knows the outcome of the story and thus also knows that the danger
was not really serious: We all know that it was only a trial.20 It is
thus with this reconciling knowledge and not with religious terror
that we approach Abraham, and precisely in doing so we come to forget the fear and trembling with which Abraham once approached the
mountain. This sort of knowledge is repeatedly criticized.21 And this
criticism is all the more understandable because, through its own inner logic, this knowledge makes the drama undramatic by permitting
one to stand at a due historical distance from which to suck worldly
wisdom out of the paradox.22
Although the imperative of the work is anti-aesthetic, inasmuch as
the shudder of thought is opposed to every form of clear representation, nonetheless the imperative can only be obeyed by means of an
aesthetic praxis which re-establishes the medium of clear representation. And thus Johannes de silentio also dramatizes the journey. He
stretches out the time that it took, describing the necessary equipment for butchery, so that Abraham on his way to Mount Moriah is
accompanied by writing which invests its energy in producing the
presence or the personal knowledge, the autopsy, which forms the basis for the shudder, the shudder of thought. Every means is used in
order to catch the reader's eye and maintain the terror. This is made
18

19
20

21
22

SV3 5,56.
SV35.57.
SV3 5,23.
Cf. SV35.28.49.59.60.61.
SV3 5,36.

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clear as early as the section entitled Mood, which comes immediately after the preface and which presents four variations on the story
that both separately and together have the purpose of bringing about
the terror's shuddering return.23 Thus it is scarcely an overstatement
to claim that the teleological suspension of the ethical corresponds to
the aesthetic suspension of time. The autopsy is indeed the point, and
time is the threat which the text is to ward off - and which it attempts to abjure aesthetically, as if a few millennia were an enormous distance.24
Thus the text is composed of an artistic web of fantasy, whose texture is the precondition of the shudder. And yet Johannes de silentio
is painfully aware that Abraham evades representation, because in
the case of Abraham, he confesses, I cannot think myself into [him];
when I have reached the high point, I fall down, for what is offered
me is the paradox.25 Therefore, just as one ought to approach Abraham with religious terror, so must the text which grasps after that
which cannot be grasped be a text that continually betrays its knowledge of the fact that it does not admit of being written, because then
it wants to be a text about something which itself was not a text but a
paradoxical action. For this same reason the text can only say what it
wants to do, but cannot do it. Johannes de silentio explains: If I were
to speak of [Abraham], then I would first sketch the pain of trial. To
that end, like a leech I would suck all the anxiety and distress and
torment out of a father's suffering, so that I could describe what
Abraham suffered throughout it all, yet he believed. I would point
out that the journey lasted three days and a good bit of the fourth;
yes, these three and a half days would become infinitely longer than
the couple of thousand years that separate me from Abraham.26
A text which wants to retell a story about a journey that took
three days, but which arranges the time of the retelling in reverse
proportion to the time of the story, is not a text but is a demonstration of the misrelation between the text itself and its object, so that
strictly speaking Johannes de silentio ought to fall silent in impotent
gestures. But he doesn't. He chooses instead to have a series of textual characters mime the story of Abraham, and he thereby causes
the event, which he himself does not understand, to fasten its shud23
24

25
26

Cf. SV3 5,13ff.

SV35,33;cf.61.50.
SV3 5,32.
SV35,5Q.

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dering grip on others - others, be it noted, who do not let the matter
stop with shuddering but who repeat the story of Abraham in their
own stories. As a sort of synchronization, on the one hand, of the vision which the text has produced aesthetically and rhetorically, and
on the other hand, of the demand which its author requires honored
existentially, Johannes de silentio can write that at the moment I reflect upon it, I call out to myself: jam tua res agitur [now the matter is
about you].27 In brief, the tale of Abraham demands repetition, reduplication.
And that is what happens in what follows.
Three Knights of the Order of Faith
The story of Abraham is not the only one in the book, but is one
among several fantastic stories. And of these there are more than
seven - nearer seven times seven, of which the majority go beyond
the fantastic and become terrifying. Thus there is quite an extensive
gallery of characters: knights of various orders and ranks; heroes like
Agamemnon, Jephtha, and Brutus, inspired with greater or lesser degrees of heroic courage; several Copenhagen citizens of the more
anonymous sort; and a series of couples, such as Agnes and the Merman, Tobias and Sara, and Faust and Margaret, who, as is well known,
only form couples because they never became such. Characteristic of
all these characters is that they are placed in small narrative niches in
the larger room in which the story of Abraham takes place. In accordance with their placement, they come forth with commentaries ranging from a dispirited monologue of encapsulation, to the Aristotelian
definition of drama, and to something so quiet that for a moment it
could resemble silence.
These commentaries could be read as the subtext to the text which
Johannes de silentio is writing about Abraham, and they function like
prisms through which the various theological, philosophical, or psychological problems in the basic story are refracted and personally
appropriated. In this way, the textual characters make explicit the
epistemological implications of the text - they live the lives of the
thoughts, so to speak. And it is a rather burdensome existence, one
must say, because Johannes de silentio has appointed himself tortor
27

SV3 5,32.

