Johannes de silentio:religious Poet or Faithless aesthete?

ryan Kemp

Of all Kierkegaard’s pseudonyms, few are as difficult to pin down as Fear and Trembling’s Johannes de silentio. unlike his peers, de silentio’s credentials—by his own account a faithless poet—suggest that his topic of interest (ostensibly, “faith”) may significantly outdistance his expertise. If this is correct, then de silentio and his masterwork Fear and Trembling may serve an exclusively negative role in the Kierkegaardian authorship, perhaps showing the reader what faithfulness (and by implication faith) is not. in this article, i look at two central aspects of de silentio’s character: his status as a poet, and his status as an outsider to faith. my hope is that such an analysis will, along with introducing de silentio, put the reader in a position to know one further thing about him: that, in principle, there is no reason to question his reliability as a commentator on faith.

I. Johannes’ Mode of Communication

early in Fear and Trembling, de silentio suggests that his task—namely, preserving the memory of abraham—is one of the poet.1 Stated as such, the significance of de silentio’s identity is ambiguous. being a poet may, on the one hand, simply be a claim about authorial craft: that de silentio writes imaginative fictions. On the other hand, being a poet may indicate something about existential status: that de silentio is, for example, someone with an aesthetic “life-view.”2 as we will see (in this section and the next), de silentio’s poeticism can be profitably analyzed in both senses.

Perhaps no single line captures de silentio’s understanding of the poet’s task better than his praise of Shakespeare in the first problema. There, de silentio commends

1 see especially the opening paragraphs of de silentio’s “speech in Praise of abraham.” though, at one point, de silentio claims that he is “not a poet” (SKS 4, 180 / FTP, 116), this is best understood as a claim about the unique “dialectical” task that de silentio undertakes in the problemata. Perhaps the most accurate description of de silentio’s authorial role is “poet-dialectician,” an author who wields the rhetorical tools of both the poet and the philosopher. For more on the distinction between these two roles see ryan Kemp, “in defense of a straightforward reading of Fear and Trembling,” Kierkegaard Studies Yearbook, 2013, pp. 49–70.2 this is what Kierkegaard claims about Hans Christian andersen in From the Papers of One Still Living. i will say more about this in the article’s second section.

Ryan Kemp144

shakespeare’s ability to “say everything, everything, everything exactly as it is.”3 if, as is commonly done, shakespeare is here invoked to represent poetic mastery, then it is revealing that de silentio focuses on shakespeare’s exactness. this suggests that, far from exaggerating reality (as a common caricature of the poet maintains), de silentio thinks that the best poets are capable of faithful reproduction. though, in itself, this does not appear to distinguish the poet from the philosopher (or the pastor), only the former appreciates that (1) reproduction involves replicating an affective state in the reader, and (2) that the poet’s rhetorical tools are best suited to replicating such a state. that de silentio understands his task in these terms is best brought out by considering a series of passages that develop de silentio’s distinction between understanding and having faith, a distinction that Johannes Climacus (the pseudonymous author of the Postscript) will later make in terms of objective and subjective truth.

the distinction between understanding faith and having faith is suggested for the first time in Fear and Trembling’s preface. there de silentio writes: “even if one were to render the whole of the content of faith into conceptual form [Begrebets Form], it would not follow that one had grasped [begrebet] faith, grasped how one came to it [kom ind i den], or how it came to one.”4 in this passage we see the juxtaposition of two distinct forms of understanding: the understanding of the philosopher and the understanding of the first-person participant. Though the full implications of each will be filled in below, we can provisionally distinguish the two by saying that philosophic understanding involves grasping a concept’s meaning (for example, knowledge of what faith is), while first-person understanding involves a strictly experiential or affective element (for example, the experience of having faith).

in the second problema, de silentio revisits this distinction in the context of explaining the knight of faith’s isolation. He writes:

so even if someone were so cowardly and base as to want to be a knight of faith on someone else’s responsibility, he would never become one; for only the single individual becomes one, as the single individual, and this is the knight’s greatness, as i can well understand [forstaae] without being party to it [uden at komme ind deri], since I lack courage; though also his terror, as i can understand [fatte] even better.5

de silentio is clear that the divide between himself and the knight of faith is not one of philosophic understanding. not only does de silentio claim to understand the commitments of faith (in this case, its necessary conditions), it is conceivable that he and the knight of faith share the same religious beliefs.6 notice also that de silentio claims that he possesses philosophic understanding without having faith. the wording here—uden at komme ind deri—recalls the claim from the preface, that an ability to conceptualize faith does not entail that one has also come into it [kom ind i

3 SKS 4, 154 / FTP, 90. 4 SKS 4, 103 / FTP, 42–3. 5 SKS 4, 163 / FTP, 99.6 For instance, that when God commands a person to sacrifice their son, they should obey.

