The next session of Mockingbird’s monthly Zoom book club is coming up this Sunday, 3:30pm, and it is one you will not want to miss! Longtime Mockingbird contributor and author Will McDavid will be leading us in a discussion of the classic 1843 text Fear and Trembling by Søren Kierkegaard — the great anxiety-ridden Danish philosopher, theologian, poet, social critic, and general oddball who is considered to be the father of existentialism.
If 19th-century philosophy sounds daunting to you, just remember the old saying attributed to the German romantic poet Novalis: “All philosophy is a form of homesickness.” Such homesickness is especially evident in the writings of Christo-centric philosophers like Kierkegaard. In Fear and Trembling, Kierkegaard interrogates the nature and experience of true faith through the lens of Abraham, the biblical patriarch who is famously called by God in Genesis 22 to sacrifice his only son, Isaac, on Mount Moriah. It is this strange and shocking story that is the heart of Kierkegaard’s analysis, and one which is perhaps more challenging to us now than ever.
For Kierkegaard, faith is ultimate — “the highest passion in a person.” As he writes,
If a human being did not have an eternal consciousness, if underlying everything there were only a wild, fermenting power that writhing in dark passions produced everything, be it significant or insignificant, if a vast, never appeased emptiness hid beneath everything, what would life be then but despair? … [I]f an eternal oblivion, perpetually hungry, lurked for its prey and there were no power strong enough to wrench that away from it—how empty and devoid of consolation life would be! But precisely for that reason it is not so.
And precisely because it is so important, Kierkegaard argues, Abraham was a great man — a “second father of the race” — solely because of his faith. There are those, he explains, who have been “great by virtue of [their] power … by virtue of [their] wisdom … by virtue of [their] hope … by virtue of [their] love.” But Abraham was the “greatest of all” because of his faith — “that power whose strength is powerlessness … that wisdom whose secret is foolishness … that hope whose form is madness … that love that is hatred to oneself.”
Make no mistake: this faith Kierkegaard speaks of is no “genteel piety within a culture of Christendom,” as one commenter puts it. On the contrary, as the many challenges raised in the story of Abraham and Isaac demonstrate, it is a radical trust, a kind of holy madness.
[W]hat did Abraham do? He arrived neither too early nor too late. He mounted the ass, he rode slowly down the road. During all this time he had faith, he had faith that God would not demand Isaac of him, and yet he was willing to sacrifice him if it was demanded. He had faith by virtue of the absurd, for human calculation was out of the question.
It is these kinds of passages investigating the challenging paradoxes and implications of faith that Will McDavid will be helping us make sense of this Sunday. And if you haven’t finished the book or find yourself totally lost, no worries! We’d still love for you to tune in.
The book club meets on Zoom this Sunday, June 25th, at 3:30 Eastern Time.
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Future books, discussion leaders, and dates are:
July 30th — Meaghan Ritchey, Simone Weil’s Gravity and Grace (1947) (248 pgs)
August 27th — Sam Bush, How to Be a (Bad) Birdwatcher (2005) (240 pgs)
September 24th — Jason Micheli, Robert Jenson’s A Theology in Outline: Can These Bones Live? (2016) (152 pgs)
October 29th — Stephanie Phillips, Heather Havrilesky’s Foreverland: On the Divine Tedium of Marriage (2022) (304 pgs)
November 26th — Todd Brewer, T. S. Eliot’s The Elder Statesman (1959)