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heroum [tormentor of heroes],28 a post he looks after with meticulous care. Thus just as the hero seems to espy a way out, Johannes de
silentio makes a little change29 which makes the hero's situation, if
possible, even more unfortunate.
In what follows below, however, the three figures are treated more
gently by their poet - indeed, the last of them actually becomes
happy despite an otherwise uncertain fate. All of them are knights of
the noble order of faith. The first is someone as insignificant as a tax
collector, while the two others have neither names nor civic titles,
and for the sake of convenience I have therefore dubbed them that
man and the insomniac.
First the tax collector, who is close to the ideal version of a
knight of faith as he might appear in Biedermeier Copenhagen. In
reading the description of his appearance one must continually bear
in mind that, like Abraham, he has made the double movement of
faith. That is, he has definitively surrendered everything (as Abraham
surrendered Isaac) - and simultaneously, by virtue of faith as the final, absurd possibility, he has received everything again (as Abraham
in the obedience of his faith receives Isaac again). Enormous though
the socio-cultural distance between Abraham and the tax collector
is, they are very closely connected in their existential mode: Here he
is. The acquaintance is made, I am introduced to him. At the instant I
first see him, I thrust him from me, even jump a bit away, clap my
hands, and say half audibly, >Good Lord! Is this the man? Is it really
he? He looks just like a tax collector!< But it is he, however. I move a
bit closer to him, keeping an eye peeled for the least signal from infinity, a glance, an expression, a gesture, a sadness, a smile to betray
the infinite in its heterogeneity with the finite. No! I scrutinize his figure from top to toe to see if there is a little tear through which the
infinite peeked out. No! He is solid all the way through.30
And Johannes de silentio pursues his tax collector up one street
and down the next, page after page - with the same zeal that Johannes the Seducer had earlier pursued Cordelia - seeking that little
tear, but in vain. To his pronounced amazement he can only ascertain that the tax collector goes to church and takes walks in the
woods with equal ease and that he is able to assume whatever role a
situation requires with no apparent difficulty. Quite ironically, pur28
29
30

SV3 5,99.
SV3 5,98.
SV3 5,37.

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sued by his spy day in and day out, the tax collector resembles
what he is not: a bourgeois, a clerk, a money-making businessman, a poet, a postman, a restauranteur, a capitalist, indeed,
even a sixteen-year-old girl, as well as a genius, a pork butcher,
and finally a do-nothing.31 And - as if a parody of Abraham's sacrifice - a lamb, the very saving moment of the peripeteia: toward evening he gets the idea that his wife will surely have prepared a special hot meal for him when he returns home, for example, a roast
head of lamb with vegetables.32
Quite understandably it occasions certain difficulties for Johannes
de silentio when he has to reconcile himself to the fact that the tax
collector is a knight of faith and not just the smooth bourgeois
fellow that his spiritless behavior would seem to indicate. Naturally
this ambiguity is the whole point, because the function of the tax
collector is of course to demonstrate that there is an inwardness
which is incommensurable with the external [,..].33 Thus the tax
collector is a knight of faith not so much in spite of his external appearance as by virtue of it. Johannes de silentio illuminates the dialectic: He continually makes the movement of infinity, but he does it
so correctly and with such certainty that he continually gets finitude
out of it, and not even for a second does anyone suspect anything
else.34 Thus no one ever suspects or has the least clue about the existential basis underlying the tax collector, because that basis is composed either of the wondrous experience of faith or of simple, everyday conformism. Johannes de silentio maintains that in the present
case we are confronted with the former, inasmuch as to be able to
fall down in such a manner that it simultaneously looks as if one
stood up and walked, to transform the leap of life into a walk, absolutely to express the sublime in the pedestrian - only that knight can
do this, and this is the only miracle.35
To express the sublime in the pedestrian, the exalted in the ordinary - this is the formula for the inwardness which is incommensurable with the world but which at the same time is the prerequisite for
remaining in that world. The formula itself borders upon paradox, for
the sublime is of course at the farthest imaginable remove from the
31

32
33

34
35

SV3 5,38.
SV35,38.
SV3 5,64.
SV35,39.
Ibid.