Johannes de silentio 145

den].7 This passage also hints at what first-person understanding has that philosophic understanding lacks. in the end, what prevents de silentio from possessing faith is a failure to muster a certain kind of “courage.” thus, having faith, as opposed to merely knowing about it, requires certain motivational conditions to be met.

in the preamble, de silentio makes the above distinction in terms of conventional wisdom and faith. He writes that conventional wisdom “believes it is enough to have knowledge of large truths. no other work is necessary. but then it does not get its bread, it starves to death while everything is transformed into gold.”8 a few pages later de silentio explains what such wisdom lacks. He writes: “what is left out of abraham’s story is anguish,”9 and “yet without that anguish abraham is not the one he is.”10 Finally, de silentio locates himself with respect to the distinction, writing:

i for my part have devoted considerable time to understanding [forstaae] the Hegelian philosophy, believe also that i have more or less understood it….all this i do easily, naturally, without it causing me any mental strain. but when i have to think about abraham i am virtually annihilated. i am all the time aware of that monstrous paradox that is the content of abraham’s life, i am constantly repulsed, and my thought, for all its passion, is unable to enter into it [ikke trænge ind i det], cannot come one hairbreadth further. i strain every muscle to catch sight of it, but the same instant i become paralyzed.11

as in the passage from the second problema, de silentio again expresses an inability to enter into faith. unlike the intellectual demands of understanding Hegel, faith demands a passion that “repulses” and “paralyzes,” leaving de silentio in a position where he “can indeed describe [beskrive] the movements of faith, but…cannot perform them.”12

Now that we have the distinction between philosophic and first-person understanding in hand, we can appreciate why de silentio thinks that the poet is uniquely able to “remember” Abraham. If Abraham has faith in the first-person sense, then getting a reader to understand abraham’s faith requires more than simply clarifying faith’s necessary and sufficient conditions. It also requires reproducing an affective response, in this case, the anxiety of faith. it is a failure to do the latter that makes an otherwise accurate retelling of abraham’s story misleading. we see this in de silentio’s example of the oblivious pastor, where the pastor’s mistake is not that he gets all the facts of abraham’s story wrong (he is actually quite good in this regard), but rather that he has a misguided view of what it means to impart a lesson, entirely ignoring the emotional dimension without which an accurate depiction of having faith cannot be given.13

7 this distinction between the two types of understanding also makes sense of de silentio’s otherwise contradictory claim that he both understands and does not understand abraham. what de silentio cannot understand (or think himself into) is the source of abraham’s motivational strength. 8 SKS 4, 123–4 / FTP, 57–8. 9 SKS 4, 124 / FTP, 58. 10 SKS 4, 126 / FTP, 60. 11 SKS 4, 128 / FTP, 62–3. 12 SKS 4, 132 / FTP, 67. 13 SKS 4, 124 / FTP, 58.

Ryan Kemp146

that de silentio understands the task of “remembering” in this broader sense is hinted at in the first problema where he writes, “It goes against my nature to speak inhumanly of greatness, to let its grandeur fade into an indistinct outline at an immense distance, or represent it as great without the human element in it coming to the fore—whence it ceases to be the great.”14 in this context, speaking “inhumanly” consists in retelling abraham’s story without also creating a mood (Stemning) by which the reader can become emotionally invested in it (komme ind i den). this mode of storytelling is “inhuman” (as opposed to just poor) because it assumes a one-sided model of understanding, one that highlights understanding’s cognitive dimension while ignoring its emotional or human dimension. while de silentio thinks that both philosophers and pastors alike engage in this kind of one-sidedness, the “poet-dialectician” strives for balance. For the latter, “attunement” always prepares the way for dialectics.

A final hint that exactness (and not mere emotionalism) is the aim of de silentio’s poeticism is found in Fear and Trembling’s epilogue. there, two distinct methods of capturing the “human element” are considered: artificial inflation and honest earnestness. recalling the dutch merchants who dumped their cargo overboard in order to drive up prices, de silentio asks:

is it this kind of trick of self-deception the present generation needs…or has it not already perfected itself sufficiently in the art of self-deception? Or is what it needs not rather an honest seriousness which fearlessly and incorruptibly calls attention to the tasks…which does not frighten people into wanting to dash precipitately to the heights, but keeps the tasks young and beautiful and charming to behold….whatever one generation learns from another, it can never learn from a predecessor the genuinely human factor.15

this passage suggests that while the poet’s craft can be used to exaggerate deceptively, this is not the task that de silentio sets for himself in Fear and Trembling. Following shakespeare, de silentio thinks that bringing forth the “genuinely human factor” must be done with an “honest seriousness,” a seriousness that attempts to say “everything exactly as it is.”16 this capacity to faithfully reproduce, thinks de silentio, constitutes the poet’s advantage over more didactic forms of communication.

