# Knight of faith

A Knight of faith (Danish: troens ridder) is an individual who has placed complete faith in himself and in God and can act freely and independently from the world. The 19th-century Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard discusses the knight of faith in several of his pseudonymous works, with the most in-depth and detailed critique exposited in Fear and Trembling and Repetition.

## Overview

Johannes de Silentio, Kierkegaard's pseudonymous author of Fear and Trembling, argues that the knight of faith is the paradox, the individual and absolutely nothing but the individual, without connections or pretensions. The knight of faith is the individual who can gracefully embrace life. Kierkegaard described in Either/Or, "When around one everything has become silent, solemn as a clear, starlit night when the soul comes to be alone in the whole world, then before one there appears, not an extraordinary human being, but the eternal power itself, then the heavens open, and the I chooses itself or, more correctly, receives itself. Then the personality receives the accolade of knighthood that ennobles it for an eternity."

### The Three Stages

Kierkegaard recognized three levels of individual existence: The Aesthetic, The Ethical, and The Religious. In Fear and Trembling, Silentio refers to individuals in each stage as the personal self, the civic self, and the religious self. Abraham learned how to keep his finite relationship with his family separate from his infinite relationship with God. He had to overcome the fear of having anxiety over losing something. Each experiences anxiety to a different degree and the fear of anxiety in a unique way.

## Knight of Faith and the Knight of Infinite Resignation

Kierkegaard's Silentio contrasts the knight of faith with the other two, the knight of infinite resignation and the aesthetic realm's "slaves". Kierkegaard uses the story of a princess and a man who is madly in love with her, but the man will never be able to realize this love in this world. A person who is in the ethical stage would not give up on this love but would be resigned to the fact that they will never be together in this world. The knight of infinite resignation may or may not believe that they may be together in another life or spirit, but what's important is that the knight of infinite resignation gives up on their being together in this world.
The knight of faith feels what the knight of infinite resignation feels, but with the exception that the knight of faith believes that in this world; in this life, they will be together. This double movement is paradoxical because on the one hand, it is humanly impossible that they would be together, but on the other hand the knight of faith is willing to believe that they will be together through divine possibility.
Using the example of the man who is in love with the princess, Silentio describes how the movements of the knight of infinite resignation and the knight of faith are executed.For the knight of infinite resignation, having acknowledged the impossibility of the love between the man and the princess, the love is infinitely renounced in the following manner:
* First, the knight of infinite resignation will have the power to concentrate the whole substance of his life and the meaning of actuality into one single desire.
* Next, the knight will have the power to concentrate all of his thinking into one act of consciousness.
* The knight then moves. The knight will recollect everything, but this recollection is precisely the pain, and yet in infinite resignation, he is reconciled with existence.
* His love for that princess would become an expression of eternal love for him, he would assume a religious character and be transfigured into a love of an eternal being. While it denied him fulfillment, it did reconcile him once more in the eternal consciousness of its validity that no person can take away from him.

## Abraham and Isaac

Johannes de Silentio believes that Abraham is one such knight of faith. In the Book of Genesis, God told Abraham to sacrifice his son Isaac. Abraham loved his son but obeyed this command faithfully. Just as he was about to commit the act, an angel stopped Abraham and rewarded him with his son and steadfast faith. In the same act of committing murder, Abraham believed through virtue of the absurd that he would still have his son alive and well.

## Who are Knights of Faith?

Silentio personally believes that only three people were ever knights of faith: the Virgin Mary, Abraham and Jesus. 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 due to the idea that knights of faith exist alone in isolation.
The Knight of Faith is a person of action. (See Eighteen Upbuilding Discourses) 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 although he didn't do any great feats or conquer the universe to become one. Kierkegaard stressed the reversal of the inner and the outer in his first book, Either/Or. However, he made a sharp distinction between Mary and others in The Book on Adler. Adler had an action in the innermost being but didn't think it was his job to do what he was told, but that it was something he should tell the whole church to do. An action in the inner being is something completely different from an action in the outer being. 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, while neither of them knew what would come of it.
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 that 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". Artistically, faith becomes something impossible to reproduce in actual life. Only the person who is existing can reproduce faith, expectancy, patience, love and resolution to hold fast to that 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.