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calm rhythm of habitual life. And as mentioned, the paradox is precisely the point, because the tax collector must indeed exemplify
something close to his own opposite, which of course sounds strange.
And in fact by means of his own inwardness Johannes de silentio also
emphasizes this mis/relationship: And yet, and yet the entire earthly
figure he presents is a new creation by virtue of the absurd. He resigned everything infinitely, and then he grasped everything again by
virtue of the absurd.36
At this point it is appropriate to present the second of the the
three (selected) knights, the one known as that man. He makes his
entree in the first part of the book, and we are told the following
with respect to him: Once there was a man who as a child had heard
that beautiful story of how God tempted Abraham and of how
[Abraham] endured the temptation, preserved the faith, and, contrary
to expectation, received a son a second time. When he became older,
he read the same story with even greater admiration [...]. The older
he became, the more often his thoughts turned to that story, and his
enthusiasm became stronger and stronger - yet he was less and less
able to understand the story. In the end, he forgot everything else because of the story [,..].37 This passage is followed by four little variations on the Abraham story, each of which shows how that man
reads portions of the story of his own life into Abraham's story. Johannes de silentio summarizes what happened: In this way and in
many similar ways did the man of whom we are speaking consider
this event. Every time he returned home after a journey to Mount
Moriah, he collapsed from fatigue, folded his hands together and said,
>No one was as great as Abraham. Who is able to understand
him?<38
As can be seen, in this case the story has taken possession of the
man. As time passed, the story has inscribed itself in that man's life
and filled him so completely that the story of which he had once
been a part has had to give way. The distance in time between him
and Abraham has been annulled by the autopsy that pushes aside the
categories of time and space, categories which in other cases are universally binding. By dint of its inherent epic power the story has intruded to such a degree that it no longer merely is about the reader
but also takes place with its reader. Among the ways in which this is
36
37
38

Ibid.
SV3 5,13.
SV3 5,16.

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made clear is that that man simply collapses from fatigue every
time he has undertaken a journey to Mount Moriah. It is this autopsy
that the story has reproduced, which is why Johannes de silentio's
rhetorical question makes good sense: What is the value of taking
the trouble to remember that past which cannot become something
present.39
And with this sort of presence we have reached the third knight,
who was seized so completely by the vision of Abraham's sacrifice
that he could not close his eyes and thus became the insomniac. It
began rather quietly, though. One Sunday in church he had heard
about the sacrifice and then went home and wanted to do just as
Abraham had done,40 that is, he wanted to repeat or reduplicate the
story. But no sooner had he made his decision than he met the pastor,
who cannot exactly be said to have given the plan his blessing:
Abominable man, scum of society! What devil has possessed you to
make you want to murder your son.41 To this the insomniac replied merely, after all, it's what you yourself preached about on Sunday.42 The story does not really continue much further, and Johannes
de silentio therefore comments upon the little scene: The comic and
the tragic here contact one another in absolute infinitude. By itself,
the pastor's sermon was perhaps ridiculous enough, but it became infinitely ridiculous through its effect - and yet this was quite natural.43
Of particular interest is Johannes de silentio's concluding assertion,
in which he makes it clear that despite its ridiculousness the effect
was quite natural. And of course, when the insomniac wants to repeat the story of Abraham he is not possessed by a devil, as the pastor assumes. He is possessed by the story, which therefore quite naturally insists upon being repeated - but of course, it insists upon being
repeated in the external and not merely in the internal, as was
the case with the two previous knights. But Johannes de silentio must
therefore ask how it can be explained that the one repetition is legitimate while the other is not: How does one explain such a contradiction [...]? Is it because Abraham has the time-honored reputation of
being a great man, so that what he does is great, and when another
39

40
41
42
43

SV3 5,30.
5V35,28.
Ibid.
SV35.29.
Ibid.

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does the same thing it is a sin, a sin which cries out to heaven? [...] If
faith cannot make the willingness to murder one's son into a holy act,
then let the same judgment be passed upon Abraham as upon everyone else.44
With his straightforward will to action, the insomniac is the first
of the characters in Kierkegaard's works to dispute the thesis that inwardness is incommensurable - and the first to transform inwardness
into action. And this action is so fascinating that Johannes de silentio
cannot resist the desire to write a short postscript to the story about
the insomniac knight: [He] was probably then executed or sent to
the madhouse. In brief, he became unhappy in relation to so-called
reality. In another sense, I truly think that Abraham made him happy
[...].

