In 1921 David F. Swenson wrote, "Fear and Trembling uses the story of Abraham's sacrifice of his son. Abraham is not a tragic hero, for he cannot claim, like Jephtah or the Roman consul, a higher ethical justification for his deed. His intention to sacrifice his son has a purely personal motivation, and one which no social ethic can acknowledge; for the highest ethical obligation that his life or the situation reveals is the father's duty of loving his son. Abraham is therefore either a murderer, or a hero of Faith. The detailed exposition elucidates Abraham's situation dialectically and lyrically, bringing out as problemata the teleological suspension of the ethical, the assumption of an absolute duty toward God, and the purely private character of Abraham's procedure; thus showing the paradoxical and transcendent character of a relation in which the individual, contrary to all rule, is precisely as an individual, higher than the community." Scandinavian Studies and Notes Volume VI, No. 7 August 1921 David F. Swenson: Søren Kierkegaard p. 21