Comparing Kierkegaard And The Knight Of Faith

Kierkegaard further differentiates the knight of faith and the tragic hero through the evaluation of wish and duty. To begin with, the knight of faith apprehends an absolute duty, to him wish and duty are identical, yet he is obliged to resign them both. In relation to the knight of faith, Kierkegaard states that “If he would remain within his duty and his wish, he is not a knight of faith; for the absolute duty requires precisely that he should give them up” (75). In other words, his duty is his wish; in any case if he is to give up his wish, he does not find peace, for that is after all his duty and this act of resignation of both wish and duty is precisely what makes him a knight of faith. However, this is not the case for the tragic hero.
The knight of faith, Kierkegaard claims, exemplifies the religious way of life and always weighs the ethical vs religious, which are the highest of Kierkegaard’s three stages on life’s way, (aesthetic, ethical and religious), in which the individual exists in a complete relation to the absolute (God), above the ethical in total isolation. The tragic hero, on the other hand, proceeds in the ethical path. He weighs the ethical versus the ethical and gives everything up in the movement of infinite resignation, and in doing so expresses the universal. For him the ethical is the divine, giving up “the certain for the still more certain.” King Agamemnon sacrifices Iphigenia for ethical reasons, to appease the Goddess Artemis during the war. Therefore, the tragic hero conveys the ethical and is fully comprehended, whereas the knight of faith, Abraham in this case, that expresses the religious cannot be understood. At times, the knight of faith, who is above the ethical in the religious sphere, is tempted to choose the ethical, a lower stage of life, than the religious path, this Kierkegaard defines as
In some sense, he is and the reason is quite simple, where the knight of faith sacrifices something in hopes of gaining it back, taking a leap of faith for his personal benefit, the tragic hero is willing to sacrifice something he loves, with no intention of gaining it back, for the betterment of another individual or nation. However, in general, none is better than the other; both remain in the same level. For as the tragic hero in giving something up for the betterment of his people is still, in a sense, a form of greed. On the ethical level, the level that we can comprehend, Abraham is a killer who nearly slays his only son. The absurdity then lies in elucidating why this murderer is praised as the father of faith. While it is possible to understand why the tragic hero sacrifices what he loves, we can never understand the knight of faith, it must simply be accepted as the only solution to the absurd. One finds happiness from something in themselves while the other hopes for contentment from something "out