This so-called reality is the socio-cultural system in which Judge

William and the bourgeois philistine, despite all their differences, are
situated. The former has consciously identified himself with his social
role, while the latter has unconsciously assimilated himself to that
role. The insomniac knight, on the other hand, is situated outside of
this mediating system and ends in delinquency or delerium. And yet
Abraham makes him happy. Why? Because the story supplied him
with the epic material in which he found his narrative identity. The
story proved to be about him.
As the knight of reduplication, the insomniac bears repetition
upon his coat of arms, so it would not be out of order for him to repeat the idea - and he does so. Not even ten pages after Johannes de
silentio has announced a possible future for the insomniac, the latter is resurrected in a new form. The situation is the same, however. A
pastor has told the story of Abraham and has done so in such a boring fashion that the entire congregation has fallen asleep, except for
that individual who suffered from insomnia.46 When the pastor finally finishes his uninspired sermon, the insomniac returns home to
meditate upon the matter, but as soon as his ideas begin to develop,
the pastor again shows up and exclaims: Wretch! That you let your
soul sink into such madness! No miracle takes place [...], to which
the insomniac then replies, yet again, after all, that was what you
preached about last Sunday.47 And in keeping with this simple, sub44
45
46

47

Ibid.
Ibid.

SV3 5,49.
Ibid.

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tie logic, Johannnes de silentio must conclude: If Abraham is not a

nullity, a phantom, a bit of decoration used as a diversion, then the
sinner can never err in wanting to do the same [,..].48
It is no coincidence that Johannes de silentio mounts a defense of
this sort. The insomniac knight, after all, is not a chance character. He
is the straightforward representative of autopsy, the character whose
eye cannot free itself from the images in the story, because the person who has seen these images can never get rid of them again. Insomnia is not merely the appropriate reaction to the religious terror
of the story; it also makes clear that it is to the eye that the story directs its appeal. Insomnia is a metaphor for the moment - the twinkling of an eye - of religious terror, the wide-open eye transfixed in a
continual stare, the eye whose pains are not soothed by the relief of
sleep. In brief, to be sleepless is to be exposed to genuine fear and
trembling: There were countless generations who knew the story of
Abraham by heart, word for word, but how many did it make sleepless?49
Yet as the character of the seeing eye, of the moment - the twinkling of an eye - the insomniac is also the very character of visibility, of making manifest. And this is not the least important of the respects in which the insomniac differs from his two fellow knights, for
in their cases it is only by faith and not by murder that one attains
likeness with Abraham.50 Things are different for the insomniac.
He realizes his inwardness in the external and defies the realm of
communication, which the busy pastor only just barely manages to
maintain intact. Had he not arrived in time, the catastrophe would
have taken place and the son would have been slaughtered. To put it
mildly, the text does not place the pastor in a favorable light, but
brands him a hypocrite who condemns that for which he himself has
served as the occasion. Thus the pastoral parody also serves to emphasize the distance between, on the one hand, the mediating tendency of institutions and, on the other hand, a will which is opposed
to every sort of middle way, opposed to the socio-cultural system opposed, in short, to the established order.

48
49
50

Ibid.
51/35,28.
SV3 5,30.

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The Category of the Turning Point

In general, if poetry took notice of the religious and of the inwardness of the individual, it would take on far more significant tasks than
those with which it is presently occupied.51 This remark is allowed to
fall in a note a bit less than 20 pages from the end of the book, but it
could well have been placed a good deal earlier, in the main text, because Fear and Trembling is very attentive to the religious and the inwardness of the individual, and thus even formulates one of the problems with which, according to Johannes de silentio, poetry ought to
occupy itself.
The degree to which the book has dealt successfully with this problem is less certain, especially because Johannes de silentio has placed
himself in a dilemma with his theory of the incommensurability of inwardness. Thus, although poetry is required for the depiction of inwardness, still, precisely because it is the medium of exposition and
externalization, it is also profoundly opposed to every form of inwardness. Nonetheless Johannes de silentio presents and surveys his
various characters as if they were stage actors whose different postures, scenes, and leaps indicated degrees on a scale of inwardness
which he could read from where he sits somewhere in his private
lge. From this location he follows faith's double movement,52 and
evaluates it as pure, objectified inwardness: Fortunate is he who can
make these movements. He does the marvelous, and I will never become tired of admiring him. Whether it be Abraham or the slave in
Abraham's house, a professor of philosophy or a poor servant girl, is
a matter of complete indifference to me; I look only at the movements. But I do look at them, and I do not permit myself to be
fooled, either by myself or by anyone else.53
If Johannes de silentio does not permit himself to be fooled now
and then, either by himself or by others, but always judges correctly
about what he sees, then inwardness must be accompanied with a
clearly readable correlate, and thus it must be anything but incommensurable. If this is so, the tax collector is lost. He, of course, won
inwardly and invisibly what he lost externally and visibly, so in his
case, if one paid attention only to the movements one would only
see a chance figure wandering aimlessly about Copenhagen. And it is
51

52
53

SV3 5,83n.

SV3 5,34.
SV3 5,36.