Having now gained some insight into the rationale behind de silentio’s poetic method, we can move on to consider what connection, if any, exists between de silentio’s poet-identity and his faithlessness.

II. Johannes’ Life-View

while determining de silentio’s relationship to Fear and Trembling invites a careful analysis of where de silentio resides vis-à-vis Kierkegaard’s stages, most considerations of this kind stop with the simple recognition that he does not have faith. From here, many go on to claim that de silentio (as an outsider) likely misunderstands

14 SKS 4, 156 / FTP, 92. my emphasis.15 SKS 4, 208 / FTP, 145. my emphasis.16 SKS 4, 154 / FTP, 90.

Johannes de silentio 147

and exaggerates faith’s requirements. in this section of the article, i argue that de silentio—far from being an insincere aesthete—is closest to Kierkegaard’s religious stage. However, even if he is not religious, i argue (in section iii) that there is no compelling reason to think that his faithlessness prevents him from understanding and communicating faith’s requirements.

A. Poetry and Aestheticism

in From the Papers of One Still Living, Kierkegaard draws an explicit connection between a writer’s mode of expression and a writer’s “life-view.” This is significant because it suggests that facts about a pseudonym’s existential status might be inferred from his way of communicating, in de silentio’s case, his poeticism. while From the Papers of One Still Living is both early and distinct enough to make any easy application of its schematic problematic, Kierkegaard does—in later works—endorse the general claim that an author’s manner of communication reveals something about his inner development. with this in mind, we can ask what de silentio’s mode of communication reveals about his character.

some of the pseudonymous works suggest a close connection between aestheticism and poetry. Consider, for instance, the first passage of A’s papers from Either/Or. the passage reads: “what is a poet? an unhappy person who conceals profound anguish in his heart but whose lips are so formed so that as sighs and cries pass over them they sound like beautiful music.”17 this comes from the opening of the “Diapsalmata” and thus serves to introduce the reader to aestheticism for the first time. It is significant that this introduction is made by casting the aesthete as a poet, a move that naturally suggests that poets—if identified with any of Kierkegaard’s stages—must be aesthetes.

Like most generalizations, however, the association of poetry and aestheticism has it counterexamples. For instance, a’s papers also praise don giovanni and Faust, two characters who are not explicitly poets. though each possesses qualities that can be associated with poetry (for instance, the power of seduction) neither can be straightforwardly classified as a poet in the literal sense. Perhaps, though, the entailment runs in the other direction: if you are a poet, then you are also an aesthete. However, this does not hold either. Consider, for instance, what Johannes Climacus says about poetry in the Postscript:

if the religious is truly the religious…then it cannot forget that religiously the pathos is not a matter of singing praises and celebrating or composing song books but of existing oneself. thus the poet production, if it is not totally absent, or if it is just as rich as before, is regarded by the poet himself as accidental, which shows that he understands himself religiously, because esthetically the poet-production is the important thing, and the poet is the accidental.18

in this important passage, Climacus points out that as long as an author applies his poetic skill to specifically religious ends (that is, regards the poet production

17 SKS 2, 27 / EO1, 19. 18 SKS 7, 353 / CUP1, 388.

Ryan Kemp148

as “accidental”), poetry need not be seen as strictly “aesthetic.” in fact, if we broaden what counts as poetry (as de silentio’s example encourages) to include what Kierkegaard calls “indirect communication,” then Kierkegaard’s pseudonymous works may reasonably be interpreted as precisely this kind of production.19 if this is right, then we ought to disabuse ourselves of the understandable but misguided notion that poets are necessarily aesthetes. Having made this more general point about poets, we can now examine whether there is any evidence that de silentio’s own poet production is, in fact, religious. Following Climacus’ suggestion, we will consider whether de silentio’s communication (1) aims at religious reproduction, and (2) is an expression of a religious existence.

De silentio appears to meet the first condition. Our earlier analysis suggested that the goal of de silentio’s poetic method is to put the reader in a position where the first-person condition of having faith can be satisfied. Toward this end, de silentio cultivates a mood whereby the reader can understand both that anxiety is a necessary condition of faith and what that anxiety is like experientially.

with respect to the second condition, things are considerably less straightforward. if we understand religiousness solely in terms of having faith, then clearly de silentio does not possess (nor by implication communicate) a religious existence. if, on the other hand, religiousness is understood in the broader sense outlined in the Concluding Unscientific Postscript (as either socratic or Christian in character), then de silentio may still meet the requirements of socratic faith. a second way in which de silentio’s communication might turn out to be religious is if it itself is a resource for de silentio’s religious growth. on this interpretation, Fear and Trembling would not merely be an attempt to reproduce faith in others, but it would also be an attempt to cultivate de silentio’s own faith through a reflection on Abraham’s example. Since inquiring into de silentio’s socratic faith requires examining several claims that are potentially drawn into question by de silentio’s religious sincerity (or lack thereof), it makes sense to examine the second possibility first: namely, is de silentio’s role as speechmaker compatible with a genuine desire to have faith?

