Kierkegaard Quote on Faith: The Leap of Faith

The Quote

"Faith is namely this paradox that the single individual is higher than the universal, yet in such a way, be it noted, that the movement is repeated, that is, that the single individual, after having been in the universal, now as the single individual isolates himself as higher than the universal."

— Søren Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling (1843)

Context

Kierkegaard published Fear and Trembling in 1843 under the pseudonym Johannes de Silentio — "John of Silence." The pseudonym is itself significant. Kierkegaard was a prolific writer who published dozens of books under a shifting cast of fictional authors, each with a distinct perspective and personality. He did this partly to distance himself from the views expressed in the books — the pseudonyms are not mouthpieces for Kierkegaard but characters in a larger philosophical drama — and partly to dramatize the impossibility of communicating the deepest truths directly. Some things can only be approached indirectly, through story, paradox, and silence. Faith, Kierkegaard believed, is one of those things.

The book takes as its subject the biblical story of Abraham's binding of Isaac (Genesis 22). God commands Abraham to sacrifice his beloved son — the son through whom God had promised to build a great nation, the son born to Sarah in her old age after a lifetime of barrenness. Abraham obeys. He takes Isaac up Mount Moriah, binds him, raises the knife — and at the last moment, an angel intervenes, and a ram caught in a thicket is provided as a substitute sacrifice. Abraham gets his son back.

The story is deeply disturbing, and Kierkegaard doesn't try to make it less so. Instead, he uses it to explore what faith actually is. His conclusion is unsettling: Abraham is not a moral hero. By any ethical standard, he's a would-be murderer — a man willing to kill his own child at a voice's command. And yet the tradition calls him the "father of faith." How can this be? How can the supreme exemplar of faith also be, by every ethical measure, a criminal?

Kierkegaard's answer involves the concept of the teleological suspension of the ethical. The "ethical," in Kierkegaard's framework, is the universal — the moral law that applies to everyone, the duties we owe to one another as members of a community, the rational norms that govern decent conduct. Abraham's willingness to sacrifice Isaac violates this universal in the most extreme way imaginable. But faith, Kierkegaard argues, involves a movement in which the individual stands in a direct relationship with God that transcends the universal. In faith, the single individual is "higher than the universal" — not because morality doesn't matter, but because the individual's relation to the absolute (God) can, in certain extraordinary cases, take precedence over the ethical order that binds human communities together.

Meaning

The quote captures the paradox at the heart of Kierkegaard's account. Let's break it down.

"Faith is namely this paradox that the single individual is higher than the universal." Kierkegaard is not saying that individuals can ignore moral laws whenever they feel like it — that would be a recipe for chaos, and Kierkegaard was acutely aware of the danger. He's describing a specific, rare, and terrifying structure: the individual who, standing absolutely alone before God, is called to act in a way that cannot be justified by any universal ethical standard. Abraham doesn't sacrifice Isaac because he thinks it's the right thing to do. He doesn't reason his way to the conclusion that killing his son is morally permissible. He does it because God commands it — and God's command, in this case, contradicts the moral law. This is the paradox: the very thing that makes Abraham a man of faith is the thing that makes him, ethically speaking, a murderer. If Abraham had acted on his own initiative, without divine command, he would simply be a killer. The fact that he acts in faith — in response to an absolute that transcends the ethical — is what makes the story intelligible, even though it remains, by every rational measure, incomprehensible.

"Yet in such a way, be it noted, that the movement is repeated." This is a crucial qualification, and it's easy to miss. Faith is not a matter of never having entered the ethical sphere. Abraham is not a barbarian who doesn't know right from wrong, who hasn't internalized the moral norms of his community. He's a man who has lived within the universal — who has been a father, a husband, a member of a community — and who, from within that ethical life, is called to a higher, more radical relationship with God. The "movement" of faith is one that passes through the universal and then, paradoxically, beyond it. This is what distinguishes faith from mere innocence or ignorance. The knight of faith, as Kierkegaard calls him, isn't someone who has never known ethical obligation. He's someone who knows it intimately, who feels its full weight, and who nevertheless makes a movement that transcends it. The movement is "repeated" because it doesn't happen once and for all; it must be made again and again, in the ongoing tension between the ethical and the religious.

