The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
Søren Kierkegaard · a dialectical lyric in eight divisions, published under the pseudonym Johannes de silentio · Copenhagen, 16 October 1843, at the author’s expense, the same day as Repetition and Three Upbuilding Discourses · scored on Kierkegaard’s Danish as he printed it, read from knowledge; no text in hand, Danish quoted only where its words are certain, with the desk’s plain English beneath; the translation of Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (1983) and Alastair Hannay’s (1985) for sense
Mode
A dialectical lyric: philosophy of religion written as literature, argument and song alternating, under a pseudonym who cannot do what he describes
Mythos
The binding of Isaac, rebuilt: the father, the son and the demand, told four times wrong and measured against the tragic heroes who sacrifice their children for the universal; the knight of faith, the knight of resignation, the merman
Phase
Written chiefly in 1843, partly in Berlin that spring, two years after the broken engagement to Regine Olsen; published in Copenhagen, where philosophy was Hegelian, on 16 October 1843
Presentation
Prose in eight divisions: Preface; the Exordium (“Stemning”, Attunement); Eulogy on Abraham; Preliminary Expectoration; Problema I, II and III; Epilogue. Epigraph from Hamann, title from Philippians 2:12
Register
From grave, almost liturgical parataxis to classical encomium, urbane comic irony, colloquial portrait and the voice of the fairy tale; between them a cool dialectic that repeats its formula on purpose
Scale
One relation, the single individual before the absolute, tried against the family, the state, the sacred and the age; a short book of wide intellectual compass in a narrow human world
Governing Proposition
A writer who calls himself Johannes de silentio, and who says he cannot make the movement of faith himself, sets out to understand Abraham riding to Mount Moriah to sacrifice his son, and finds that he cannot. The wager of the book is that faith is not a lower stage of reason to be gone beyond but a passion harder than any: that it differs from the infinite resignation every great soul can make by a second movement that receives the finite back by virtue of the absurd; that if the ethical is the universal and the highest, Abraham is a murderer; and that a book can show this only by failing, on purpose and in several voices, to tell his story.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
The title comes from Paul: “work out your own salvation with fear and trembling” (Philippians 2:12). The book was published in Copenhagen on 16 October 1843, as Frygt og Bæven. Dialektisk Lyrik, Fear and Trembling, a dialectical lyric, on the same day as Gjentagelsen, Repetition, under another pseudonym, and Tre opbyggelige Taler, three upbuilding discourses, under Kierkegaard’s own name. It was written chiefly that year, in part during a stay in Berlin in the spring, two years after Kierkegaard broke his engagement to Regine Olsen. He paid for the printing.
The author on the title page is Johannes de silentio. The epigraph is from Hamann, on Tarquinius Superbus and the poppy heads: the son understood the message, the messenger did not. A book about a man who cannot speak is signed by a man named silence, and it opens by telling its reader that the one who carries a message need not be the one who understands it.
The work is the book as printed in 1843, in eight divisions: a Preface; the Exordium, headed “Stemning”, attunement; a Eulogy on Abraham; a Preliminary Expectoration; three Problemata; an Epilogue. The Problemata take more than half of it, and the third is by some distance the longest single section. It is scored on the Danish, and as literature: its argument is weighed through its form, because here the form is the argument.
Movement II
The Preface is satire. The age, it says, is holding a clearance sale of ideas, and everyone wants to go further than faith. The voice is urbane and comic, and the target is the Hegelian philosophy that ruled Copenhagen in 1843, which counted faith a lower stage on the way to the system.
Then the tone breaks. The Exordium tells the ride to Mount Moriah four times. Each time Abraham goes, and each time he is something less than the Abraham of Genesis 22; each variant closes with a short paragraph on a mother weaning her child, blackening her breast. Four stories and four similes, a frame repeated with variation, in a grave, almost liturgical prose.
The four rides are a proof by failure. The true Abraham is defined negatively before he is praised: the reader is shown four ways the story can be told and four ways the father can fall short, so that when the book turns to praise, it already knows that no retelling will reach him. Without these pages the book would assert that Abraham cannot be retold. With them, it shows it.
Movement III
The Eulogy praises Abraham as the poet praises the hero. It opens on a cosmic alternative: if there were no eternal consciousness in a human being, if beneath everything there lay only a wild ferment, how empty and comfortless life would be. It climbs from there, in the manner of the classical encomium, to Abraham, who was great because he expected the impossible.
The Expectoration then shows that praise cannot reach him. Johannes distinguishes two movements. The first is den uendelige Resignation, infinite resignation: the renunciation every great soul can make, as the knight of resignation renounces the princess he loves. The second is faith, which makes the renunciation and then receives the finite back:
i Kraft af det Absurde
by virtue of the absurd. Johannes says he cannot make the second movement himself.
