The knight of faith is a philosophical term coined by Kierkegaard to describe a person who has an absolute faith in God. This person not only has absolute faith in God, but is also continuously is going through a process of having that faith tested. Faith by its nature is absurd because it is not based in logics, as Kierkegaard describes it "faith begins precisely where thinking leaves off" (Kierkegaard 82). Kierkegaard views faith as being superior to thinking, believing that it exists on a higher level than what is logical. To be above the realm of logics, a knight of faith not only has to expect the improbable, but the impossible "He who expected the impossible became greater then all" (Kierkegaard 50). If the knight of faith's expectations were probable, then they would take little faith to believe in. The more improbable the expectations, the more faith is required. The more faith a person has, the greater they become, no one having more faith than a knight of faith (making them 'greatest of all').
If God exists, then he is the ultimate good in this universe. So in turn, doing what God wants would be for the ultimate good. This of course is assuming that God created everything, and that God would be on higher level than what he created. The knight of faith goes beyond the realm of the universal (e.g., logical thinking, ethics, language) and into a personal relationship with the creator of it. The universal, to put it simply, is the realm which all people have access to, the realm which people are able to express themselves and find common ground in their experiences.
Kierkegaard views faith as being something which started with Abraham, otherwise faith does not exist "because it has always existed" (Kierkegaard 85). If the universal is not needed for faith to exist, then faith is not dependant on the single individual, therefore it does not exist because the single individual is a product of the universal, which has not existed forever. Meaning that the conception of faith, if there was such a thing, started with Abraham.
In the book Fear and Trembling Kierkegaard describes Abraham as being a knight of faith. Abraham had an unquestioning faith in God. Abraham's strong and unwavering trust in God is what allows him to go beyond the ethical realm. Abraham is motivated by his desire to prove his faith in God, believing that he is being tested. It is Abraham's personal relationship with God that allows the events to take place, at the same time it is this which isolates him from everyone else (when God speaks only Abraham can hear). Abraham believes it was the power of absurd which got him Isaac in the first place and that he would not lose Isaac as a result of it. While Abraham's logic does not make sense, it is not suppose to "for all human calculation had long since been suspended" (Kierkegaard 65). Faith is like fire, logic like water -- with enough fire, all water becomes evaporated, but with enough water, the fire gets extinguished. Logic would have prevented Abraham from sacrificing his son, luckily Abraham is full of fire.
Abraham has more loyalty to God than with the universal, he feels morally justified in breaking his ethical responsibility for what he considers the greater good, which is God's will. More importantly, if God created ethics, then Abraham is justified in suspending those ethics for the being which created it. In Abraham's case, the universal ethics being suspended would be that murder is wrong and a father must love his son more then he loves himself (Kierkegaard 86). Both of these ethical rules are broken when the act is viewed through the realm of universal, which is why Abraham cannot stay in it. Abraham needed to make a leap beyond ethics for such an action to be morally justifiable. Abraham with his faith can go through the motions of killing Isaac, but at the same time maintain a deep love for him, this love is one of the most important parts of Abraham’s story. Without the love Abraham has for Isaac, his act, instead of being a sacrifice, would be a murder (Kierkegaard 60). The love of Isaac itself must be greater than the love Abraham has for himself, otherwise such an action switches from being the ultimate-expression of faith and sacrifice to one which is 'wicked' (Kierkegaard 65). To put it differently, for an action to be a sacrifice, the person doing the sacrificing must suffer a loss, otherwise it is just an act of destruction. In Abraham's case, the action would be murder if Isaac dying was not a personal loss. Even if Abraham loved Isaac, but not quite as much as himself, then the act still is selfish, and killing a son for selfish reasons is wrong ethically. It is important that the knight of faith make sacrifices and suffer, otherwise there is no challenge, and with no challenge the knight of faith is not great (everyone would be one). It is the knight of faith being challenged by his/her faith which makes them great. Those challenges must be a result of leaving the universal, otherwise they are not a knight of faith.
When the knight of faith's actions are a result of faith and not universal ethics, it is impossible to rationalize these actions from the outside. What from the outside appears to be a bizarre action is divine when faith is involved. This is because true-faith is subjective, while the universal ethics of a society are accessible to everyone. Faith can lead people into doing what would be considered strange behavior, strange to all but the individual. If Abraham's actions are looked at by the standards of universal ethics, his action is not only strange, but cold-blooded. Kierkegaard describes the knight of faith as being alone in the world because he justifies his actions in the realm of faith and not the universal. The further a knight of faith goes into basing his/her actions on faith, the more secluded he/she becomes. The more faith a person has, the further they remove themselves from the universal, which furthers them from being able to justify themselves in the universal (through speaking and actions). Those that express themselves in the universal are like those that express themselves by speaking with a particular language, this being compared to the knight of faith who speaking in tongues. While what the knight of faith is doing is understandable to himself, to everyone else it is nonsense. This makes the knight of faith unable to be understood, their actions do not follow what it viewed as normal behavior by society. When it comes to Abraham's reasoning behind sacrificing Isaac, he might as well be speaking in tongues. Kierkegaard states it as "Abraham cannot be mediated, which can also be put by saying he cannot speak" (Kierkegaard 89). On the flip-side, if faith was something which could be expressed through language and understood in the universal, a knight of faith would turn into a tragic-hero. Tragic heroes seek after others understanding and empathy, diminishing their greatness (Kierkegaard 89). In other words, a tragic hero is not as great as a knight of faith, they do not need faith because they never leave the universal (faith being what makes the knight of faith great). What is important for the knight of faith is not the destination or end result (Kierkegaard 92), it is the journey. For example, if Isaac was stabbed to death by a hitchhiker on the way to be sacrificed, Abraham would not be given any credit for Isaac's death, despite the end results being the same. The loss would not have been a result of Abraham's desire to express his faith in God, which is what is important. It is the journey, or circumstances leading up to the sacrifice that made Abraham a knight of faith. If Abraham attempted to sacrifice Isaac for the good of society because of his ethical obligations to it, he also would have been nothing but a tragic hero, having ethical obligations overridden by one which is higher (which is what a tragic hero is); which makes faith irrelevant because the universal is never left (despite the end result being the same). But Abraham was not willing to sacrifice Isaac for society, it was for the sake of God's will, and God's will was to test Abraham's faith in him. It is this relationship with God which is essential for Abraham to be a knight of faith, otherwise the killing of Isaac would just be murder. The knight of faith is required to have a direct relationship with God, while the tragic hero does not have any sort of communication with God (Kierkegaard 88).
