In the world of spirit no swindling is tolerated. From this beginning Fear and Trembling becomes an exploration of the faith that transcends the ethical, as in Abraham's willingness to sacrifice his son Isaac at God's command. For instead of learning from this terror that he is not capable of performing the great deed and then plainly admitting it (an act which I cannot but approve, because it is what I do) the manikin thinks that by uniting with several other manikins he will be able to do it.

This is the terrible thing which the sectarian manikin cannot endure. The knight of faith, on the contrary, is the paradox, is the individual, absolutely nothing but the individual, without connections or pretensions. Kierkegaards infamous and hugely influential philosophical work on faith, choice and sacrificeIn Fear and Trembling Kierkegaard, writing under the. Kierkegaard also uses his retelling of the Abraham story to distinguish between faith and resignation. Kierkegaard claims that the killing of Isaac is ethically wrong but religiously right. several good friends and comrades who represent the universal just about as well as the beadles in The Golden Snuffbox represent justice. In the rest of Fear and Trembling, Kierkegaard examines his four retellings of the story of Abraham, focusing on the religious and the ethical. The sectarian punchinello, instead of that, has a private theatre, i.e. The tragic hero expresses the universal and sacrifices himself for it. This sectarianism is an attempt to leap away from the narrow path of the paradox and become a tragic hero at a cheap price. “The true knight of faith is always absolute isolation, the false knight is sectarian.

Fear and Trembling by Søren Kierkegaard