that speech making and religious earnestness are incompatible is suggested, among other places, in Kierkegaard’s A Literary Review of Two Ages. there, Kierkegaard claims that one of the chief ways the “present age” avoids commitment is by replacing action with mere talkativeness. to get a sense of what Kierkegaard means, consider the following passage:

[A] political virtuoso might be able to perform an amazing tour de force….He would issue invitations to a general meeting for the purpose of deciding on a revolution, wording the invitation so cautiously that even the censor would have to let it pass. on the evening of the meeting, he would so skillfully create the illusion that they had made a revolution that everyone would go home quietly, having passed a very pleasant evening.20

applied to de silentio’s case, we might worry that de silentio’s praise of abraham is a way to acknowledge faith without also taking the emotional risk required to possess it.

19 at least as they are evaluated in hindsight in Kierkegaard’s The Point of View for My Activity as an Author. 20 SKS 8, 68 / TA, 70.

Johannes de silentio 149

if this is the case, then de silentio would not only fail to be a religious writer, his qualifications as a religious commentator (that is, someone tasked to accurately describe faith’s requirements) would be seriously drawn into question. the latter follows from the reasonable suspicion that someone interested in excusing himself from the task of faith might also have an interest in inflating the requirements of faith, perhaps making them appear so absurd that anyone who fails to achieve them could not be reasonably faulted.21

though it is natural to entertain this worry with respect to someone as long-winded as de silentio, there is no clear evidence that his talkativeness is of the problematic variety. First, consider that Kierkegaard does not appear to endorse the following strong version of what we might call the “talkativeness thesis.” Strong talkativeness thesis: “if a person talks about faith, then there is good reason to think that he neither has it nor is developing it.” to the contrary, Kierkegaard seems to think that expressing one’s faith, when done with sufficient subtlety, can be a coherent manifestation of a genuinely religious life. Presumably, Kierkegaard would not have spent so much time writing about faith if he thought it entailed that he was thereby moving away from it. if Kierkegaard does not endorse the strong talkativeness thesis, we should not assume that someone is a mere “talker” unless there is independent evidence that suggests this is the case. we might call this the “weak talkativeness thesis.” Weak talkativeness thesis: “if a person is content merely to talk about faith, then there is good reason to think that he neither has it nor is developing it.” when we apply the weak thesis to the “revolutionaries” from A Literary Review of Two Ages (adjusting the test for “revolutionary sincerity”), we conclude that they are not sincere revolutionaries: they are mere “talkers.” However, when we apply the weak thesis to de silentio we cannot draw the same conclusion. though clearly he talks about faith, it is not at all clear that he is content to merely talk about faith. For all we know, his poetic communication may be accompanied by, or a means to, genuine religious striving. This latter possibility, that religious reflection is a possible means to religious growth, is worth pausing to consider further.

in marked contrast to the strong talkativeness thesis, Kierkegaard sometimes suggests that an ability to reflect abstractly on oneself, can be an important first step to personal growth. in A Literary Review of Two Ages, speaking of the reflective distance created by a skilled author, Kierkegaard writes:

21 daniel Conway makes exactly this claim about de silentio in his “the Confessional drama of Fear and Trembling,” in Søren Kierkegaard: Critical Assessments, vols. 1–4, ed. by daniel Conway and K.e. gover, London: routledge 2002, vol. 3, pp. 87–103. For a response to Conway, see John Lippitt, “what neither abraham nor Johannes de silentio Could say,” Aristotelian Society Supplementary Volume 82, 2008, pp. 79–99. in addition to Lippitt’s response (rehearsed in brief below), Conway’s claim reverses the model Kierkegaard offers in A Literary Review of Two Ages. in Two Ages, the “present age” is accused of deflecting responsibility by “leveling” greatness, not exaggerating it. though i remain unconvinced by Conway’s reading, it represents a serious challenge to the interpretation that i offer here. if de silentio’s self-reports are untrustworthy, then we should not expect to learn much about his character from what he says about himself.

Ryan Kemp150

Here is the inviting intimacy of the cozy inner sanctum from which heated emotions and critical, dangerous decisions and extreme exertions are excluded, because there is no room or forbearance for such things. a willingness to listen is the prerequisite for appropriating persuasive guidance; this relaxed compliance is the prerequisite for persuasion’s success in eliciting new harmony again from disharmony.22

This passage suggests that reflective space, whether created by oneself or an author, is sometimes a means to practical appropriation. if this is right, then we should not assume that talking about faith is always a means to evading faith. to the contrary, reflection may sometimes be a prerequisite for its development.23

