Fear and Trembling

⚖The case for it

Kierkegaard withholds the proof deliberately, and that refusal carries the whole case. Faith cannot be argued into anyone: a demonstration that made Abraham respectable would hand him back to the ethics he had to break, so it would destroy the thing it set out to establish. Hence the restarts. They read like the drafts of a writer who cannot get the sentences to land, and when you try it yourself, you fail at the place he fails. You finish worse at explaining Abraham and better at seeing why nobody explains him.

— the honest librarian

✕The case against

Four retellings of the same Abraham story, then three Problemata that circle it again: Kierkegaard does not argue so much as orbit. The pseudonym lets him assert the knight of faith without ever producing one, and a teleological suspension of the ethical is one fanatic's permission slip away from horror, an objection the book raises and then admires instead of answering.

— the honest librarian