Meaning
A commitment made without proof - believing the unprovable, or acting on an outcome nobody can guarantee. The phrase half-admits the gap it crosses: the leaper knows the evidence has run out and jumps anyway. Sincerely admiring or quietly ironic depending on outcome; pedants may note Kierkegaard never wrote the exact words, a correction that itself has become a commonplace. Regional use: General English; philosophical origin.
Origin
The phrase is commonly attributed to Soren Kierkegaard, and the attribution is the first myth to clear: as both Wikipedia and Wiktionary record, he never used the exact wording, writing instead of a qualitative leap, in Fear and Trembling (1843), Philosophical Fragments (1844), The Concept of Anxiety (1844), and the Concluding Unscientific Postscript (1846). For Kierkegaard the leap was a transition between qualities - Adam's leap into sin his own illustration - that could not be rationally grounded, since faith's truths are subjective and science can neither verify nor invalidate them; he even noted the leap becomes easier the more distance it covers. The seed was Lessing's ditch, the unbridgeable gap between historical knowledge and God, and Kant had already written in 1784 of dogmas casting off, making an uncertain leap over the narrowest ditch. C. S. Lewis, for one, rejected the whole idea, holding Christian belief inferable. The modern sense - believing without proof, or committing blind - runs from theology to Christopher Nolan's Inception (2010): do you not want to take a leap of faith?
Research Sources
References used to check this entry’s meaning, history, or documented forms.
Variants
- a leap in the dark
- an act of faith
- take a leap of faith
Usage Examples
- Signing the lease before the funding cleared was a leap of faith the founders still joke about.
- Marrying a city she had visited once was, she said, less a decision than a leap of faith.
- Every first-night review is a leap of faith by the audience on the critics' behalf.