Fear and Trembling
Ianguished over the creeping amnesia when it comes to our wrenching from the dictatorship 34 years ago. But Filipinos have no sense of history, my dear confidant and most patient mentor said. And Manong sent me a copy of Søren Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling, to reread and ponder in my mature years what had perhaps gone over my head in my college Literature classes.
“Anguish is a dangerous affair for the squeamish, so people forget it,” Johannes de Silentio, Kierkegaard’s pseudonym in Fear
and Trembling says to the reader. “Silentio,” meaning “quiet.” To remain quiet would be the easier alternative than the painful existential self-examination of anguish and doubt, and the conflict of intuitive responsibility versus selfish detachment. “Silence is the snare of the demon, and the more one keeps silent, the more terrifying the demon becomes.
“(But) people do not know what they ought to say but only that they must say something.” Yet notwithstanding the philosopher Descartes’ conviction that “I think, therefore I am,” the quality of thought declines with age because of the alterations and compromises suggested by experience, the author says. “For life has divided what has been united in the child’s pious simplicity... Is (your) heart still young enough not to have forgotten the fear and
trembling that disciplined (your) youth, and which, although the grown man mastered it, no man altogether outgrows?”
If you have been tested like Abraham in the Bible, you will never forget how you feared for yourself and for your loved one, but more than fear, how faith in your God and in yourself should not have made you fear at all. In a four-scenario exegesis of Genesis 22:1-18, Johannes as Conscience monologues on the anguish of the patriarch Abraham, who was asked by God to kill his beloved son Isaac at the altar of sacrifice. Abraham stoically proceeds to obey God’s orders until God stops him in time and rewards his devotion.
Kierkegaard says, “Infinite resignation is the last stage before faith, so anyone who has not made this movement does not have faith, for only in infinite resignation does an individual become conscious of his eternal validity,