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pretty clear that something similar is the case for that man. And
yet so doggedly does Johannes de silentio emphasize the movements
and their importance that his condescending remark about the ballet master, with whom the poet so often confuses himself these
days54 seems more than a little out of place. He explains that
knights of infinite resignation, for example, can be known by their
walk, which is light and daring,55 and this also is true to some extent for the knights of infinity, for they possess elevation.56
Though they excel in their leap, they nonetheless do not manage to
assume the correct position when they return to earth; they vacillate
for an instant and thereby reveal themselves: One need not see
them in the air; one need only see them at the instant they touch and
make contact with the earth, and one recognizes them.57 On the
other hand, the ability to leap in a given position so that in the leap
itself [one] takes the position,58 is within the capacity of the knight
of faith and him alone, whose inwardness can be clearly read when
one looks at the scale.59
As tortor heroum, Johannes de silentio takes zestful pleasure in
calling forth poetic individualities and uses the power of dialectic
to hold [them ...] at the point of extremity.60 To do this he employs
the whip of despair so that victims can discover one thing or another in [their] anxiety.61 Behind his brutal practice Johannes de silentio has a theory about man as a being who first becomes aware of
his true essence when he is subjected to a dramatic re-versal. It is not
surprising that in this connection he thanks Lessing for the idea of a
Christian drama,62 just as it makes good sense when he refers to the
two concepts in Aristotle's poetics which are connected to drama,
namely peripeteia and anagnorisis: reversal and recognition.
In connection with these concepts, the insomniac again returns to
view. If he wishes to repeat the story of Abraham concretely and existentially, it is because he recognizes himself in the story and immediately understands that the story is about himself. The distance be54

55
56

57
58
59
60

61
62

SV3 5,85.
SV3 5,36.
SV3 5,39.
Ibid.
Ibid.
SV3 5,45.
SV3 5,80.
Ibid.
SV3 5,81n.

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tween the story's pronouncement - de te fabula - and its imperative

form - jam tua res agitur - thus corresponds to the distance between
recognition and reversal. Here the dramatic peripeteia - the decisive
moment (or twinkling of an eye)63 or the category of the turning
point64 - presents itself, when the invisible inwardness suddenly
makes itself visible in an external action which breaks up or at least
threatens the realm of communication. In other words, like Abraham,
the insomniac, is an emigrant from the sphere of the universal.65
And if the answer Abraham gives Isaac when the latter asks about
the burnt sacrifice has the form of irony because it is always irony
when I say something and yet do not say anything,66 then the insomniac is not a whit less ironic in his answer to the pastor: after
all, it's what you yourself preached about.
Both of them are exiled from the universal. Both answer ironically
when they must give an account of their enterprise. Both make their
inwardness visible in an external, dramatic peripeteia. And neither of
them finds rest or blessedness in the mediations of the socio-cultural
system, because both have broken with the continuity which is the
prerequisite and requirement of the universal. The fact that the insomniac has all this in common with Abraham naturally makes it
very obvious to ask whether Johannes de silentio's re-staging of the
story has inscribed Abraham in an aesthetic typology and thus presented him as the character typifying the crisis of authenticity in the
modern epoch. There is more than a little evidence that this is so. To
view Abraham's answer to Isaac as something so atypical of the Old
Testament as an ironic remark is, in a miniature format, what the retelling itself is in the full-scale version. And where the story in Genesis 22 is matter-of-fact to the point of being laconic, Johannes de silentio supplements his retelling with massive existential pathos.
No less problematic is the fact that the retelling of an Old Testament story about Abraham takes its title from a New Testament story
(to the extent that one can call Philippians 2:12 a story). Of course it
is certainly possible to search out New Testament variations on Old
Testament themes, but the story of Abraham in Fear and Trembling
nonetheless lies beyond the horizons of the New Testament. And
apart from the Merman - who fills his little narrative niches with his
63

64
65
66

SV3 5,77. 82. 87.

SV35,75f
SV3 5,103.
SV3 5,107.

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203

struggles with sin, repentance, and forgiveness - Christian theology is

glaring in its absence. A journal entry from the period when the book
was taking shape discusses the problem explicitly: That is what is
difficult, Kierkegaard writes, about having both the Old and the
New Testaments. Because the Old Testament has entirely different
categories [...]. This is the source of the inconstancy in clerical discourse, all according to whether the Old or the New Testament appears in it.67 This is also the source of some of the inconstancy that
can be detected at various points in Johannes de silentio; yet on one
of the book's final pages he has to admit that the paradox of sin
does not apply to Abraham because it is located in quite another
sphere.68 In this respect Abraham seems for once to share the fate
of the normativity of the universal inasmuch as an ethics that ignores sin is a completely futile discipline, but if it takes sin into account then it has eo ipso gone beyond itself.69
With this the book has not only indicated the blind spot in Judge
William's ethics, it has also clearly noted its own limitations. Therefore, if William's concept of God as an empty transcendentality is
provided with epic content by Johannes de silentio, who supplies the
knights of the noble order of faith with narrative identity, it is also
true that this identity rests upon an identification which assumes a
more or less unproblematic transition from the one story to the other.
There remains the question of whether this identity can be maintained when the identification upon which the identity is based is no
longer taken from myths or Old Testament stories, but this must be
dealt with on another occasion.
Two Perspectives
At this point I wish to close by sketching two perspectives on the rest
of Kierkegaard's canon which are suggested by the present reading of
Fear and Trembling, namely the perspective of inwardness and the