B. Evidence of Religiousness

up to now, i have defended a strictly negative thesis: de silentio’s poeticism does not entail that he is an aesthete. if, however, we want to move beyond this to say something positive about de silentio’s life-view, we will need to transition from a mere analysis of his communication style to what he actually says about himself. when we do this, we discover that de silentio comes very close to what Johannes Climacus later calls socratic faith.

in Fear and Trembling, the three most salient existence categories are the tragic hero, the knight of infinite resignation, and the knight of faith. De silentio denies belonging to the latter category and says a few, initially confusing, things about his relationship to the other two. For instance, in the preamble he writes:

if—in the guise of tragic hero, for higher than that i cannot come—i were summoned to such an extraordinary royal progress as that to the mountain in moriah i know very well what i would have done….the moment i mounted the horse i would have said to myself: “Now everything is lost, God demands Isaac, I sacrifice him, and with him all my joy—yet god is love and for me continues to be so.”24

what is confusing about this passage is that de silentio claims that he cannot attain anything higher than the category of tragic hero while also confessing a willingness to perform an action that would, eo ipso, take him beyond that category. to appreciate this we need only recall that the tragic hero never transgresses ethical boundaries unless the transgression itself is demanded by ethics. Following this model, Agamemnon, Jephthah, and Brutus all sacrifice a child for the sake of the state. In contrast, the sacrifice of Isaac admits of no public justification: from the perspective of ethics, it is an unintelligible act of murder. given this, de silentio’s counterfactual willingness to sacrifice Isaac for no other reason than that God demands it, suggests that he is not a mere tragic hero; he is a knight of infinite resignation.

Later in the preamble, de silentio is clear about this. He writes:

22 SKS 8, 22 / TA, 19.23 Lippitt makes a strong case for this in his “what neither abraham nor Johannes de silentio Could say.”24 SKS 4, 130 / FTP, 64.

Johannes de silentio 151

But to my own strength I cannot get the least little thing of what belongs to finitude; for I am continually using my energy to renounce everything. by my own strength i can give up the princess, and I shall be no sulker but find joy and peace and repose in my pain, but with my own strength i cannot get her back again, for all that strength is precisely what i use to renounce my claim on her.25

Just before this passage, de silentio explains infinite resignation through the story of a young man who exchanges love’s finite consummation—receiving his “princess” in time—for the idea of the princess as his one and eternal love. this motif is revisited in the above passage, with de silentio now casting himself as the knight of resignation. Like the young man of the story, de silentio is prepared to renounce finitude for the sake of the infinite. More specifically, he is prepared to obey God’s call to suspend the ethical (that is, sacrifice Isaac) without also having the courage to trust that god can restore what is renounced in the act of suspension, namely, ethical satisfaction (the promised son). this inability to return (gjentage) to the ethical is what makes de silentio a mere knight of infinite resignation. He writes, “For in the temporal world god and i cannot talk together, we have no common language….nor could I have made more than the infinite movement in order to find myself again and rest once more in myself.”26 Instead of following Abraham and reclaiming finitude’s blessings, de silentio is resigned to the relative safety of infinitude, a position that suspends the ethical while remaining within what de silentio calls the sphere of the Socratic.

Infinite resignation’s Socratic character is emphasized when de silentio writes: “if faith is no more than what philosophy passes it off as, then socrates himself already went further, much further….He made the movement of infinity intellectually. His ignorance is the infinite resignation.”27 this passage is striking because it recommends an explicit connection between de silentio’s life-view (infinite resignation) and socrates’ (what Johannes Climacus later calls “religiousness a”). though it is often presumptuous to assume that the referent of “socratic” in one Kierkegaardian text is identical to the referent of “socratic” in another, religiousness a is marked by three necessary and sufficient conditions that the knight of infinite resignation appears to satisfy: (1) an absolute orientation toward an absolute telos, (2) suffering, and (3) guilt.28 This overlap between infinite resignation and Religiousness A is significant

25 SKS 4, 143 / FTP, 78.26 SKS 4, 130 / FTP, 64.27 SKS 4, 161 / FTP, 97.28 (1) Guilt: in the case of de silentio’s young man, guilt is expressed as the incommensurability of his deepest desire (being with the princess) and the realm of finite possibility. While this differs from Christianity’s specific account of guilt (“original sin”), it captures a more general feature of the concept, namely, a person’s inability to “measure up.” it is this feature that is salient in the Postscript’s account of religiousness a. (2) Suffering: Though transfiguring one’s finite love into an infinite ideal offers a certain “peace and repose” (especially when compared against the fear and trembling of faith), the repose is contingent upon an ever present “pain.” De silentio writes: “Infinite resignation is that shirt in the old fable. the thread is spun with tears, bleached by tears, the shirt sewn in tears, but then it also gives better protection than iron and steel” (SKS 4, 140 / FTP, 74). this pain, brought

Ryan Kemp152

because it suggests that while de silentio may lack the faith of abraham, he may still be “religious” in the broader sense of the term. Having established this, we can now turn to consider the implications of de silentio’s existential perspective on his reliability as a commentator on faith.

