“Kierkegaard affects us because of his seriousness, his honesty, and the depth of his psychological insights. His efforts to plumb Abraham’s depths therefore deserve respect, even if the biblical text remains silent, and even if de Silentio’s Abraham may have little connection to the figure the author of Gen. 22 wanted to portray.”
“Kierkegaard moves us so powerfully in Fear and Trembling, not only because of his extraordinary skill as a writer and seriousness as a thinker, but because of the depth of the tragic sensibility with which he faces the human condition. But it is in Abraham really a kind of inversion of the tragic. The tragic hero suffers social or corporeal shipwreck because he will stop at nothing in his defiance of a morally unjust divine order. The Knight of Faith risks moral chaos because he will stop at nothing to obey the decrees of an incomprehensible God.”
“The great figures of the ancient tragedies were heroic because they rebelled against an unjust fate decreed by the gods. The tragedy of Abraham is…that he does not rebel.”
(pp. 105-106)