67

68
69

S0ren Kierkegaards Papirer [The Papers of S0ren Kierkegaard], P.A. Heiberg, V.

Kuhr og E. Torsting, eds., 2nd enlarged edition by N. Thulstrup, index by N.J. Cappe!0rn, 16 vols. in 22 tomes (Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 1968-1978), IV A 143 (hereafter Pap. IV A 143).
SV3 5,101.
SV3 5,90.

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perspective which for want of a better name could be called biographical.

As is well-known, Kierkegaard's critique of the identity of the internal and the external is directed against Hegel, whose exchange between Innere and ussere Kierkegaard first viewed as an existential matter and then transformed it into a conflict between a
religiously-grounded inwardness and an external world, the universal.
Frater Taciturnus highlights this conflict: It follows [...] of itself that,
in relation to the religious, such categories of actuality, such as that
the external is the internal and the internal is the external are invented by Miinchhausens who have absolutely no understanding of
the religious [...]. In matters such as this they [these Miinchhausens]
do about as much good - to cite an old proverb - as sticking one's
tongue out the window and getting a smack because of it.70
Kierkegaard is no Baron von Munchhausen, naturally, but I am
certainly inclined to believe that his casting of suspicion upon the
connection between internal and external has cost him no few
smacks because of his tongue - and indeed, what is worse, he ends by
contradicting himself and putting his foot in his mouth. From being
the implacable defender of inwardness - for example, with the typological character the tax collector - over time Kierkegaard develops into a no less implacable opponent of inwardness, and this is
why his writings can be read retrospectively as an elaborate history of
the undoing of inwardness.
Nominally, this reversal from inner to outer in Kierkegaard's writings is situated in the reversal from Climacus to Anti-Climacus. This is
reflected in the settings announced by each of these two pseudonyms.
Whereas the first work asserts that the setting is inwardness,71 the
second insists that the setting is in Christendom.72 Although AntiClimacus, on the title page of his work Practice in Christianity, issues
an invitation to Awakening and Inward Appropriation, this invitation is partially retracted by the book itself because Practice is, if anything, a criticism of the religious sort of inward appropriation typical
of the times: Here we have the concept of established Christendom.
In established Christendom we are all true Christians, but in hidden
inwardness. The external world has absolutely nothing to do with the
fact that I am a Christian; therefore, my being as a Christian cannot
70
71
72

SK?8,225.
SV3 10,58.
SV3 16,215.

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be measured [...]. And why this hiddenness, then [...]? Oh, naturally,
because I fear that if someone were to discover the degree to which I
am a true Christian, I would be rewarded with extraordinary honor
and esteem. And furthermore, I am too much of a true Christian to
want to be honored and esteemed because I am a true Christian. So
you see, that is why I keep it concealed in hidden inwardness; [...]
Everyone is a true Christian, but in hidden inwardness.73
Not only is this undoing of the concept of inwardness fraught with
a series of theological and social psychological implications, it also invites a biographical reading. That is, by describing a movement from
the internal to the external, Kierkegaard's canon gradually, work
by work, implicates and renders visible the man behind it, the actual
author, Kierkegaard.
In other words, Kierkegaard is not only a subject who attempts to
present an authentic self, he himself is also implicated in this process,
which is why every reading of Kierkegaard has a biographical tendency from the outset. Thus, Kierkegaard criticizes Hans Christian
Andersen for writing novels in which there is a residue, as it were, of
the author's finite character, which often chatters at inappropriate
moments, like some impertinent third party or an ill brought-up
child.74 Impertinently and displaying my own lack of proper upbringing, I will turn this comment back upon Kierkegaard himself.
The life and the writings not only influence [indvirker] one another,
they also produce [udvirker] one another: reality is made into writing,
and writing is made into reality. Thus I will assert with respect to
Kierkegaard what he asserted with respect to Fichte in his doctoral
dissertation, namely that the producing I is the same as the produced I.75 Thus, in a journal entry from 1837 Kierkegaard can imagine the following situation, which verges on being a self-prophecy:
Someone wishes to write a novel in which one of the characters
goes mad; as he writes the novel he himself slowly goes mad and
ends in the first person.76
What I wrote, I wrote is here transformed into What I wrote, I
became. That is, the second I which becomes visible is the I
which the written work puts forth in writing, and of course it does so,
somewhat ambivalently, by writing off an empirical I. Conse73
74
75
76

SV3
5V3
SV3
Pap.