III. Johannes’ Reliability

Though the article’s previous two sections may help restore confidence in de silentio’s credentials as a religious commentator, his credibility does not yet extend so far as to justify confidence in his ability to accurately portray the more specific concept of “faith.” after all, how much stock can be put in an analysis of faith that comes from the pen of one who lacks it? while i will not here present any positive arguments for de silentio’s reliability, i will attempt to show how the most convincing arguments to the contrary—those that suggest we should doubt his reliability29—are misguided. i begin by examining two pieces of textual evidence that are often brought to bear on the issue, and end by challenging, on merely philosophic grounds, the reasoning of the accusation itself. if my argument succeeds, then perhaps we can extend to de silentio the courtesy of assuming reliability until proven otherwise.

A. Textual Considerations

one of the most widely cited pieces of evidence for de silentio’s limited perspective is Fear and Trembling’s epigraph.30 explicitly referring to the famed communication between the roman sovereign tarquin the Proud and his son, some have read the epigraph as Kierkegaard’s hint that de silentio, much like the story’s messenger, does not understand the full significance of what he is talking about. Though perhaps prima facie plausible (de silentio is, after all, a messenger of sorts), this interpretation reveals itself to be considerably weaker when we take into account (1) the lack of

on by the constant knowledge of one’s guilt, “bends inwards” in order to focus the agent’s passion upon the absolute ideal. (3) Absolute orientation to the absolute: Infinite resignation’s orientation is absolute because it suspends all other goals and values for the sake of its guiding ideal. we see this in the young man who, for the sake of the princess, has “the strength to concentrate the whole of his life’s content and the meaning of reality in a single wish” (SKS 4, 137 / FTP, 72). Infinite resignation’s goal is absolute because its finite object of desire is “transfigured” into an “eternal” ideal. Speaking again of the young man’s love, de silentio writes: “His love for the princess would take on for him the expression of an eternal love, would require a religious character, be transfigured into a love for the eternal being” (SKS 4, 137 / FTP, 72).29 see for instance C. stephen evans, “Faith as the telos of morality,” in his Kierkegaard on Faith and the Self, waco: baylor university Press 2006, p. 210; pp. 218–21; edward mooney, “understanding abraham,” in Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling: Critical Appraisals, ed. by robert Perkins, tuscaloosa: university of alabama Press 1981, p. 101; Conway, “the Confessional drama of Fear and Trembling”; and Jerry gill, “Faith is as Faith does,” in Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling, ed. by robert Perkins, pp. 204–17.30 see, for example, evans, “Faith as the telos of morality,” pp. 210–11.

Johannes de silentio 153

evidence that can be mounted in its favor and (2) the existence of a much more plausible interpretation.31

in terms of textual evidence, there is one simple reason to think that de silentio is responsible for Fear and Trembling’s epigraph: de silentio’s name—and not Kierkegaard’s—adorns the work’s title page. if we attribute the epigraph to Kierkegaard, we are forced to conclude that Fear and Trembling is only properly understood when certain select passages are attributed to someone other than the author explicitly given credit for those passages. while, for all we know, this may be the case, it is difficult to see how a reading that advanced such an interpretive principle could be justified, especially since the principle underdetermines which passages are subject to such treatment. one might, in an effort to defend against this worry, point to passages outside of Fear and Trembling that suggest deep disagreement between Kierkegaard and de silentio. if such disagreement exists, then one might reasonably expect Kierkegaard to indicate this within the pages of Fear of Trembling itself, perhaps in an epigraph. as it happens, a few passages have been recruited to play precisely this role. though i will not be able to consider all such passages, i will consider the most convincing of its kind: Kierkegaard’s claim that, “when the believer has faith, the absurd is not the absurd.”

in an unpublished reply to one of Fear of Trembling’s critics, Kierkegaard says the following about faith:

when the believer has faith, the absurd is not the absurd—faith transforms it, but in every weak moment it is again more or less absurd to him. the passion of faith is the only thing which masters the absurd—if not, then faith is not faith in the strictest sense, but a kind of knowledge. the absurd terminates negatively before the sphere of faith, which is a sphere by itself.32

as some interpretations of this passage maintain: de silentio’s description of faith’s “absurdity” directly conflicts with Kierkegaard’s claim that, “When the believer has faith, the absurd is not the absurd.” given this contradiction, we can assume that de silentio’s perspective, at least sometimes, limits his ability to accurately describe faith.33

in contrast to what is sometimes claimed, i want to suggest that the above passage is striking insofar as it confirms de silentio’s account, not discredits it. notice that Kierkegaard does not deny that faith, understood as a claim about a “kind of knowledge,” is absurd. Here, Kierkegaard appears to be making the same distinction recommended by de silentio, that one can possess either a philosophic understanding of faith or a first-person understanding of faith. If one wants to talk

31 i develop a more thorough account of this in Kemp, “in defense of a straightforward reading of Fear and Trembling.” 32 Pap. X–6 b 79 / JP 1, 10. 33 see, for example, evans, “Faith as the telos of morality,” p. 221. For a response to evans on this point see Karen L. Carr, “the offense of reason and the Passion of Faith,” Faith and Philosophy, vol. 13, no. 2, 2010, pp. 236–51. Carr persuasively argues that Kierkegaard’s notion of the “offense” (a concept that takes center stage in later works) refers, in part, to faith’s “absurdity.”

