I love my child, my friend, my beloved with the emphasis
on the my, I love with a preferential self love that I need to
suspend with infinite resignation if I am truly to love every
other person as they are in themselves and not as I see them.
So this hard saying is part of the cultivation process in which
I can come to love all persons in the very value of their personhood.
In accord with Kierkegaard’s existential dialectic after I stop
loving my beloved absolutely and I come to love Love absolutely
the I can love all persons as persons and then love my
beloved relatively in all of his or her unique differences.
According to Silentio Abraham is already called upon to do this.
II.2.8 The Abrahamic Blessing for All Peoples
Kierkegaard’s understanding of the strategy of the highest love
that is the gift and task to reconcile all peoples should let
the prodigal son, Jesus, go out to the elder brother, Socrates, the Greek,
and Abraham, the Jew, and begin by loving them as more important.
Just as Socrates in Søren ’s mind would nobly come to love Jesus
as more important in return so could Abraham also do that.
Abraham believes that the promise of being a blessing for all peoples
can be fulfilled through Isaac and his offspring and Jesus
could be the key person in that family line for blessing all peoples.
Silentio treats Abraham and Jesus as the same for the reader
could think that Abraham’s double movement leap is the same
as that of the God-man who as eternal came into the finite flesh.
They do both have universalist intentions even though in Jesus’
case the Son is sacrificed for every single individual person,
whereas in Abraham’s Isaac is not sacrificed for all peoples.
In Problemata III it is asked if it was ethically defensible
for Abraham to conceal his understanding from his family.
The main point is that Abraham did not have any certain understanding.
He acted as if he would sacrifice Isaac and believed as if he would not.
Abraham is trapped in a double bind that calls for the double
movement leap of faith and that makes him higher than other
heroes such as Agamemnon, Brutus, and Jephte who
did sacrifice their children for very clear teleological reasons.
They were Knights of Infinite Resignation, not Knights of Faith.
Silentio’s Abraham is already being loved as a blessing for the peoples
by helping us to love the girl and the young swain, Ephigenia in Aulis,
Aristotle’s bride and bridegroom, Axel and Valborg, Queen Elizabeth,
Agnes and Merman, Sara and Tobias, and Gretchen and Faust.
We must love Abraham as more important for he is greater than these.
II.2.9 Loving the God-Man as More Important
This pseudonym, Johannes de Silentio, is being used by Kierkegaard
to deceive us out of our self-deceit into the truth and he tells us
in the Epilogue at the end of Fear and Trembling the truth is that
the highest passion in a person is faith and faith is:
an honest earnestness that fearlessly
and incorruptibly points to the tasks
an honest earnestness
that lovingly maintains the tasks
that does not disquiet people into wanting
to attain the highest too hastily
but keep the tasks young’
and beautiful and lovely to look at
inviting to all and yet also difficult
and inspiring to the noble mind. (121)
Our highest passion is faith in the gift and task of reconciliation.
We can spend our life on this or we can become weary of it.
Fear and Trembling is Kierkegaard’s way of fulfilling his task.
He wants to make the task young and beautiful as was Regina.
She awakened him from his unmotivated lethargy and sleep walking.
By showing us Abraham and his task we can come to love Jesus
and the task He has given us of spending our lives for others.
The actual is higher than the possible and the highest of all
is to live out the highest possible actual which is the gift
and the task which Paul and Kierkegaard were given and which
we can all be given if we notice it and become earnest about it.
Fear and Trembling is a motivational book that wants to move
us to do nothing less than the best we can dream of for others.
The promise and the task of faith in that promise so motivated
Abraham that he lived out his belief that by giving up Isaac
he would get him back a billion fold as a blessing for all peoples.
Jesus as the grain of wheat died that all Abraham’s might live.
II.3 Reconciling the God-Man and Job
II.3.1 Repetition’s Reconciliation Is the Only Happy Love
In Repetition, the companion volume to Fear and Trembling, Søren
also discusses his love for Regina
