The knight of faith

How should one interpret Abraham's behavior on mount Moriah? Kierkegaard emphasizes the stark nature of the choice facing Abraham, the "knight of faith." In effect, Abraham has been ordered to murder his own innocent son as a human sacrifice to God. It's important to keep in mind a few things:


What then? How are we to understand the suspension of the ethical? Is Abraham, to put it bluntly, a murderous fanatic? Is this, what it is to have faith? If so, both reason and morality would seem to dictate becoming an atheist (not a bad idea, in my view). Kierkegaard's answer to these problems is unclear. He thinks that the suspension of the ethical requires a leap of faith which cannot be justified rationally. But, in addition, he also seems to think that the leap of faith cannot even be reconciled with reason: it is, one might say, irrational to have faith. Kierkegaard himself, writing Fear and Tembling under the pseudonym of Johannes de Silentio, claims to be unable to make such a leap.
Kierkegaard also thinks that Abraham believes, as he goes up the mountain, that he will get back the son he had been commanded to sacrifice, that God will ultimately spare Isaac. Indeed, as Adams points out, the leap of faith requires not only a concentration of one's earthly attachments, but also a double movement s of "infinite resignation" and of faith proper, by which one receives back what one has given up to God. Moreover, these two movements must be made simultaneously and not sequentially because to have faith is to receive and love things only through God. Of course, how one can resign something and get it back at the same time is hard to understand. But going through these two movements, actually living them, is even harder. This too Johannes de Silentio is unable to do.  Babette's Feast gives a cinematographic representation of this difficulty and, with its hopeful ending, hints at a possibility of resolution.