Ryan Kemp154

about faith in terms of its epistemic status (that is, as a “kind of knowledge”), then one rightly cites its absurdity; faith lacks a sufficient epistemic foundation. While someone who possesses first-person faith may indeed “master the absurd”—with, for instance, a kind of courage that acts in spite of uncertainty—it is not as though the absurd is permanently transcended. in fact, the above passage suggests that even for those who possess first-person faith (the Abrahams of the world) absurdity still lurks as a constant threat, there in “every weak moment” to challenge the person of faith. if this is right, then we should not think that the difference between someone in de silentio’s position (someone who lacks the courage of faith) and someone in abraham’s position (someone who possesses the courage) is that the latter somehow neutralizes faith’s absurdity. according to both Kierkegaard and de silentio, abraham “masters the absurd” in the same way the recovering alcoholic masters alcoholism: he recognizes its claim while denying its authority.34

besides the fact that there is no convincing independent evidence that the epigraph is intended to hint at de silentio’s limited perspective, a much more plausible interpretation of the epigraph is available. the reason Fear and Trembling is prefaced with an epigraph about a father delivering a message that no one but his son can understand is because Fear and Trembling is, in fact, the story about a father (namely, god) delivering a message that no one but his son (namely, abraham) can understand. this interpretation has the virtue of mapping on nicely to the explicit theme of the text while avoiding the awkward conclusion that the person explicitly given credit for the epigraph (the book’s author, de silentio) should not be given credit for it.

B. Non-Textual Considerations

in addition to possessing a weak textual ground, claims about de silentio’s unreliability depend upon a highly questionable inference: that a person who has not experienced faith cannot accurately discern its necessary conditions. since de silentio asserts the opposite, that “it is possible…to construct certain criteria which

34 another passage that has been cited for the same purpose is the following from the Postscript: “as for the religious, it is an essential requirement that it should have passed through the ethical….if the religious is in truth the religious, if it has submitted itself to the discipline of the ethical and preserves it within itself, it cannot forget that religious pathos does not consist in singing and hymning and composing verses, but in existing” (SKS 7, 353 / CUP1, 388). Like the previous passage, this passage is meant to show that something that de silentio explicitly emphasizes in Fear and Trembling—for example, the tension between ethics and faith—is dismissed in another text that more reasonably reflects “Kierkegaard’s position.” see, for example, evans, “Faith as the telos of morality,” p. 211. Just as in the previous passage, however, here we have another instance in which de silentio’s position is validated, not undermined. insofar as the Postscript passage suggests that the “the religious” is necessarily conditioned by “the ethical,” then de silentio is in full agreement. in the third problema, de silentio makes it clear that any attempt to suspend the authority of ethics, that is not enacted from some prior commitment to ethics, is a mark of the aesthetic. it is, in fact, precisely this antecedent commitment to ethics that distinguishes the faithful silence of abraham from the demonic silence of the aesthete.

Johannes de silentio 155

even someone not in [faith] can understand,”35 we should pause to consider which of the two competing claims is right.

a similar question has recently been raised with respect to the experience of having children.36 it has been suggested that having and raising children is so radically different from any other human experience, that it is difficult to see how a decision to have children can be rational. to put the problem in a way that mirrors are concern, we might say that “having children” constitutes such a distinct way of life that it is unclear how anyone who lacks first-hand experience of having children can reliably describe what the experience is like.

while there is much about this that seems right, it is not at all clear that a non-parent is unable to say anything true about the experience of having children. For instance, a non-parent can, in principle, still know parenthood’s necessary and sufficient conditions, what qualifies as having children and what does not. This ability is unaffected by a lack of first-hand experience because it requires mere conceptual familiarity, something that can be obtained in contexts other than child-rearing. in fact, we can imagine cases in which someone who does not have children understands the necessary and sufficient conditions of having children better than an actual parent. this is possible, because the kind of understanding that involves knowing a concept is distinct from the kind of understanding one has when one actually embodies the concept.

when we distinguish these two types of understanding, we can appreciate that de silentio is in a position to know at least one dimension of faith: its necessary conditions.37 Though this does not amount to a positive confirmation of de silentio’s accuracy, it at least shows that there is no reason to think that he cannot, in principle, have knowledge of what faith is. if anything about de silentio’s account can be questioned, it is perhaps his description of faith’s emotional demands, those aspects of faith that only first-hand experience reveals. However, if the parenthood example bears any analogy to de silentio’s case, it seems just as likely that de silentio underemphasizes the difficulties of faith as he does overemphasize them. Like the would-be parent’s naive reference to the stresses of parenthood, the true anxiety of faith may entirely outdistance de silentio’s imaginative capacity.

