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Introduction: The Problem It is well known that Søren Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling,1 which he attributed to the pseudonym Johannes de Silentio,2 is about the complex relation between the ‘stages’ of existence that he calls “the ethical” (characterized by moral duties and virtues) and the religious (or ‘faith’). Despite much scholarly attention, deep disagreement remains about how these life-views or existential stages are distinguished and related, and in particular about how Kierkegaard understands the transition from the ethical to the religious. In Fear and Trembling , this is the movement from the “Knight of Infinite Resignation,” who exemplifies a kind of limiting point within the ethical, to the “Knight of Faith” instantiated by Abraham in the story of the “Binding of Isaac” (which Rabbinic literature calls the Akedah).3 One reading of this transition from ethical resignation to religious faith situates it within a broader irrationalist interpretation of Kierkegaard’s stages. In After Virtue, Alasdair MacIntyre argues that Kierkegaard’s portrayal of ethical choice in Either/Or replaces the objective authority of moral virtues and duties with the arbitrary fiat of the individual will that simply chooses to acknowledge moral obligation.4 MacIntyre also argues that in Philosophical Fragments, Kierkegaard invokes radical and ultimate choice to explain how one becomes a Christian;5 similarly, he says that in Fear and Trembling Kierkegaard uses Abraham to show that faith requires a criterionless leap.6 Thus, according to MacIntyre, Kierkegaard holds that faith is total submission to “the arbitrary fiats of a cosmic despot” who can make anything right by commanding it, even murder—a God who resembles Blake’s “Nobodaddy.”7 15. Faith as Eschatological Trust in Fear and Trembling JohnJ.Davenport Faith as Eschatological Trust in Fear and Trembling · 197 In response to MacIntyre, I have argued that the process of “choice” by which one moves from aesthetic to ethical orientations or ways of life consists in personal appropriation of ethical standards through identity-defining commitments that depend on already-recognized ethical ideals; the individual who “chooses” the ethical does not posit or create the authority of ethical norms. Since Kierkegaard After MacIntyre, few scholars still hold that Either/Or portrays the movement from the aesthetic to the ethical stage as an arbitrary radical choice; but proto-Sartrean readings of Kierkegaardian faith remain popular. In this essay I extend my anti-irrationalist interpretation of the ethical to Kier­ kegaardian faith. I hold that understanding “the religious” in all of Kierkegaard ’s thought depends on grasping the central idea in Fear and Trembling, without which the Fragments and the Postscript cannot be properly interpreted (though some think we can work backward from these later texts to a reading of Fear and Trembling).8 However, as we will see, there are two quite different approaches to showing that the “teleological suspension of the ethical” in Silentio ’s Akedah is not simply irrational, and I will develop the alternative already outlined in Alastair Hannay’s book Kierkegaard and Edward Mooney’s classic commentary on Fear and Trembling,9 as well as in his reading of Repetition. In his critique of Fear and Trembling, MacIntyre has hardly been alone. For at least half a century since Kierkegaard got into English (as Walter Lowrie put it), undergraduates have been taught that Fear and Trembling presents faith as rejecting all natural knowledge and reason in favor of divine commands that can have any content or abrogate any ethical principle with purported universal application. The Danish existentialist, they were told, recommends total obedience to a God who demands our allegiance to his own inscrutable authority. This venerable tradition of portraying Kierkegaard as an absolute theological voluntarist is well represented by Brand Blanshard, who complains that in Fear and Trembling, religious obligation transcends Kantian universal judgment: it may be our duty “to trample down the affections of natural man and all his nicely calculated goods and evils.”10 In acting to sacrifice Isaac, Blanshard says, the only motive Abraham could have is “the command from on high to kill,” since “every human consideration” could only provide motives not to commit such a heinous crime.11 So Abraham “was called upon to renounce the moral for the religious.”12 It is hard to overstate the violence done by this popular portrayal, which reduces Kierkegaardian faith to blind fanaticism.13 The situation is not helped by some postmodern fans of Fear and Trembling who embrace this misreading and celebrate the alleged irrationalism of Kierkegaardian faith as...

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