When a higher command overrules every moral law
In Fear and Trembling, Søren Kierkegaard explored an existential crisis: God commanding Abraham to sacrifice his son Isaac. Normally, killing one’s child is an unambiguous moral evil. Kierkegaard coined the term "teleological suspension of the ethical" to describe moments when universal moral duties are temporarily set aside for a transcendent divine purpose. Abraham’s agonizing trial showed that genuine faith cannot be reduced to conventional ethics—it requires a dizzying leap into the absurd.
The Agony on Mount Moriah
In 1843, Søren Kierkegaard published Fear and Trembling under the pseudonym Johannes de silentio, or John of the Silence. The text opens by meditating on the biblical story of Abraham and the binding of his son Isaac on Mount Moriah. In the narrative found in Genesis, God promises Abraham that he will be the father of many nations through Isaac, his long-awaited child. Yet God later issues an incomprehensible command: Abraham must take Isaac up the mountain and slaughter him as a burnt offering.
Johannes de silentio observes that conventional religious culture had smoothed away the terror of this passage. Pastors praised Abraham as the great father of faith, treating his story as an uplifting moral example. To Johannes, this glosses over the terrifying reality. If a man in modern society resolved to butcher his child on an altar, the community would rightly condemn him as an abhorrent criminal. Abraham did not set out on a pleasant spiritual retreat; he lived through days of agonizing dread, holding a knife over the boy he loved more than life itself.
The problem Kierkegaard identifies is that Abraham cannot be assimilated into standard religious comfort. By any human moral standard, killing one's innocent child is not a demonstration of virtue—it is murder. To take the biblical text seriously requires confronting a profound paradox: either Abraham is a deranged killer who belonged on the gallows, or faith represents an existential realm that cannot be evaluated through the lens of ordinary ethics.