16,202-203.
1,39-40.
1,285.
II A 634.

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quently, the written canon can be read as a process in which the writing subject traverses back and forth between his own construction
and destruction, and is thus deconstructed. This is why - as Kierkegaard himself eventually recognized - he could not say I in a solid
and autonomous sense.77 This sort of writing is biographical in the
specific sense that it sees both connection and separation between
life and writings, and I have chosen to highlight this in the following
by placing a hyphen in bio-graphy.
It goes without saying that a bio-graphical reading is not oblivious
to the notoriously autobiographical materials which appear in the
written canon, but it justifies itself by referring to the way in which
Kierkegaard describes his written corpus in The Point of View for My
Activity as an Author, where indeed he states quite baldly that it was
[divine] Governance which has brought me up, and this upbringing
is reflected in the process of productivity.78 Although at first blush
this might be taken to be rampant megalomania, properly viewed, it
is Kierkegaard's confession of the fact that his autonomy has been
limited: it is not Kierkegaard who has guided the writings, but rather
the reverse, the writings which have guided their writer. Kierkegaard
interprets this guidance religiously as the role of [divine] Governance. Kierkegaard's written works constitute a sort of Bildungsroman - or a novel depicting the process of his own undoing - in which
the writing, in a general and grammatological sense, stands in a
maieutic relationship to its writer.
Viewed in this perspective, the attack on the church is not merely a
corrective to the established order, it is also a corrective to the
pseudonymous ventriloquism of the works, which now definitively go
over to the personal out-spokenness of action. The turbulence of inwardness - which has become more and more dramatic since Judge
William first introduced the term inner history - must now manifest itself with the suddenness of the enigmatic (as Vigilius Haufniensis wrote in connection with the inexplicable precondition of
sin)79 and thereby become imperatively visible. Because, as can be
read in the final issue of The Moment, in which what is decisive is
said, when the castle door of inwardness has long been shut and is
finally opened, it does not move soundlessly like an interior door

77

78
79

Pap. X 2 A 89.
SV3 18,125.
SV3 6,126.

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207

with spring hinges.80 The day on which this door opens is Wednesday, May 16, 1855, when Kierkegaard explains in Fcedrelandet that if
he were now to issue a new printing of Practice, the book would not
be by a pseudonym, but by myself, and the thrice-repeated preface
would be removed [...]. Earlier, my idea was that if the established
order could be defended this was the only way, by poetically (thus
pseudonymously) passing judgment upon it [...]. Now, on the other
hand, I have come to a quite definite conclusion concerning two matters, both that from a Christian point of view the established order is
quite untenable and that, Christianly understood, every day it continues to exist is a crime; and that it is impermissible to draw upon grace
in this fashion. Therefore take the pseudonymity away.81
Practice, with its intensified demands which could only be met by a
pseudonym, had contained a judgment concerning [Kierkegaard's]
own existence.82 And now Kierkegaard passes judgment on his times
by taking back [at tage igen] that pseudonymity, that is, by repeating
[at gentage] in his own name the demands of the pseudonymous
author. If one here adopts a narratological point of view, however, it
is remarkable that by repeating these demands in his own name,
Kierkegaard is assuming the role of his textual character. Indeed, we
recall that the insomniac's story began when he heard the pastor's
sermon in church one Sunday, and then wanted to repeat it existentially, to reduplicate it. With this, the insomniac not only became
the first character in Kierkegaard's writings to defend the notion of
the incommensurability of inwardness, but he also became the first of
the autopsy characters. And in this double role as the representative
of autopsy and of the incommensurability of inwardness he also became the character of visibility, of making manifest, because with his
paradoxical action he instituted a frightful disparity within the social
order. Kierkegaard does something similar on December 30, 1854,
when, using the definitive title There the Matter Rests!, he says the
following: I have not passed judgment on Bishop Mynster. No, but
in the hand of [divine] Governance I was the occasion for Bishop
Mynster to pass judgment on himself. On Mondays, he either did not
recognize or dared not or would not acknowledge his Sunday sermons. Because, quite ironically and naively, I was his own sermon on
Mondays. And if Bishop Mynster himself had not, with worldly
80
81
82

SV3 19,93.
SV3 19,72-73.
Pap. X 5 B 62, p. 274.

