Soren Kierkegaard

its original terror and insist on Abraham’s tale as the stor yof the impact of
the alien and the terrifying, the demonically sublime.
Johannes de silentio continuall yemplo ys aesthetic methods to accomplish
his purpose, but earl yin the book, in a bit of compositional elegance, he
bringsthe uncorrupted gazeto bear on the Old Testament narrative. This is
done under the rubric “Tuning Up,” where Johannes de silentio recounts
the following: “Once there was a man who as a child had heard the beautiful
stor yof how God tempted Abraham and of how Abraham withstood the
temptation, kept his faith, and, contrar yto expectation, received a son for
the second time....Theolder he became, the more often his thoughts
turned to that story; his enthusiasm for it became greater and greater, and
yet he was less and less able to understand the story. Finally, the story caused
him to forget everything else; his soul had but a single wish, to see Abraham,
but one longing, to have witnessed that event....Hisdesire was to follow
along on the three-da yjourne ywhen Abraham rode with sorrow ahead of
him and Isaac beside him. His wish was to be present at the moment when
Abraham lifted up his eyes to see Mount Moriah in the distance, at the
moment when he had the donkeys remain where they were and went up
the mountain alone with Isaac. Because what concerned him was not the
artistic fabric of the imagination, but the shudder of the thought.”
Having established this uncorrupted gaze, which is the gaze with whichthe
readerideall yought to read, the reader is presented with four different versions
of the Old Testament story. Thanks to this re-narration (and co-narration) of
the biblical tale—an art at which Kierkegaard (verbosel ydisguised as Johannes
de silentio) is a veritable virtuoso—the stor yis endowed with a modern, exis-
tential emotional intensity, and with its adroit rhetoric it vaults well above the
hidebound official translation of the Danish Bible from 1740.
“It was earl ymorning”: This is the fine, rh ythmic opening of each of the
four versions, all of which consist of an “a” section and a “b” section. Each
“a” section treats Abraham and Isaac, while the “b” section depicts how a
mother blackens her breast in order to wean her child. Even though the
“b” section is clearly separated from the “a” section typographically, the
two sections are connected not only in style and tone, but also thematically,
because each of the four “a” sections, along with its accompanying “b”
section (as well as all four pairs viewed successively) describes a movement
from a successful deception to an unsuccessful deception.
Of the four versions, thefirstand longest is derived from a journal entry
from late March or earl yApril 1843 titled “Plan,” in which Kierkegaard
meditated on “Abraham’s conduct,” calling it “genuinel ypoetic, magnani-
mous, more magnanimous than everything I have read about in tragedies.”
Then, with the same stroke of the pen, Kierkegaard searches for “the con-