Key Ideas
The knight of infinite resignation versus the knight of faith.
The teleological suspension of the ethical.
Faith is not the beginning but the highest passion — “one does not go beyond it”.
The knight of faith looks exactly like a tax collector.
Title from Philippians 2:12 — “work out your own salvation with fear and trembling.” See Abraham on Mount Moriah.
Great Scenes
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related by shared connections
Tertullian
Fiery early Christian writer from Carthage, father of Latin theology, remembered for setting faith against philosophy — “What has Athens to do with Jerusalem?”
Faith vs. Reason
Can God be reached by argument — or does faith begin exactly where reason fails? From Tertullian’s Athens and Jerusalem to Kierkegaard’s leap and Camus’s refusal.
Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi
German critic of the Enlightenment who sparked the Pantheism Controversy and gave philosophy the word “nihilism”.
Franz Kafka
Prague insurance clerk whose parables of guilt, bureaucracy and metamorphosis became the defining images of modern anxiety — and the word “Kafkaesque”.
Dayānanda Sarasvatī
The Gujarati ascetic (1824–1883) who founded the Ārya Samāj with the cry “Back to the Vedas!” — rejecting idol-worship, caste by birth, and the Purāṇas, and calling for a rational Vedic religion, education for women and the reconversion of those who had left Hinduism.
Critique of Practical Reason
Kant’s second Critique — the moral law is a fact of reason, and through it we know we are free.