, published in 1843 under the pseudonym Johannes de silentio (John the Silent). The title is a reference to a line from Philippians 2:12, "...continue to work out your salvation with fear and trembling."
Kierkegaard wanted to understand the anxiety that must have been present in Abraham
when "God tempted [him] and said to him, take Isaac
, your only son, whom you love, and go to the land of Moriah and offer him as a burnt offering on the mountain that I shall show you."
Abraham had a choice to complete the task or to forget it.
Not merely in the realm of commerce but in the world of ideas as well our age is organizing a regular clearance sale. Everything is to be had at such a bargain that it is questionable whether in the end there is anybody who will want to bid.
If there were no eternal consciousness in a man, if at the foundation of all there lay only a wildly seething power which writhing with obscure passions produced everything that is great and everything that is insignificant, if a bottomless void never satiated lay hidden beneath all–what then would life be but despair?
It is human to lament, human to weep with them that weep, but it is greater to believe, more blessed to contemplate the believer.
...passion is necessary. Every movement of infinity comes about by passion, and no reflection can bring a movement about.
"I believe nevertheless that I shall get her, in virtue, that is, of the absurd, in virtue of the fact that with God all things are possible."
"By virtue of the absurd thou shalt get every penny back again. Can you believe that?"
Is there such a thing as a teleological suspension of the ethical?
To explain the whole of existence and faith along with it, without having a conception of what faith is, is easy, and that man does not make the poorest calculation in life who reckons upon admiration when he possesses such an explanation; for, as Boileau says, "un sot trouve toujours un plus sot qui l'admire."