"That the single individual, after having been in the universal, now as the single individual isolates himself as higher than the universal." The key word here is "isolates." In faith, the individual is utterly alone. Abraham cannot explain what he's doing. He can't tell Sarah, he can't tell Isaac, he can't tell his servants. If he tried to justify his action, he'd have to appeal to some universal standard — and there is no universal standard that can justify killing your child. He can't even justify it to himself, in the sense of giving reasons that would make it rational. He acts in absolute isolation, sustained by nothing but his relationship with God. This is what Kierkegaard means when he says that faith is a "private" enterprise — not in the modern sense of personal preference or private opinion, but in the sense that it's a relationship between the individual and the absolute that no third party can comprehend or mediate. Abraham stands alone before God, and that's the whole story.

Kierkegaard situates this paradox within his famous three spheres of existence: the aesthetic, the ethical, and the religious. The aesthetic sphere is the life of pleasure, sensation, and immediate gratification — the life that flees from commitment, that pursues the interesting and the novel, that dissolves into irony and despair when it runs out of stimulation. The ethical sphere is the life of duty, marriage, work, and citizenship — the life that takes responsibility within the universal, that commits to something larger than itself, that finds meaning in fulfilling its obligations to others. The religious sphere is the life of faith — the life in which the individual, standing alone before God, transcends both the aesthetic and the ethical.

Abraham is Kierkegaard's paradigm of the religious sphere. He's not an aesthetic hero, chasing thrills or defying convention for the sake of defiance. He's not an ethical hero, doing his duty or sacrificing himself for the greater good. He's something else entirely — a man whose relationship with God places him beyond the categories of both pleasure and duty. And this is why Johannes de Silentio, the pseudonymous author, repeatedly confesses that he can understand Abraham but he cannot be Abraham. He can admire the faith from the outside, he can analyze its structure, but he can't make the movement himself. Faith, for Kierkegaard, is not an achievement of understanding. It's not something you can think your way into. It's a leap — a movement that exceeds reason and ethics alike, that can only be made by the individual who is willing to stand alone before the absolute.

Significance

The concept of the leap of faith has become one of the most influential ideas in modern thought, and also one of the most caricatured. It's often taken to mean that faith is a blind, irrational commitment — a leap in the dark, a refusal to think. But Kierkegaard's account is far more nuanced than that. The leap isn't irrational because the person of faith doesn't understand what they're doing. Abraham knows exactly what God is asking. He knows it's wrong by every ethical standard. He feels the full horror of it. The leap is "absurd" in Kierkegaard's specific sense — absurd not because it's silly or irrational, but because it's a movement that cannot be reconciled with the ethical or the rational, that the individual makes anyway, in trust that the impossible will somehow be resolved. "By faith Abraham did not leave Isaac but received him back," Kierkegaard writes — faith is the belief that God will keep his promise even when the promise seems to require its own destruction. Abraham's greatness isn't his willingness to kill; it's his faith that he'll get Isaac back, a faith that makes no sense, that cannot be explained to anyone, and that isolates him from every human community.

Kierkegaard's analysis reshaped the philosophy of religion and helped lay the groundwork for existentialism. His insistence that faith is a matter of passionate, individual commitment — not of assenting to doctrines, not of following moral rules, not of participating in institutional religion — has influenced theologians from Karl Barth to Paul Tillich. His concept of the three spheres of existence provided a framework that later existentialists adapted and transformed, even when they rejected his religious commitments. Jean-Paul Sartre, for instance, took over Kierkegaard's insistence on the primacy of the individual and the irreducibility of subjective experience while stripping away the religious dimension entirely, arguing that the individual creates their own values in a godless universe.

The concept also poses a challenge that remains urgent. If faith can suspend the ethical, what prevents it from becoming a license for atrocity? If Abraham can kill because God tells him to, what's to stop anyone from claiming divine sanction for violence? Kierkegaard was acutely aware of this problem, and he insisted that the genuine movement of faith is both rare and deeply terrifying — not a comfortable justification for violence but an ordeal that tests the individual to the breaking point. The knight of faith is not the fanatic who kills with a clear conscience. The knight of faith is the one who trembles, who knows the full weight of what they're doing, who cannot justify it to anyone, and who makes the movement anyway, sustained by a trust that no one else can see or share. In practice, Kierkegaard thought, most people who claim to act on faith are actually acting on aesthetic passion or ethical convention dressed up in religious language. True faith is as rare as it is radical.

The quote, in the end, names something that reason can describe but cannot contain: the possibility that the deepest truths of human existence are not universal but singular, not public but private, and not rational but paradoxical. Whether one finds this possibility liberating or frightening, Kierkegaard's formulation of it remains one of the most powerful in the history of thought. It forces us to ask whether there's anything worth committing to that can't be justified by reason alone — and if so, whether we'd have the courage to make the leap.