tion for a new paragraph. Onl ythe reader, in his or her private reflections,
knows whatelsetakes place in the narrow strip of blank space between the
lines. Finally, in thefourthversion, the sketch of the unsuccessful deception,
Abraham carries out his task with a sort of defiance: “But Abraham drew
the knife.” And it should be noted that he drew the knifebeforethe text
managed to suppl yhim with a ram. If we count the number of times the
various words occur, the biographical shudder is no less disturbing: In the
four versions there appear, in all, four knives—versus onl yone ram!
Do we now have a better understanding of why, in his note to Boesen,
Kierkegaard signed himself as the castrato Farinelli?
“A Crevice through Which the Infinite Peeped Out”
There is a biographical layer immediately beneath the artistic treatment of
the material. The impetus behind the new version is the traumatic experi-
ence, the unbearable pain, that art can assuage but never completel ybanish.
But even though it might take a certain will to abstraction in order to
ignore the obvious andnotread Kierkegaard biographically, works such
asRepetitionandFear and Tremblingnaturall ytreat something other—and
greater—than Kierkegaard himself. The two works raise implicit and ex-
plicit questions about the status of the Old Testament texts in the modern
era, questions about the degree to which the yremain usable, and for Kier-
kegaard these questions take the form of a reflection about whether these
texts aresusceptible of repetition. If the texts belong to a bygone era, then for
the present age the yare onl ymuseum artifacts that therefore ought properl y
be kept at arm’s length. Or, on the contrary, do these texts reveal depths,
fundamental existential situations and eternal conflicts, that time conse-
quentl ycannot render obsolete?
In a way, the answer is already given in Johannes de silentio’s modernre-
presentationof the Old Testament figures and legendar ycharacters, but this
same Johannes de silentio also likes to resort to more tangible examples.
Thus there is the famous and notorious poetic production of someone peo-
ple call the tax collector, a sort of idealized version of the “knight of faith”
as he might appear during his comings and goings in Kierkegaard’s Copen-
hagen. Like Abraham, the tax collector has made the double movement of
faith, that is, he has definitivel ysurrendered ever ything (as Abraham sur-
rendered Isaac) while at the same time, b yvirtue of faith as the final, absurd
possibility, he has received everything back again (as Abraham received Isaac
back again through the obedience of faith). “Here he is,” Johannes de si-
lentio writes, “the acquaintance is made, I am introduced to him. From the