The book Fear and Trembling takes its title from the New Testament epistles. Kierkegaard attempts to understand the anxiety that Abraham must have felt when God called upon him to sacrifice his son Isaac. According to the author, the final stage before achieving faith is a state of infinite resignation and the determination to give up everything that one would prefer over God. The Sickness Unto Death deals with despair, which Kierkegaard labels as sin from a Christian perspective, even though he understands it psychologically. The title refers to the story of the resurrected Lazarus. The author analyzes various forms of despair related to how a person can accept their own finitude (the physical component) or infinitude (the spiritual component). Both works were created in the 1840s and remain significant both within the author's oeuvre and in the context of existentialist philosophy and psychology.
