Anthropology as Ethics. T. M. S. (Terry) Evens
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Faith or Unholy Desire?
Like all stories, the Akedah has at least two sides, each of which serves the other as a deconstructive mirror-image, that is, one that reflects so acutely as to occasion critical self-reflection, the sort of prying reflection that opens oneself to question. In the present case, what is an imperfection from the creational side of the story—namely, surrogate or incomplete sacrifice—proves a perfectly vital force from the creatural side. The lesson seems to be something to the effect that humanity as such depends for its livelihood on a constitutive incapacity to complete itself or do things in the absolute, and that insofar as humanity seeks to transcend altogether this condition of conditionality, as is its wont, it courts destruction. A familiar story. Indeed, this tale of an infanticidal father whose devoutly murderous conduct is transmuted into the life of the generations by a salvific act of God may be seen to recall the life-disseminating properties of a great tree whose fruit remains immortalizing only so long as it stays beyond the reach of mortals. The fruit, of course, is the originary power over life and death, the fruit of the Edenic tree of life, and, as the story goes, at the end of the day it simply is not ours for the taking.
This reading follows from construing the highlight of the Akedah to be the substitution of an animal for a human in sacrifice. It is this substitution that realizes the story's theme as a turning movement from death to life. In light of reading the story from its endpoint of surrogation, the story's principal burden of instruction is to make the substitution of beast for human, and thus life for death, sensible in terms of the logic of sacrifice. The story performs this task by establishing vicarious identity between Isaac and the ram of God. The command by God to offer up Isaac, and Abraham's dutiful conduct in doing so, may be explained, then, simply as functions of the story's narrative task: the establishment of identity between Isaac and the sacrificial ram depends on the establishment of Isaac's identity as victim.
However, while God's command and Abraham's response may be readily understood in this way, when these two figures are seen as subjectivities or persons rather than simply as agents of the narrative, their actions inevitably raise questions of motivation. These are the questions that Kierkegaard addressed. And if I am right about the story's principal purpose as a demonstration of the vital significance of surrogation in sacrifice, these questions of subjectivity must have vexed the story's redactors too.
In point of fact, as one might expect if the story's main thrust lies elsewhere, the narrative provides precious little to go on in answering these questions. When God issues his command, he provides no reason for it, and Abraham appears to be as much in the dark about his own conduct as he is about the order from above. Indeed, Abraham's response to the command is so immediate that it seems very much like one's response to an ‘order’ issued practically by oneself to oneself: While carving the Thanksgiving turkey, I ‘tell’ myself to raise my arm, knife in hand, and my arm goes up. Although we take for granted self-movement of this kind, in fact it exhibits all the mystery surrounding the connection between mind and body, or, more appropriately in the present context, between spirit and matter. For in truth, as I argued (on Wittgenstein's philosophical authority) in chapter 1, the connection is neither exactly immediate nor mediate.
The sort of response Abraham gives to God's order, not instinctual but nonetheless more bodily than mindful, is what one might expect of a time and place in which the existence of God (or of gods) is not quite yet a matter of belief but constitutes the implicit certainty on the basis of which any belief whatsoever takes flight. In other words, insofar as ‘faith’ implies ‘belief’ in the sense of facultative acceptance (as it plainly does in Kierkegaard's Pauline usage), Abraham's behavior seems to be both more and less than a matter of faith. Put another way, his behavior may be thought of in terms of a sense of faith other than the one in question here, a pre-predicative and fundamentally social sense. Indeed, his movement is so automatic it might almost be described as motivationless.8
Nevertheless, the story does not want for certain contents that betray a subjectivist perspective. The stunning horror of what Abraham is asked to do could not but introduce the wrench of self-consciousness into the automated works of the divine structure of command. Doubtless, like Kierkegaard, the story's redactors, in their capacity as readers, felt the need to arrive at some understanding of what God and Abraham could have been thinking. Hence, when Isaac, a pious son but no fool, seeing the sacrificial appurtenances asks his father as to the whereabouts of “the lamb for a burnt offering,” Abraham answers “God will provide.” This answer is truthful, prophetically so. And yet it is also exquisitely ironic, concealing the awful truth from Isaac. From this one may infer that Abraham was hardly acting in all innocence, but was only too conscious of the horrifying nature of what he was about to do. (Harking back to Lyotard's jarring comparison between God and Hitler, Abraham's answer could be seen to find a parallel in the well-documented attempt of the Nazis to conceal [e.g., Lang 1990: 41ff.], from both the victims and the world at large, what they were doing in the death camps.)9 Much the same may be said of Abraham's words to his two young helpers, when he instructs them to wait while he and Isaac go off to “worship.” Notwithstanding its plain truth, the statement does more to conceal than reveal what is about to happen. And when he appends to this instruction (my emphasis) “we will come back to you,” he is telling the servants (what had to appear to him) an outright lie, but which in fact proves to be yet another prophetic truth. Finally, in connection to the question of Abraham's and God's intentionality, the words of “the angel of the Lord” seem to leave no room for doubt. The angel informs Abraham (twice, no less) that he has been let off the hook because he did not withhold his son, “thine only son, from Me.” These remarks certainly give truth to the interpretation that in this story God is out to try Abraham's faith, and Abraham means to prove that his faith is more than equal to the trial.
Still, there is something off-center about this strand of the story. The theme that what is on trial is Abraham's faith is somehow not quite in keeping with the more immediate theme of the story—that of the trial of Isaac's life. From the perspective of human law, as Kierkegaard stressed, Abraham's conduct must be judged repugnant. But, strikingly, Abraham's great and blind faith may be seen to constitute a threat even from the perspective of his maker. Given the nature of God's final intervention, it is logically implicit in the story's upshot that in a substantial sense Abraham's behavior was dreadfully wrong. The sort of gift Abraham set out to give is simply not for humankind to offer. The gift of perfection or death, as is the theme of Golgotha, is God's prerogative, not man's. Hence, at the end of this story, God has to step in to make things right. All this follows from taking the story principally as, rather than a rationalization of blind faith, a warrant to economize when sacrificing.
A Perfect Sacrifice
Because it is our habit to think of substantive identity in terms of singular individuals, it has been usual to see Abraham's action as simply homicidal, the attempted murder of another, albeit his own son. But if I am right about the way in which identity is defined in the story, as a matter of the relationship between Abraham and his son before it is a matter of the (non-)relationship between Abraham and himself (“non-relationship” only because we mistakenly tend to conceive of the self in entitative rather than relational terms), then Abraham's act should be understood in terms of self-sacrifice. In which case, we are talking about a selfless act of attempted suicide.
As a rule, selflessness is a good thing. But, and this is the point that I want to develop here, the act seems so perfectly selfless that it registers as the ultimate suicide. In binding Isaac to the altar, Abraham sets out to do himself in, but so completely as to prescind even the possibility of living on in the supreme manner in which, according to the biblical imagination, it is given to humankind to do so: through the generations that issue from Abraham's seed. Moreover, in light of the fact that these are the generations of God's promise, a promise of great and mighty nationhood (Genesis: chaps. 17 and 21), it might be said that Abraham intends to give himself a death so round as to be matchlessly complete. To attempt such global perfection is to presume the exercise of total control in matters of life and death, and thereby to arrogate to oneself godlike powers. If we choose to say (with Wittgenstein 1971: 35) that “nothing is so dead as death,” then Abraham appears to be casting himself as the very substance and pure figure