Knight of Faith - Who Are (or Are There) Knights of Faith?

Who Are (or Are There) Knights of Faith?

Silentio personally believes that only two people were ever knights of faith: The Virgin Mary, and Abraham. It is also possible that Silentio regards Jesus as a knight of faith. Silentio grants that there may be knights of faith out there that we do not know about, or that there never have been knights of faith. This is because knights of faith exist alone in isolation. Yet Kierkegaard said the following in Repetition. "The Young Man has gone through the same ordeal as Job but neither of them is a Knight of Faith." Abraham wasn't really alone and living in isolation, he was only alone for three anxious filled days, he was a married man who had a wife and children and God had promised him many more. Mary was alone with the angel for a short time but then she was a wife and later a mother.

To be sure, Mary bore the child wondrously, but she nevertheless did it “after the manner of women,” and such a time is one of anxiety, distress and paradox. The angel was indeed a ministering spirit, but he was not a meddlesome spirit who went to the other young maidens in Israel and said: Do not scorn Mary, the extraordinary is happening to her. The angel went only to Mary, and no one could understand her. Has any woman been as infringed upon, as Mary, and is it not true here also that the one whom God blesses he curses in the same breath? Fear and Trembling p. 65

The Knight of Faith is a man or woman of action. Abraham became a Knight of Faith because he voluntarily lifted the knife to sacrifice Isaac. Mary was a Knight of Faith because she volunteered to have Jesus. Jesus became a Knight of Faith because he voluntarily went to the cross. Paul was a Knight of Faith because he voluntarily went to Jerusalem. Kierkegaard considered Diogenes a Knight of Faith also but he didn't have to do great feats or conquer the universe to become one. Kierkegaard says, "When the Eleatic’s denied motion, Diogenes, as everyone knows, came forward as an opponent. He literally did come forward, because he did not say a word but merely paced back and forth a few times, thereby assuming that he had sufficiently refuted them." He used Diogenes in the same way in Philosophical Fragments in 1844.

When Philip threatened to lay siege to the city of Corinth and all its inhabitants hastily bestirred themselves in defense, some polishing weapons, some gathering stones, some repairing the walls, Diogenes seeing all this hurriedly folded his mantle about him and began to roll his tub zealously back and forth through the streets. When he was asked why he did this he replied that he wished to be busy like all the rest, and rolled his tub lest he should be the only idler among so many industrious citizens. Such conduct is at any rate not sophistical, if Aristotle be right in describing sophistry as the art of making money. It is certainly not open to misunderstanding; it is quite inconceivable that Diogenes should have been hailed as the saviour and benefactor of the city. Soren Kierkegaard, Philosophical Fragments, p. 5

Kierkegaard kept to the same theme in his earlier and later works. "The great heroic feats are the stuff of history but they are not the stuff of life. Each single individual can do the great things of life. Each of us is born with the power to become what we become. " can be grasped and held fast by the simplest of people, it is only the more difficult for the cultured to attain. What a wondrous, inspiring, Christian humanity: the highest is common for all human beings." He wrote,

he then possesses himself as a task in such a way that it is chiefly to order, shape, temper, inflame, control-in short, to produce an evenness in the soul, a harmony, which is the fruit of the personal virtues. ... Someone can conquer kingdoms and countries without being a hero; someone else can prove himself a hero by controlling his temper. Someone can display courage by doing the out-of-the-ordinary, another by doing the ordinary. The question is-how does he do it? .... When the originality in earnestness is acquired and preserved, then there is succession and repetition, but as soon as originality is lacking in repetition, there is habit.The earnest person is earnest precisely through the originality from which he returns in repetition. It is said that a living and inward feeling preserves this originality, but the inwardness of the feeling is a fire that may cool as soon as earnestness no longer attends to it. Soren Kierkegaard Either/Or Part II, Hong, p. 262, 298, Repetition p. 149

Then he discovered that life was beautiful, that it was a new gloriousness of faith that no human being can give it to another, that every human being has what is highest, noblest, and most sacred in humankind. It is original in him, and every human being has it if he wants to have it-it is precisely the gloriousness of faith that it can be had only on this condition. Therefore, it is the only unfailing good, because it can be had only by constantly being acquired and can be acquired by continually being generated. ... The original natural power of endurance can be different in different individuals, but as soon as the fulfillment fails to come for such a long time that his original power is consumed and exhausted, then and only then will it become manifest whether a person has new oil in readiness, only then will his patience in expectancy become manifest. ... With a smile or with tears, one confesses that expectancy is in the soul originally. Only the true expectancy, which requires patience, also teaches patience. But true expectancy is such that it pertains to a person essentially and does not leave it up to his own power to bring about the fulfillment. Therefore every truly expectant person is in a relationship with God. ... everyone has an original supply of oil with which to sustain expectancy. .... If it is really so that there is something in life that has or can have such power over a person that it little by little makes him forget everything that is noble and sacred and makes him a slave in the service of the world, of the moment; if it is really so that time has or can gain such power over a person that while it adds days to his life it also every passing day measures the greater distance of his life from the divine, until he, trapped in everydayness and habit, becomes alienated from the eternal and the original. Resolution is a wakening up to the eternal. ... The 'individual’ is the category of spirit, of spiritual awakening. Soren Kierkegaard, Eighteen Upbuilding Discourses (1843-1844) p. 14, 213-214, 220-221, 348 Soren Kierkegaard, Point of View p. 133 Lowrie

when in dealing with the concept of faith the historical is made so one-sidedly significant that the primitive originality of faith in the individual is overlooked, faith becomes a finite pettiness instead of a free infinitude. ... Repetition and recollection are the same movement, except in opposite directions, for what is recollected has been, is repeated backward, whereas genuine repetition is recollected forward. ... The transition from possibility to actuality is, as Aristotle rightly teaches, a movement. This cannot be said in the language of abstraction at all or understood therein, because abstraction can give movement neither time nor space, which presuppose it or which it presupposes. There is a halt, a leap. The Concept of Anxiety, Nichol p. 62-63 Repetition p. 131-132, Concluding Postscript p. 341-342

