Kierkegaard on the Leap of Faith

Original Text

The movement of faith must continually be made by virtue of the absurd, but yet in such a way, please note, that one does not lose the finite but gains it whole and intact.

— Søren Kierkegaard (as Johannes de Silentio), Fear and Trembling, "Preliminary Expectoration"; trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983), p. 37.

The Danish phrase translated as "by virtue of the absurd" — i Kraft af det Absurde — is the signature expression of the book, and it names the principle on which the leap of faith depends: faith is not a conclusion drawn from evidence but a movement undertaken in the face of the absurd.

Translation

Kierkegaard wrote Fear and Trembling in Danish, and the Hong and Hong translation (Princeton, 1983) is the standard scholarly English edition. The key terms of the passage translate Kierkegaard's own vocabulary of movement and risk: "movement" (Bevægelse) is borrowed from Hegel but turned against the system, "continually" (stadig) stresses that faith is never a settled possession but a task repeated at every instant, and "by virtue of the absurd" (i Kraft af det Absurde) indicates that the ground of the movement is precisely what reason cannot supply. "To gain the finite whole and intact" renders at vinde den Endelige hel og holden: the knight of faith does not escape the world but receives it back, renewed.

Context

The passage stands in the "Preliminary Expectoration" of Fear and Trembling, the section in which Johannes de Silentio introduces the two great figures of the book: the knight of infinite resignation and the knight of faith. The knight of resignation performs the tragic and noble movement of renunciation — he gives up the beloved, the dream, the finite object of desire, and lives in the pain of having lost it, at peace with the loss. The knight of faith does everything the knight of resignation does, but he performs one further movement, "the next movement, the movement of faith": he believes, against every probability and every calculation, that he will receive the finite back. The example de Silentio returns to again and again is the man who loves a princess he cannot have: he resigns her infinitely, and then — by virtue of the absurd, by virtue of his faith that "with God all things are possible" — he believes that he will have her after all.

The context is autobiographical as well as philosophical. In 1841 Kierkegaard broke his engagement to Regine Olsen, convinced that his melancholy made marriage impossible; two years later, writing Fear and Trembling, he records his own inability to perform the second movement: "I can make the movement of resignation... but this next movement I cannot make." The leap of faith is therefore not a doctrine Kierkegaard claims to have achieved; it is the movement he describes from the outside, with admiration and despair, as the one thing that would have made his own life whole.

Meaning

The sentence defines faith as a movement rather than a state. Faith is not an opinion about the existence of God, not an assent to propositions, but an act performed again and again: "must continually be made." And the movement is specified with extraordinary precision. It is made "by virtue of the absurd" — that is, its ground is not evidence, argument, or moral justification, but the confident expectation of what reason pronounces impossible. Yet the purpose of the movement is not escape from the world. The knight of faith does not despise the finite, does not retire into mystical indifference; he gains the finite back, whole and intact. The difference between resignation and faith is the difference between losing the world in order to save one's soul and receiving the world back as a gift. This is what Kierkegaard elsewhere calls the "repetition" (Gjentagelsen) of faith: the return of what was renounced, transformed.

The "please note" (mærk vel) is a warning. It blocks a misunderstanding: the leap of faith must not be confused with a leap out of the finite into a purely spiritual realm, nor with an emotional intensity that leaves the world behind. On the contrary, faith's miracle is that it keeps the world — the princess, the son, the everyday life — while holding it as something received by virtue of the absurd. The knight of faith looks, to the outward eye, exactly like an ordinary bourgeois: he walks, he works, he pays his taxes; the prodigy is invisible. The absurd is not the enemy of the ordinary; it is the hidden ground on which the ordinary is finally possessed.

Philosophical Interpretation

The leap of faith is the hinge on which Kierkegaard's whole authorship turns, and it has shaped existentialism's account of commitment. Against the Hegelian claim that truth is mediated through the system, de Silentio insists that the highest movement of the spirit — faith — cannot be mediated: it must be made by a single individual, in fear and trembling, with no guarantee. This is the origin of the existentialist theme of the "decision" that precedes and exceeds all rational justification. Jean-Paul Sartre radicalized the structure while removing its theological content: his account of choice as groundless, anguished commitment — the choice of one's values with nothing to justify them — is the secular descendant of the leap. Albert Camus, in The Myth of Sisyphus, explicitly opposes Kierkegaard's leap to his own acceptance of the absurd: where Camus will inhabit the absurd without leaping, Kierkegaard leaps precisely because the absurd reveals that meaning cannot be reached by reason. For Kierkegaard, however, the leap is not a flight from reason into irrationality; it is the acknowledgment that reason's competence is real but bounded, and that the finite can be genuinely gained only by one who has first resigned it infinitely. The leap is the courage of the individual who stakes his whole existence on a movement he cannot justify — and the honesty to admit that this is the only way to possess the finite at all.

Related Concepts

• The Leap of Faith: the movement of faith by virtue of the absurd, continually repeated, which regains the finite rather than escaping it.
• Infinite Resignation: the prior movement of total renunciation that the knight of faith performs and surpasses.
• The Absurd: the paradoxical object of faith — what reason cannot render possible, yet what the knight of faith expects.
• The Knight of Faith: the ordinary-looking individual who makes the double movement of resignation and faith.
• The Teleological Suspension of the Ethical: the related claim, developed in Problema I, that faith can place the individual in an absolute relation to the absolute that exceeds the universal ethical rule.
• Fear and Trembling: the title itself, from Philippians 2:12, signals that faith is not comfort but risk.

Related Learning Path

Begin with Fear and Trembling itself, reading the "Preliminary Expectoration" before the Problemata, so that the figure of the knight of faith is in place when the ethical questions are raised. Then read the story of Abraham in Genesis 22 and Kierkegaard's The Concept of Anxiety for the account of anxiety that makes the leap possible. For the existentialist aftermath, compare Sartre's groundless choice in Being and Nothingness and Camus's rejection of the leap in The Myth of Sisyphus. In this archive, the existentialism topic, the existentialist wisdom collection, and the pages on faith and courage provide further orientation; see also our analysis of Kierkegaard on anxiety and the paradox of faith.