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GOD Third, faith must be a passionate devotion of oneself, but objective inquiry involves an attitude of detachment Because belief demands passion, Kierkegaard argues that the improbability of what is believed not only is no obstacle to faith, but is an essential element of faith The believer must embrace risk, for without risk there is no faith ‘Faith is precisely the contradiction between the infinite passion of the individual’s inwardness and the objective uncertainty.’ The greater the risk of falsehood, the greater the passion involved in believing We must throw away all rational supports of faith ‘so as to permit the absurd to stand out in all its clarity, in order that the individual may believe if he wills it’ (P 190) If the improbability of a belief is the measure of the passion with which it is believed, then faith, which Kierkegaard calls ‘infinite personal passion’, must have as its object something that is infinitely improbable Such was the faith of Abraham, who right up to the moment of drawing the knife on Isaac continued to believe in the divine promise of posterity And his faith was rewarded, when God’s angel held back his hand and Isaac, liberated from the pyre, went on to become the father of many nations Few believing Christians have been willing to accept that Christianity is infinitely improbable, and non-believers are offered by Kierkegaard no motive, not to say reason, for accepting belief Paradoxically, his irrationalism has been most influential not among his fellow believers, but among twentieth-century atheists Existentialist thinkers such as Karl Jaspers in Germany and Jean-Paul Sartre in France found attractive his claim that to have an authentic existence one must abandon the multitude and seize control of one’s own destiny by a blind leap beyond reason The Theism of John Stuart Mill In England, religious thought took a very different turn in the writings of John Stuart Mill, published some fifteen years after the Concluding Unscientific Postscript Jeremy Bentham and James Mill had ensured that religious instruction should form no part of John Stuart’s education Accordingly, in his autobiography, Mill says he is ‘one of the very few examples in this country of one who has, not thrown off religious belief, but never had it’ Possibly because of this, he did not feel the animus against religion that many other utilitarians have felt In his posthumously published Three 297
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