Kierkegaard
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In Fear and Trembling, Kierkegaard explains that for religious believers to have faith they must simply yield to what is incomprehensible, or absurd, about their experience of the finite world. God, the believer realizes, is infinite and thus incapable of comprehension, and the lesson of finite experience is that neither God nor reason works in the world. That is, worldly experience is the absurd, not to say evil. How, then, can there be faith? Repeatedly Kierkegaard uses the phrase "by virtue of the absurd," which suggests that people of faith admit that the absurd cannot be decoded but go ahead and embrace the absurd as a paradoxical reality. In that moment of embrace, they yield to the reality of the absurd, to the reality of the incomprehensible, to the reality that what they might like to experience will never be realized (= made real). The yielding, however, is everything (Kierkegaard uses the phrase "infinite resignation" in Chapter 2), for in that same moment there is a linkage with infinity, and once that linkage is made, everything about what is finite is perfectly bearable. That is so even if--or precisely because--one realizes that finite experience, imperfect as it may be, is an accidental on one hand, and, on account of the having yielded, more than bearable on the other. As Kierkegaard puts it: "the movements of faith must constantly be made by virtue of the absurd, yet in such a way, be it observed, that one does not lose the finite but gains it every inch" (F
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n this text, the absurd does not necessarily refer to the objective facts of existence as militating against the idea of faith but rather to the experience of faith in the context of the objective facts of existence. Objectively speaking, having faith "is absurd; and this absurdity, held fast in the passion of inwardness, is faith" (Concluding Unscientific Postscript 188). The content of the faith as absurdity has to do with the Christ-event:
The absurd is--that the eternal truth has come into being in time, that God has come into being, has been born, has grown up, and so forth, precisely like any other individual human being, quite indistinguishable from other individuals (Concluding Unscientific Postscript 188).
The Incarnation-- the Word Made Flesh dwelling among us--embodied for humankind a glimpse into eternity. Kierkegaard does not impute magic to the Incarnation; rather, the logically impossible idea that God could walk among mere mortals is lent probability by the example of the life and death of the Christ figure. Kierkegaard uses the idea of "approximation" to explain the importance of a man who was able to elicit faith as a matter of historical fact and, as it turned out, transform consciousness of the human relation
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Approximate Word count = 1566
Approximate Pages = 6 (250 words per page)
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