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shrewdness, avoided shouldering the consequences of his Sunday sermons on Mondays; if he had risked an existence and actions which
were the equal of his Sunday rhetoric instead of employing worldly
shrewdness in order to gain advantage for himself in a variety of
ways - then his life would have taken on quite another appearance.83
As the insomniac repeated the pastor's sermon on Monday, S.
Kierkegaard, as the article is signed, now repeats Mynster's sermon
on Monday - the Monday constituted by Kierkegaard's actions of
1855. And the following journal entry makes it clear that Kierkegaard
thought his reduplication came under the same catastrophic category
as the one used in connection with the two textual characters who
are members of the same knightly order which includes himself:
How anxious people would be for me if they knew about it, how
alien it would be to them: for it is certainly the case that in recent
times I have occupied myself quite exclusively with the question of
whether it was not God's will that I should do this, that I should risk
everything in order to bring about a catastrophe, to get arrested,
judged, if possible, executed.84
The passionless times did not let themselves get lured into granting
Kierkegaard the pereat [Let him die!] which would have been the
most fitting applaus [sign of approval], and this mismatch can serve
as the occasion either for lament or for ridicule, according to one's
point of view. But the mismatch is not the point. Rather, the point is
that Kierkegaard's written canon has shown itself to be like the
novel, which Kierkegaard imagined in 1837, in which the author,
chapter by chapter, became inscribed in his story and finally appeared in the first person singular, in the present tense, indicative
mood, active voice.85 And just as the insomniac wanted to repeat
the story of Abraham in a teleological suspension of the ethical
which was at odds with the social order, Kierkegaard repeats the insomniac's intention of unconditional obedience in defiance of the
world and its unchristian disorder. The insomniac became unhappy in relation to so-called reality because he had been remunerated with execution or with being sent to the madhouse, but was
nonetheless in another sense happy.86 For his part, Kierkegaard be83
84
85

86

SV3 19,18-19.
Pap. XI 2 A 265, p. 267.
Pap. II A 634,
SV35.29.

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209

came unhappy in relation to so-called reality, which ignored his willingness to sacrifice, but he nonetheless became happy in the sense
that his will was ready. So let the world remain what it has in fact always been, scanty drafts of thin beer.
In a passage from This Must Be Said, So Let It Be Said, Then
(which nonetheless seems to have said more than ought to have been
said, and which was therefore omitted from the published version),
Kierkegaard proclaims the clearly personal, indeed, almost private
motivation behind his action: Therfore, even if things worked out
such that this attack ended as unfortunately as possible for me, so
that I accomplished nothing at all and only became a pointless victim
[...]. I say [...] that even if there were not a single person who benefitted from my being sacrificed, it would not therefore be pointless,
not at all. It is of infinite value for myself, [...] and [divine] Governance is not a childish person who judges according to the result.87
Should we childish people - we who know the result and know
how the martyrdom dropped out of the story, rather unfortunately
from a narrative point of view - should we therefore conclude that
Kierkegaard's story became a fiasco and that its concluding chapter
was his desperate attempt to write himself free of the necessity of
history, whereby he became one of the ironic victims demanded by
the development of the world.88 Or, conversely, should we renounce
the narrative requirement and instead focus our gaze on Kierkegaard's paradoxical will to powerlessness? Should we let this be the
true point at which he deviates from the story, and therefore agree in
this respect with Climacus, who explains that what makes the deed
the individual's own is the intention, but this is precisely what does
not get included in the world-historical89 - and thus does not get included in the story about this history?
In my view, we should embrace both of the alternatives outlined
above. The silent little hyphen between bios and grafce in bio-graphy
must be maintained exactly as that which both separates and unites.
Because the fact that Kierkegaard's bios was transfigured in the writings does not mean that this grafce was completely congruent with
the life it transfigured. On the street, in reality, and in the larger story
of the world, Kierkegaard was a victim of a logic which was incompatible with the logic in the story into which he himself had been in87

88
89

Pap. XI 3 B 62, p. 112.

SV3 1,276.
SV3 9,129.

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scribed. On the other hand, on paper, in writing, and in the story the
canon tells about its author, the producing I [becomes] the same as
the produced I90, and Kierkegaard thus becomes the insomniac,
and specifically the knight of reduplication. For the same reason it is
fitting that when Kierkegaard has to conclude his own story he does
so with a movement back and forth along the hyphen by which bios
and grafa are both united and separated: Without falsifying or
cheapening the concept, I may say that my life is a sort of martyrdom, but in a new pattern [...]. Just come, History, and do your audit.
Everything is in its proper place; furthermore, I have run the risk voluntarily, it was not something that happened to me.91
And with this historical audit of Kierkegaard's story my own
audit of the story is concluded for the present.

90
91

SV3 1,285.
Pap. XI1 A 484, pp. 375-376.

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