The knight of faith, if one could find him, would look exactly like a Skatteopkræver, a tax collector: a man in his Sunday coat who looks like nothing at all, who eats his roast head of lamb in imagination. The grandeur is invisible. The sublime is turned inside out and set down in the bourgeois, and the portrait is sharp, colloquial and comic, the furthest point in tone from the four rides and governed by the same question.
Movement IV
The three Problemata test Abraham against the ethical in three forms: the universal, duty and disclosure. The first asks whether there is a teleologisk Suspension af det Ethiske, a teleological suspension of the ethical. If the ethical is the universal and the highest, Abraham is a murderer, and there is no third way. The dialectic is cool, and it repeats its formula on purpose: if this is not so, Abraham is lost.
Against Abraham the book sets three fathers who sacrifice their children: Agamemnon at Aulis, Jephthah and Brutus. Each serves the universal, the nation, the vow, the law, and the universal can mourn him and understand him. Each is a tragic hero. Abraham serves nothing that can be said to anyone, and that is the difference on which the book is built.
What the Problemata disclose is a duty that may stand outside what can be told to others, and the book presents it as terror, not licence. It will not say whether anyone has faith. It says what faith would have to be, that it cannot be mediated by the universal, and that it is indistinguishable from murder unless it is what it claims.
Movement V
The third Problema turns on disclosure, and on Abraham’s silence before the ethical. It is the longest section, and it gathers a crowd of figures: the bride at Delphi from an anecdote in Aristotle, Sarah of Tobit, Faust, Gloucester from Richard III, and Agnes and the merman, the fairy tale of a merman who might be saved by Agnes’s innocence.
Here the book is loosest and most daring. The figures are worked at a length the argument does not compel, and the thread of Abraham’s silence can be lost among them. But the merman and Gloucester open a dark double of faith: the demonic, a second way for the single individual to stand higher than the universal, in sin. The book does not fully decide how the two are related, and Johannes leaves it as an excursus. Silence, which the earlier parts asserted, is here shown.
The book was little read outside Scandinavia for most of its century. Georg Brandes lectured on Kierkegaard in 1877; German translations came from the 1880s; Lowrie’s English came in 1941. Then it was read from every side: Kafka wrote parables of Abraham, Sartre found in him the anguish of the one who must decide whether the angel is real, Camus refused the leap, Levinas spoke for Isaac, Derrida wrote Donner la mort. Each found a different book, and the pseudonym has kept every reading open, because the man named silence never says which of his claims are his.
Act III · The Twelve
The spine is tight and every main part is required. The Exordium gives Abraham four ways of failing, so that the true Abraham is defined negatively before he is praised; the Eulogy praises him as the poet praises the hero; the Expectoration shows that praise cannot reach him; the three Problemata test him against the ethical in three forms, the universal, duty and disclosure. Remove the Exordium and the book loses its proof that Abraham cannot be retold; remove Problema III and silence is asserted, not shown. What holds the axis is the last third. Problema III sprawls: Agnes and the merman, Sarah of Tobit, Faust, Gloucester and the bride at Delphi are worked at a length the argument does not compel. Necessary in its frame, loose at its end.
Score: 8.1 / 10
What the book brings into the open is articulated and holds. Faith is not a lower stage of reason to be gone beyond but a passion harder than any. It is distinguished from den uendelige Resignation, infinite resignation, the renunciation every great soul can make, by a second movement that receives the finite back i Kraft af det Absurde, by virtue of the absurd. If the ethical is the universal and the highest, Abraham is a murderer, and there is no third way. The teleologisk Suspension af det Ethiske, the teleological suspension of the ethical, names a duty that stands outside what can be said to others, and shows it as terror, not licence. The book will not say whether anyone has faith; the disclosure is what faith would have to be, and what it would cost.
Score: 9.0 / 10
The book rises often and from its first pages. The Exordium’s four rides, each closing on a mother weaning her child, are among the most charged pages of nineteenth century prose, terror held in a grave, almost liturgical cadence. The Eulogy opens on a cosmic alternative, that if there were no eternal consciousness in a human being and only a wild ferment beneath everything, life would be empty and comfortless, and climbs to Abraham, great because he expected the impossible. The knight of faith who looks exactly like a Skatteopkræver, a tax collector, is a sublime turned inside out, grandeur invisible in the bourgeois. The merman lifts the book again near its end. What holds the axis: long stretches of the Problemata are cool dialectic, repetitive in their formula. Frequent height, not continuous.