Kierkegaard always points the individual forward just as he did with Abraham. He's always expectant of the good instead of dreading the evil. He trusted God. It's the same with the single individual who has to make a resolution to give some finite thing up and has found that the finite has become of infinite importance.

Abraham had faith, and had faith for this life. In fact, if his faith had been only for the life to come, he certainly would have more readily discarded everything in order to rush out of a world to which he did not belong. Fear and Trembling p. 20

Kierkegaard uses this extreme example of the paradox of faith to help people who are afraid to give something up or to take a risk without any certainty of reward. Abraham was willing to risk everything to follow God and Christ was willing to risk everything to teach humanity how to love. Neither of them knew what would come of it. Abraham learned how to love God but did he learn how to love his neighbor and himself?

If I am anxious about a past misfortune, then this is not because it is in the past but because it may be repeated, i.e., become future. If I am anxious because of a past offense, it is because I have not placed it in an essential relation to myself as past and have in some deceitful way prevented it from being past. If, indeed it is actually past, then I cannot be anxious but only repentant. If I do not repent the offense itself becomes a possibility and not something past. If indeed it is actually past, then I cannot be anxious but only repentant. If I do not repent, I have allowed myself to make my relation to the offense dialectical, and by this the offense itself has become a possibility, and not something past. If I am anxious about the punishment, it is only because this has been placed in a dialectical relation to the offense (otherwise I suffer my punishment), and then I am anxious for the possible for the future. Thus we have returned to where we were in Chapter I. Anxiety is the psychological state that precedes sin. It approaches sin as closely as possible, as anxiously as possible, but without explaining sin, which breaks forth only in the qualitative leap. Soren Kierkegaard, The Concept of Anxiety, Nichol p. 91-92

Jacques Maritain wrote in 1964, “Soren Kierkegaard was a contemporary of Marx. But it was only at the beginning of the twentieth century that his name began to become famous and his influence to be felt. Neither a philosopher in the strict sense of the word-although nourished in philosophy-and yet a philosopher in the sense of being a lay thinker; nor a theologian nor a prophet (obsessed by his feeling for the requirements of the Gospel and by his own unworthiness, he hardly dared to profess himself a Christian), and yet a kind of prophet and a knight of faith, and, at the end of his life, “a witness to the truth” in his passionate revolt against the established church, this poet of the religious, as he called himself, is a figure complex and ambiguous enough to occupy generations of interpreters and to justify their disagreements.” He also claimed that Theodor Haecker was a knight of faith.

Kierkegaard used his book Fear and Trembling to make the claim that Abraham, Mary and a tax collector were also knights of faith. These were just common people so faith isn't just for the "chosen few", he says, "Moses struck the rock, but he did not have faith. … Abraham was God’s chosen one, and it was the Lord who imposed the ordeal.” He says "artists go forward by going backward" by writing about Abraham's faith, Job's faith, Paul's faith and even Christ's faith and by creating imaginary constructions about "heroes" of faith they make Christianity difficult for the simple individual who wants to be a Christian. Yet at the same time churches often make Christianity "a matter of course". Faith just grows by itself, it needs no testing by the individual who wants to have faith, it ends up explained by external functions rather than the internal acknowledgement by the single individual who wants to be a Christian. Artistically faith becomes something impossible to reproduce in actual life. Only the person who is existing can reproduce faith, expectancy, patience, love and the resolution to hold fast to the expectation no matter what happens in his or her own life to the best of their ability. A person can become a Knight of Faith by acting without certainty. This is what Abraham did in Fear and Trembling and The Young Man failed to do in Repetition. One says, I'll do it because everything within me says I should and the other says I'll do it if everything outside of me says I should. Kierkegaard described the difference well in Either/Or.

If one wishes to strip people of their illusions in order to lead them to something more true, here as always you are “at your service in every way.” On the whole you are tireless in tracking down illusions in order to smash them to pieces. You talk so sensibly, with such experience, that anyone who does not know you better must believe that you are a steady man. But you have by no means arrived at what is true. You stopped with destroying the illusion, and since you did it in every conceivable direction, you actually have worked your way into a new illusion-that one can stop with this. Yes, my friend, you are living in an illusion, and you are achieving nothing. Here I have spoken the word that has always had such a strange effect on you. Achieve-“So who is achieving something? That is precisely one of the most dangerous illusions. I do not busy myself in the world at all; I amuse myself the best I can, and I am particularly amused by those people who believe that they are achieving, and is it not indescribably funny that a person believes that? I refuse to burden my life with such grandiose pretensions.” Soren Kierkegaard, Either/Or Part II, Hong, p. 78-79