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" (Fear and Trembling Ch. 2). To have yielded to that insight, however, is also to have glimpsed and to have experienced infinity, which is the province of faith and is infinitely (so to say) satisfying.
Kierkegaard uses several analogies to illustrate his point. One is that of the accomplished dancer.
It is supposed to be the most difficult task for a dancer to leap into a definite posture in such a way that there is not a second when he is grasping after the po...