Score: 8.7 / 10
The binding of Isaac is inherited whole from Genesis 22; the credit is for what is built on it, and here the myth is rebuilt and load-bearing. The Exordium remakes the story four times, so that the archetype is shown through its corruptions. The binding is then set against three tragic heroes, Agamemnon at Aulis, Jephthah and Brutus, whose sacrifices the universal can mourn and understand, and the difference between the two kinds of father becomes the book’s structure. The particular keeps its particularity, the three and a half days’ ride, Sarah, the knife. And the book makes figures that have lived on their own: the knight of faith in his Sunday coat, the knight of resignation in love with the princess, the merman who might be saved by Agnes’s innocence. Built, not decorated; narrower in its range of building than the very highest.
Score: 8.9 / 10
The form is the swerve. The tradition of the treatise on faith and ethics is answered by a Dialektisk Lyrik, written by a pseudonym who says he cannot make the movement of faith, who praises what he cannot understand, and whose name is silence. Philosophy in Copenhagen in 1843 was Hegelian, in Heiberg and Martensen; the book attacks the system’s claim to go further than faith from inside a literary mask, mixing eulogy, fairy tale, legend, case and satire. The stake was real: Kierkegaard published at his own expense, into a small city that could read the book as a private apology for a broken engagement, a wager on a form with no public. What holds the axis: the turn to the single individual had antecedents, Hamann above all, whom the epigraph names, and the Pauline and Lutheran tradition the title cites.
Score: 8.8 / 10
The book’s knowledge is that faith cannot be communicated, and its form performs that. An author called de silentio writes about a man whose defining act is silence. A poet of the hero eulogises a man he says he cannot understand. The Exordium tries four times to retell the story and each time produces a lesser Abraham, so that the reader learns the story cannot be told rightly by anyone who has not made the movement. The subtitle names a form in which argument and song alternate because neither alone can reach the subject. Put Kierkegaard’s own name in place of the pseudonym, or a summary of Genesis 22 in place of the Exordium, and the book stops knowing that it stands outside what it describes. The argument can be restated as a treatise, and has been; the restatement loses exactly this.
Score: 9.0 / 10
The highest of the twelve, on evidence, not promise. The book has sustained about a century of intense re-examination from opposed directions without being exhausted: Heidegger and Jaspers; Sartre’s Abraham, in L’existentialisme est un humanisme (1946), and the anguish of the one who must decide whether the angel is real; Camus on the leap, in Le Mythe de Sisyphe; Levinas’s objection on behalf of Isaac and the ethical; Derrida’s Donner la mort (1992); and a literature of moral philosophy on religious killing since 2001. Each finds a different book: one about a broken engagement, a defence of faith, an attack on faith’s comfortable defenders, a warning against fanaticism, a work on the limits of communication. The form deepens the yield: the pseudonym does not speak for Kierkegaard, so every claim can be read again as irony or as earnest. Short, and inexhaustible so far.
Score: 9.2 / 10
The field is the literature and thought of the European nineteenth century, Danish first. The force is high: the book reorganised the possibility of writing about belief, setting the single individual against the universal and making faith a passion, not a stage in a system. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: Kafka’s parables of Abraham, in a letter to Klopstock of 1921, and his reading of Kierkegaard in his diaries; Sartre’s anguish of Abraham; Camus’s critique of the leap; Auden’s essays; Levinas and Derrida. The charge is delay. In its own century and language the book moved little, the Copenhagen Hegelians absorbing it barely at all, and its reach came more than half a century late; delayed influence is credited and discounted. Some of the later reach belongs to the authorship as a whole, and only what is plainly this book’s own is counted: Abraham, the knight of faith, the suspension of the ethical.
Score: 8.8 / 10
A hundred and eighty-three years. The text survives whole, as Kierkegaard printed it, and the Danish critical edition, Søren Kierkegaards Skrifter, secures it. Its presence is now very wide: translated into the major languages, taught in nearly every course in the philosophy of religion and in existentialism, and with Either/Or the most read of the pseudonymous books. That would claim the widest figure for its span; it is held back a tenth because presence was not continuous. For some sixty years after 1843 the book was barely read outside Denmark; Georg Brandes lectured on Kierkegaard in 1877, German translations followed from the 1880s, and Walter Lowrie’s English came in 1941. A surface fixed to its moment, the Preface’s satire on Danish Hegelianism and the commerce of ideas, has outlived its occasion, and that tells for the book.
Score: 9.1 / 10
The command of register is wide and exact. The Exordium’s grave, nearly biblical paratactic prose; the Eulogy’s rhetorical climbs in the manner of the classical encomium; the Preface’s urbane comic irony on an age holding a clearance sale of ideas; the Expectoration’s sharp, colloquial portrait of the tax collector who looks like nothing at all; the fairy tale voice of the merman. Danish readers rank the prose among the language’s finest, and Kierkegaard is a founder of modern Danish prose; the sound of the Danish sentence is reported, not judged here, and nothing is charged to the book for that. What holds the axis: the dialectic is repetitive by design, its formulas recurring until the reader feels the drum, and Problema III’s digressions are less finely joined than the opening. The making is load-bearing in the Exordium and the sketches of the knights, ordinary in parts of the Problemata.