While many people-of-faith may find Kierkegaard's conclusions on faith to be somewhat agreeable, I do not fall into that group, especially when faith is taken to the extreme (the knight of faith). To make the claim that a guy like Abraham is greater than all based on the biblical account of a irrational story is as absurd as anything, which would take a great amount of faith on the authors part (Kierkegaard claims to not have great faith). Faith is impossible to express in the universal, so Kierkegaard must have found it impossible to write Fear and Trembling (it would take a knight of faith to believe he could). This meaning that any and all claims he makes on faith cannot be accurate by his own description of it.
Kierkegaard claims that "He who expected the impossible became greater then all" (Kierkegaard 50). Nothing can exist if its existence is impossible -- if there was a god, obviously his existence would not be impossible. So if the knight of faith expects the impossible, he expects something which doesn't exist. If those that expect impossible things are the greatest, then that only means that the greatest are those that get it the most wrong -- not exactly what most would think of as being great. But a knight of faith can't even get it that wrong; if the knight of faith expects something, then that expectation is not impossible, because they do expect it. The only way to make an impossible claim is to make one in the universal; to expect that a human can walk off the edge of the Earth because it is flat is to 'expect the impossible'.
To say that the knight of faith's journey is more important than the result is another claim which I do not agree with. Rather God has access to Abraham's mind or he does not. If he does, then what point is there in testing him? That is like taking a history-test with an answer sheet; the result would already be known and would be a waste of time. The argument of freewill could be made, but I'm sure an all-knowing creator, creator of that freewill, would understand how it works (otherwise he is not all-knowing). If God does not have access to Abraham's mind, then Abraham's faith is irrelevant, and God could not truly test Abraham's faith (all God could see is the results). So in other words, testing Abraham is a waste of time, or all that would matter are the results, making the knight of faith's personal experience meaningless, which Kierkegaard claims to be required for people like Abraham to be a knight of faith. If it is the internal struggle which is important to a knight of faith, it would not matter to a god one way or another (would already know what would happen or would have no way in knowing).
The knight of faith's actions are selfish in nature. While Kierkegaard denies this conclusion, there is none other which can be made. The knight of faith believes that only through faith that death can be survived, he believes that the more faith he has, the better his chances "for he who labours does not perish" (Kierkegaard 59). Being a knight of faith takes a considerable amount of sacrifice and effort. Surely such a person would not go through all that if they didn't believe that it would be beneficial to do so. For example, if Abraham believed that by doing what he was doing, he would spend an eternity suffering in Hell, he would not do it. It is the prospect of eternal salvation which motivates Abraham. Abraham is trying to befriend God (who controls his fate). Not only that, but if the story was changed up a bit, and it was the devil which was doing such a test, Abraham's act would be considered the ultimate expression of evil. If the difference between good and evil is who is giving the orders, then good and evil is not about the action, but what supernatural being is responsible.
A knight of faith is like a kid going to fat camp. The kids don't enjoy eating vegetables and doing all that exercise, for them it is torture, but they are looking for the end it will achieve (or their parents are). If a fat kid was told that he could eat a special type of jelly donut, and that magically all the weight would be lost, the kid would obviously eat it. The same is true for the knight of faith, Abraham did not enjoy jumping through all of God's hoops, but he did so because he wanted to prove his faith in God. If God offered Abraham the chance to equally prove his faith by eating a jelly-filled donut, instead of having to prove himself by killing his son etc., Abraham would have eaten the donut, he would not have taken the hard route to achieve the same end. In other words, for Abraham the end result he is seeking is what is really important to him, which is to prove his faith, doing it by any means necessary. If Abraham believed that sacrificing Isaac would have no effect, then he would not have done it, unless he deep-down hated Isaac. If this is not the case, and Abraham would rather kill his son than eat a donut, then the killing of Isaac is not a sacrifice and not a test of faith. So all that matters for Abraham is the end result or he is not a knight of faith (again, would rather kill Isaac than eat a donut, which makes it not a sacrifice).
It is quite obvious that I am not a person of faith. I believe that faith is a paradox created by a species faced with the unpleasant awareness of its own mortality, which it uses to escape by removing what caused it in the first place. Faith, when used conveniently, can protect the knight of faith -- protect them from the harsh reality of a heartless world. Faith is the easy way to patch the gaping hole created by the uncertainty of death, some would rather live a lie than live in ignorance. Those lies sometimes satisfying the desire for power and control, making them all the more powerful. Those that are uncomfortable with the unknown use faith to pretend they're not.
MLA Citation
Kierkegaard, Soren. Fear and Trembling. London, England: Penguin Books, 1985. 50,60,65,65,67,82,84,85,86,89,92,88. Print.
No comments:
Post a Comment