The knight of faith renounces the universal in order to be the particular. . . . He knows that higher up [above the security of the universal] there winds a lonely path, narrow and steep . . . The knight of faith is kept awake, for he is under constant threat and can turn back to the universal at any moment. The knight . . . walks alone with his dreadful responsibility. (Fear and Trembling 103, 105, 107)
This passage characterizes the person of faith as a knight, a hero, in terms that resonate with Buber’s highest values: renunciation, the concrete particularity of human existence, the solitary nature of existential commitment, and the sense of his life of faith as a life of service and a journey through the world on a narrow ridge, “a lonely path” that winds “narrow and steep.” Most importantly, for both Kierkegaard and Buber, the knight of faith embodies the “absolute duty to God [in which] the single individual . . . stands in an absolute relation to the absolute” (Fear and Trembling 108). For both of them the finite individual’s putting all into the venture with the absolute is the sine qua non of spiritual existence.
Was this passage of Kierkegaard’s the inspiration for Buber’s metaphor of “the narrow ridge”? I believe it was.
Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling had a lasting impact on Buber from the time he first read it as a teenager. Late in his life, almost sixty years later, he wrote “On the Suspension of the Ethical,” a critique of its argument. There, he referred to that first reading of Kierkegaard and claimed, “I still think of that hour today because it was then that I received the impulse to reflect on the ethical and the religious in their relation to each other” (“On the Suspension” 115).
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