Score: 8.7 / 10
Take the two most distant elements: the liturgical terror of the Exordium and the comic portrait of the tax collector; or the fairy tale of Agnes and the merman and the dry hypothesis of Problema I. One law governs them. Everything is measured by the relation of the single individual to the absolute, and every figure is a variation on Abraham, falling short of him, imitating him, or parodying him. The pseudonym’s stance, admiring, unable, ironic about himself, is held from the Preface to the Epilogue. What holds the axis is a seam in Problema III. There the demonic, in the merman and in Gloucester, opens a second way for the single individual to stand higher than the universal, in sin, and the book does not fully decide its relation to faith; Johannes leaves it as an excursus. Wide range, one law, a loose seam.
Score: 8.6 / 10
The lowest of the twelve. A short book, and not charged for its length beyond what it encompasses. What it holds, and holds together: consciousness at its extreme, in the decision that cannot be shared; the family, in father and son, Sarah, the marriage of Tobias and Sarah, the lovers of the princess and of Agnes; the state and its ethics, in Agamemnon, Jephthah and Brutus, who sacrifice children for nation, vow and law; the sacred; the age, its commerce and its philosophy, in the Preface; the body and its deformity, in Gloucester. Each order enters as a test of the one relation. What holds the axis lowest is what the book does not hold: labour, history in any extent, society beyond the figures named, and the natural order. A wide intellectual compass in a narrow human world.
Score: 7.8 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
8.7 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier IV · Canonical
Strongest Dimensions
The Bottomless Well at 9.2 and The Imperishable at 9.1, then The Unconcealment and The Living Form at 9.0. A century of re-examination from opposed directions, theological, existential, ethical and deconstructive, without exhaustion; a text whole as printed and now very widely present; the distinction of faith from infinite resignation and the suspension of the ethical, stated with their full danger; and a form that knows faith cannot be communicated and performs it, in a pseudonym named silence and four failed retellings.
Limiting Dimension
The Encompassed at 7.8, held by its world: a wide intellectual compass with labour, history in any extent, society beyond the figures named and the natural order left out. Next above it, The Inevitable at 8.1: a tight spine loosened in Problema III, whose figures are worked at a length the argument does not compel. Then The Inner Law at 8.6, one law with a seam where the demonic is left undecided.
The Necessity Cap clears at 8.1 against a threshold of 7.5. The Coherence Floor clears with room: The Living Form at 9.0, The Made at 8.7, The Inner Law at 8.6, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is met on all five: The Imperishable at 9.1, The Unconcealment at 9.0, The Archetypal Deep at 8.9, The Swerve at 8.8 and Pressure on Tradition at 8.8 clear the bar of 8.5, the last two by three tenths. The Universal Minimum is met (the lowest of the eleven axes it covers is The Inevitable at 8.1, against 7.5), and The Encompassed, which is exempted, clears its own floor of 6.0 at 7.8. Every summit condition is met; the work is held below the summit by its aggregate alone.
Basis · a reading from knowledge of Søren Kierkegaard’s Frygt og Bæven. Dialektisk Lyrik, published under the pseudonym Johannes de silentio in Copenhagen on 16 October 1843, scored as one work on the Danish as Kierkegaard printed it and as secured by the critical edition, Søren Kierkegaards Skrifter: the Preface, the Exordium (“Stemning”), the Eulogy on Abraham, the Preliminary Expectoration, Problema I, II and III, and the Epilogue. The book is on the literature desk as prose in literary form, its argument weighed through its form. No text was in hand; nothing was measured on a text, and no quotation was checked against a file. The order of the sections, the four variants of the Exordium, the three Problemata and the figures of the third are known closely; the Danish is not held sentence by sentence, and its sound is reported, not judged. Danish is quoted only in the terms whose words are certain, with the desk’s plain English beneath; the title’s source is quoted from Philippians 2:12 in the King James Version; everything else is paraphrase. Translation · the translation of Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (Princeton, Kierkegaard’s Writings VI, 1983) was read for sense as the closest to the Danish, and Alastair Hannay’s (Penguin, 1985) as the more readable English; neither is quoted, and nothing in them is charged to the book. Facts that could not be verified, among them the book’s length in pages, the wording of Johannes’s confession that he cannot understand Abraham, the figure that closes the Epilogue, and several accounts of later readers and writers who took the book up, are not given.