the abraham-isaac question

I recently looked back to some old posts on Jake’s blog, where he is discussing/questioning Kierkegaard’s reading of Abraham’s sacrifice of Isaac. I wish I could say I read through it all, but I was distracted/lost interest before I got very far.

One question which jumped out at me was put to Jake by one of his friends, Jonathan; what is your Isaac? Taking the question somewhat anew, since the debate is not fresh within my memory, I am compelled to begin the thought by asking what Isaac is, within this story’s context, so as to then be able to consider the question as it relates to us.

Isaac is Abraham’s son. Abraham has left life and home by command of God already. He is then promised this great nation, wealth/prosperity, etc. He can’t have kids—which in this context is the only way for someone to grow in importance. He finally is given a cherished son, Isaac; which basically means the covenant is riding on Isaac’s future. Then God asks Abraham to sacrifice his son {his future, his promise, his everything}. Beyond the merely ethical questions of murder, during this you had ‘pagans’ all around who would sacrifice their children to the gods. The ethical dilemma, isn’t so ethical because it was a ritual of the surrounding peoples. Which seems to create a certain weird tension. God calls Abraham to leave his home land and to separate himself from the surrounding peoples, but then God is calling him to an act which was rather normative to the pagans. So in a sense it was like God was calling Abraham back to the pagan lifestyle. This in itself must have created a certain about of confusion for Abraham. But this isn’t exactly the main point of what God is doing.

It is more a question about commitment and trust, the faith that Abraham had in God to uphold the promise. Isaac is the incarnation of God’s promise to Abraham. So things are slightly more complicated than we usually make it to be. To use Kierkegaardian language, the ‘defining commitment’ for Abraham was his faith to God. The realization of that commitment was his son Isaac. Isaac is the fruits of his labors; it is this fruit and the promised fruits within him which God then calls into question. He makes Abraham express through obedience that God has his defining commitment not Isaac.

So for us to consider our Isaac we need to look not only at our weaknesses, which can be easily done but also our strengths, the fruit of our work. Consider the history of the Israelites, many times they followed God until they received a certain portion, then turned their worship to that thing instead of keeping their commitment to God. This has undoubtedly been played out in the American context within each of our lives.

This play of contexts is where Kierkegaard writes about faith.

Kierkegaard is writing to the Dutch state where Lutheran was the state religion, everyone was born into Christianity. There was no defining consuming commitment to God from which one based their whole life. Kierkegaard saw a Church where being in was easier than being out, and not in any good postmodern emergent church kind of way. He believed that his defining commitment was to break down the state church and make Christianity as hard as possible. He thinks that there have only been a couple knights of faith in history: Abraham, Moses, Jesus {is that correct?}.

So what does Kierkegaard say about Abraham?

Kierkegaard understands one’s faith to be something which is completely individual; there is no room for community within his construction. {I definitely take this to be dead wrong in the worst case and least at narrow-minded at best; but I will leave that discussion for a later date.} He has justification for this; it is not simply a form of rampant individualism which we see today so often. The justification goes back to a previous post which I discussed essential differeces between greek and hebrew thought.

Kierkegaard is holding to a very hebrew way of understanding truth. Truth being something lived, not something which is propositional. It is like the slang phrase, “being true to myself.” Kierkegaard believes that the the truth of one’s inner life is superior to any corespondence theory of truth. He believes that how we live is simply between us and God. There is no way that anyone else could be privy to that relationship, so it is impossible for anyone to judge or help us live our lives.

Hubert Dryfrus explains very well in his lectures the three levels which Kierkegaard writes about. The first level is one of immediacy, like that of a child. One is only looking for one’s own pleasures. The second level is that of the ethical or universal. This is where one makes himself known and understood to others through the ethical/universal. It is rational/logical which means that everyone can understand the actions of the individual when they are acting at this level. This second level is one of mediation, because one must go through the ethical to come back to them self. This is where the Knight of Resignation, for Kierkegaard, stops.

The Knight of Faith leaves this universal/rationalism for a higher level. This last level looks a lot like the lowest level, because it is unmediated, meaning that it is completely internal. Therefore no one can understand what the person is doing. The Knight of Faith finds them self vulnerable at this final level, because what they have committed them self to is open to being lost, which would be horrible since they have based their whole life’s meaning on it. It is also understood that is completely possible that at a certain time one might have to oppose the ethical enlight of their commitment.

This opposition to the ethical shouldn’t be misunderstood as being is the sense that one opposes the basic ethical for some higher ethical calling. This is the understanding of St. Augustine, the explanation of Abraham’s sacrifice of Isaac was only the highest ethical action—to obey God. This is not how Kierkegaard understands it, because the person in the position has complete anguish for breaking the ethical though they know they must. This a second distinction between the two unmediated levels, the base person doesn’t care for the universal. They believe it doesn’t apply to them or this situation. The Knight still upholds the ethical, they have gone through that stage dialectical and aren’t ‘beyond’ the ethical.

According to Huber Dryfus’ lectures on the subject, Kierkegaard plays down the role that God plays in this story. For him God is simply the defining commitment in Abraham’s life. Now I’m not sure if this is completely true. I want to think that Kierkegaard was a better Christian than than, and Dryfus is simply doing this for the sake of his classroom discussion. But I would have to reread through Fear and Trembling to verify this for myself.

So where does all this leave us? Well I for one, am more confused about this topic now that I have revisited it, even though I have gained more understanding about it. I have put off publishing this post because everything just seems completely wrong, even though I don’t know exactly what that is.

I made a lot of comments in Jake’s discussion about how Isaac simply can’t be talked about. And though I do hold that to be true I feel that Kierkegaard it definitely missing something here. His attempt at regaining the Hebrew in Christianity and knocking of the Greek is a valor move, but it seems he might of missed the boat when it comes to individual versus community. Because the Hebrews were/are very communal people. You can’t extract one’s actions from the community. For someone to have a defining commitment to the God of Abraham it would only be understand when you understand how you relate to being an Israelite and to your heritage, i.e., coming out of slavery in Eygpt, being God’s chosen people, etc.

The Kierkegaardian individual who can’t speak of their defining commitment to anyone is very similar to the Greek/Aristotelian idea of friendship. For Aristotle, there were various levels of friendship, the highest being that between the aristocrats. Those highest of men could attain the highest friendship because they didn’t need friends. The highest friendship was one between men who didn’t need the friendship. And it was a friendship of doing to the other, nothing of dependence. Though not exact, the similarities are close enough that one can see the Greek influence (which could be understood also as closely related to an idea of Protestant-Modernism) which has snuck into his individualism.

There is also in Kierkegaard the ideas of the unspeakability of the teleological suspension of the ethical because any attempt at speaking of the act would be to put it in terms of the ethical.So you have a man, divided from everything, simply by himself before God. Which in some sense it seems like it is right. But could there be a way to link the individual before God also to the brother beside him? It seems that one could very easily bring a notion of the Holy Spirit as acting as intercessary between individuals & God. Because although man can’t talk to man about the unspeakable, God can talk to man₁ about man₂.

So one last thing which I drew from this study.

The paradox of existence not thought — living what can’t be thought