Risking Proclamation, Respecting Difference. Chris Boesel
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to one’s neighbor and, more specifically, in the totality of one’s ethical relations and duties. And here we can hear the echo of Rubenstein’s commitment to “human solidarity” as criteria and judge of religious faith.
All well and good. There is just one more dimension of the ethical as the highest that needs mentioning before turning to Abraham. Johannes points out that, “within its own compass the ethical has several rankings.”7 The individual, as the particular, is related to the whole at ascending levels of more and more comprehensive wholes, e.g., the family, the city, the state, and ultimately, for Hegel, Western civilization’s (and indeed, the World Spirit’s) pinnacle achievement, modern protestant culture. Therefore, it is possible that a suspension of one’s ethical obligation on a lower level, say the level of family obligation, may be justified, indeed, demanded, if it serves a higher level of the larger whole. This kind of suspension of the ethical would not be a breach, but rather, a tragic fulfillment of the ethical. Johannes gives a classic example. An entire nation suffers under a divine wrath. The deity demands a young girl as a sacrifice. In such a context, “it is with heroism that the father has to make that sacrifice,” and “never a noble soul in the world will there be but sheds tears of sympathy for their pain, tears of admiration for their deed.”8 The sacrifice of a particular ethical obligation at the family level, if for the good of the wider community, is an expression, not a breach, of the ethical.
Not so with Abraham. His particular relation to Isaac, ethically speaking, is the inviolate love of father to son. Johannes notes that, within the Hegelian ethical, it may be possible to “justify him ethically for suspending the ethical duty to the son” (in his decision to sacrifice Isaac), if thereby he did not exceed “the ethical’s own teleology,”9 that is, if his action had served a higher ethical purpose or goal for the wider community. However, this is clearly not the case. Abraham’s decision to suspend his ethical duty to his son by sacrificing him, in obedience to God, cannot be understood to serve or express a higher ethical good. “It is not to save a nation, not to uphold the idea of the State, that Abraham did it, not to appease angry gods.”10 Therefore, from the Hegelian point of view, Abraham’s breach of the ethical was not only due to the fact that he suspended his particular ethical duty to his son, but that he suspended the ethical itself. “In his action he overstepped the ethical altogether, and had a higher telos outside it [his own particular God-relation], in relation to which he suspended it (the ethical as telos).”11 Abraham behaves as if God, and his particular relation to God (the dimension of the particular and the universal is anticipated here), are absolutely distinct from and higher than the ethical, and are thereby absolutely determinative of the ethical and the totality of relations therein. How does Abraham’s decision of faith, then, place him in relation to the ethical as conceived by Hegel? He stands outside the ethical, in breach of it, and in contradiction to it.12
So, while Hegel’s conception of the ethical entails an affirmation of faith (when the latter is properly understood), it would seem Abraham’s faith entails a stark rejection of the ethical. And in doing so, it constitutes a grotesque disfiguration of the true nature of faith itself. That is, if we take Hegel’s word for it. But what if we take our cue from Abraham, or more accurately, from the confession that Abraham is the father of faith, rather than its most horrific profaner? What if we allow that confession about Abraham to determine our understanding of how his troubling decision is related to the ethical? This is precisely what Johannes tries to do, and what causes him so much trouble, given his initial willingness to give Hegel the benefit of the doubt with regard to the nature of the ethical.
Most people assume that the act of Abraham’s faith atop Mount Moriah consists in his willingness to give Isaac up for God. It is quite natural to assume so. It is, after all, what the available evidence suggests to the public eye of the neutral observer. However, according to Johannes’s reading of the story, this is not faith at all. Giving up Isaac for God, Johannes argues, would make Abraham a “knight of resignation” rather than of faith (the knight of resignation being exemplified by the king sacrificing his daughter to the angry god to save the nation). The “knight of faith,” on the other hand,
does exactly the same as the other knight [of resignation], he infinitely renounces the claim to the love which is the content of his life; he is reconciled in pain; but then comes the marvel, he makes one more movement, more wonderful than anything else, for he says: “I nevertheless believe that I shall get her [for Abraham, Isaac], namely on the strength of the absurd, on the strength of the fact that for God all things are possible.”13
What makes Abraham a hero of faith is not his willingness to give up Isaac. Rather, Johannes understands his special greatness to lie in the fact that “he did not doubt that he would get Isaac back . . . that God both wants and will be able to give him [Abraham] back his opportunity to exercise paternal love.”14 Not only did Abraham expect to get Isaac back—“through faith Abraham did not renounce his claim on Isaac, through his faith he received Isaac”—he expected, in getting Isaac back, to get the ethical itself back.15 The faith of Abraham, then, is a double movement. A giving up and a getting back. What is distinctive—and Kierkegaard, or at least Johannes, would say, great—about Abraham’s faith is not his willingness to give up the ethical, but his commitment to hold fast to the ethical, beyond resignation, that is, on impossible grounds—on grounds beyond the totality of the ethical itself: “for it is great to grasp hold of the eternal but greater to stick to the temporal after having given it up.”16 Abraham’s decision to sacrifice Isaac is a decision of faith precisely to the extent that it is not a decision to give up either Isaac or the ethical. Johannes invites the reader to share his wonder at the fact that Abraham never ceases to hold to Isaac and to the ethical, by holding to God’s promise and possibility concerning him, even as he raises the knife.
The extent to which the faith of Abraham entails a distinctive embrace of the ethical within the very decision to sacrifice Isaac is further illustrated in the accompanying sketch of the “happy burgher,” a sketch of how a contemporary knight of faith—presumably, a modern-day Abraham—might appear in nineteenth century Copenhagen. On the surface, this knight of faith bears very little resemblance to Abraham. The figure he does resemble, however, with “remarkable similarity,” is “the bourgeois philistine” (a middle class, decidedly non-intellectual and non-spiritual, businessman).17 Needless to say, there are no abhorrent breaches of ethical responsibility such as child sacrifice and the like visible here. Indeed, the “extremity” of Abraham’s ordeal is nowhere to be seen.
He looks like a tax gatherer. . . . He is solid through and through. His stance? Vigorous, it belongs altogether to finitude, no smartly turned-out townsman taking a stroll out to Fresberg on a Sunday afternoon treads the ground with surer foot; he belongs altogether to the world, no petit bourgeois belongs to it more. . . . No heavenly glance or any other sign of the incommensurable betrays him; if one didn’t know him it would be impossible to set him apart from the rest of the crowd.18
One can only marvel at this startling identification of two such starkly contradictory scenes: Abraham ascending Moriah and a contented petit bourgeois walking through the park. If one recalls the opening of Fear and Trembling, Johannes gives a series of differing versions of the trip to Moriah, his own versions that attempt to present an Abraham he could understand—versions that included a glimpse of a grimace of anger, a wince of pain, a clenched fist, the fallen countenance of resignation