Distinctions Between Johannes de Silentio's Three Stages in Fear and Trembling Anonymous College

To read Johannes de Silentio’s account of Abraham’s sacrifice of Isaac in Fear and Trembling is to understand the paradoxical nature of the single individual and how there are internal and external forces that define the individual in the particular and in relation to everything else around them. This account explores Abraham’s journey up the mountain to sacrifice his son, Isaac, because God called him to do so. During this ordeal, Abraham encounters a moral yet absurd expedition, and in the eyes of Johannes de Silentio, experiences a double movement of faith that defines the journey going up the mountain, at the moment when Abraham raises his knife in front of Isaac’s line of sight, and going down the mountain. This double movement, with the knight of infinite resignation being the first movement, and the knight of faith being the second, is the process of acquiring the status of knight of faith. The knight of infinite resignation is the concern with the ethical and and universal and how the knight of infinite resignation is bound by infinitude, while the knight of faith is the second movement and acquires the first movement of resignation, but comes with the greater understanding of the virtue of the absurd that Isaac will...