IV. Conclusion

in this article, i have tried to provide context for three important points of contact with de silentio: his mode of communication, his life-view, and his reliability as a religious author. Concerning the first, his poeticism, we saw that de silentio takes “poetry” to be a form of communication uniquely capable of reproducing faith’s first-person dimension. Though the philosopher is adept at representing a concept’s necessary and sufficient conditions, only the poet appreciates that true representative

35 SKS 4, 170 / FTP, 106.36 L.a. Paul, “what you can’t expect when you’re expecting,” Res Philosophica, forthcoming in vol. 92, no. 2, 2015.37 it is in this sense that de silentio is a dialectician; he is charged with clarifying the concept of faith.

Ryan Kemp156

fidelity also involves reproducing an affective state in the reader. as for de silentio’s life-view, I argued first that de silentio’s status as a poet does not entail that he is an aesthete. second, i offered a positive argument for interpreting de silentio as a religious author, a knight of infinite recognition who also meets the criteria for socratic religiousness. Finally, i suggested that even if de silentio does not possess faith there is no good textual or philosophic reason to suspect that he cannot present certain aspects of faith reliably. taken as a whole, the above considerations recommend a de silentio who is sensitive to both faith’s demands and the conditions required to communicate them properly.

bibliography

Carlisle, Clare, Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling, London: Continuum 2010, pp. 24–8.

Conway, daniel, “the Confessional drama of Fear and Trembling,” in Søren Kierkegaard: Critical Assessments, vols. 1–4, ed. by daniel Conway and K.e. gover, London: routledge 2002, vol. 3, pp. 87–103.

— “recognition and its discontents: Johannes de silentio and the Preacher,” Kierkegaard Studies Yearbook, 2013, pp. 25–48.

Cross, andrew, “Fear and Trembling’s unorthodox ideal,” Philosophical Topics, vol. 27, no. 2, 2008, pp. 227–53.

evans, C. stephen, “Faith as the telos of morality,” in his Kierkegaard on Faith and the Self, waco: baylor university Press 2006, pp. 209–24.

Fendt, gene, “whose Fear and Trembling?” in Fear and Trembling and Repetition, ed. by robert L. Perkins, macon, georgia: mercer university Press 1993 (International Kierkegaard Commentary, vol. 6), pp. 177–91.

garff, Joakim, “Johannes de silentio: rhetorician of silence,” in Kierkegaard Studies Yearbook, 1996, pp. 186–210.

gill, Jerry, “Faith is as Faith does,” in Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling, ed. by robert Perkins, tuscaloosa: university of alabama Press 1981, pp. 204–17.

green, ronald, “deciphering Fear and Trembling’s secret message,” Religious Studies, vol. 22, no. 1, 1987, pp. 95–111.

— “enough is enough! Fear and Trembling is not about ethics,” Journal of Religious Ethics, vol. 21, 1993, pp. 191–209.

— “ ‘developing’ Fear and trembling,” in The Cambridge Companion to Kierkegaard, ed. by alastair Hannay and gordon d. marino, Cambridge: Cambridge university Press 1998, pp. 257–81.

Kemp, ryan, “in defense of a straightforward reading of Fear and Trembling,” Kierkegaard Studies Yearbook, 2013, pp. 49–70.

Kosch, michelle, “i—what abraham Couldn’t say,” Aristotelian Society Supplementary Volume 82, 2008, pp. 59–78.

Lippitt, John, Routledge Philosophy Guidebook to Kierkegaard and Fear and Trembling, new york: routledge 2003, pp. 177–208.

— “what neither abraham nor Johannes de silentio Could say,” Aristotelian Society Supplementary Volume 82, 2008, pp. 79–99.

mooney, edward, “understanding abraham,” in Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling, ed. by robert Perkins, tuscaloosa: university of alabama Press 1981, pp. 100–114.

Ryan Kemp158

— Knights of Faith and Resignation: Reading Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling, albany, new york: state university of new york Press 1991, p. x; p. 5; p. 12; p. 25; p. 55; p. 131.

mulhall, stephen, Inheritance and Originality, oxford: Clarendon Press 2001, pp. 354–80.

tøjner, Poul erik, “Johannes de silentio—og Kierkegaard,” in Kierkegaard-Pseudonymitet, ed. by birgit bertung, Paul müller, and Fritz nolan, Copenhagen: C.a. reitzel 1993, pp. 90–104.