Agape and Personhood. David L. Goicoechea
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with some of the real concrete existential contingencies.
Johannes de Silentio saw that Isaac could be devastated as he
saw that he was to be the sacrificial victim and he could have
taken offence at God, so to prevent that, Abraham could tell
him that it was not God’s command but his own demonic will.
That way Isaac could have kept faith in the God of Abraham.
In contingency two Abraham could have become dejected
and abject by wondering how God could be so monstrous to do this.
In contingency three Abraham could have concluded that even
to believe in God’s command was the sin of child murder.
In contingency four Isaac could have lost his faith.
Søren had these and many more unlimited voices speaking
within himself and such complexity made logic absurd.
II.2.4 The Absurd Contingency of Abraham’s Faith in the Promise
In part three of Fear and Trembling, Eulogy on Abraham, Silentio
laments that life’s unlimited absurd contingencies could bring
us poor humans to the defiant defeat of doubt, dread and despair.
Søren was so tempted when he felt called upon to break his promise
as was Abraham when God seemed to be breaking His promise.
But the challenges of complexities’ contingencies can become
opportunities for heroes, poets and orators to become great.
“One became great by expecting the possible, another by
expecting the eternal; but he who experienced the impossible became
the greatest of all” and, of course, that is exactly what Abraham did.
God looked like an impossible contradiction of opposites as
Abraham went forth in faith to do His will because Isaac
was the means by which God could keep His promise and by
demanding Isaac as a sacrificial victim God would be taking
away the means by which the promise could be kept with honor.
The promise was for this finite, temporal life in that it
had to do with a very large family and a very prosperous land
and somehow becoming a blessing for all of humankind.
So Abraham believed that God was only tempting him and
that if he went forth in good faith to do God’s will in sacrificing
Isaac God would somehow give him back Isaac a second time.
In his faith Abraham so believed and trusted in God that
he reconciled the absurd opposites of God: God who
promises good and wonderful things with God, the monster,
who demands the sacrifice of Isaac and thus the end of the promise.
But Kierkegaard had just as much to reconcile for he did
identify with his father’s melancholia and he did feel like
a hunched back, little creep whom all of a sudden Regina redeemed.
But he felt called to leave her and never get her back in
this life a second time, but that had to do with the new
complexity of Christian faith in the sacrifice of God’s Son.
II.2.5 The Absurd Contingency of Double Movement Leaping
In his Eulogy Silentio writes that Abraham was the greatest of all
“great by that power whose strength is powerlessness,
great by that wisdom whose secret is foolishness
great by that hope whose form is madness
great by that love that is hatred to oneself.”
This is the language or the logos of the Cross as Paul sees it.
It is as if Silentio is quoting Paul here and this is the core
of Søren’s philosophy of love and reconciliation which he
now spells out for the first time in this Preliminary Expectoration.
Søren first spits out his philosophy of double movement leaping by
comparing the Knights of Infinite Resignation and of Faith.
With all of his energy and passion Abraham renounced Isaac
and was willing to give him up as a Knight of Infinite Resignation.
But by faith which is God’s gift Abraham gets Isaac a second time.
As Silentio puts it in thinking of Regina:
By my own strength I can give up the princess
and I will not sulk about it
but find joy and peace and rest in my pain
but by my own strength I cannot get her back again
for I use all my strength in resigning.
On the other hand, by faith,
says that marvelous knight,
by faith you will get her by virtue of the absurd.
With Infinite Resignation Buddhists renounce all desire and
Platonists renounce the shadows and images of the cave and
Hegelians renounce each thesis with an antithesis. But Søren,
while renouncing the aesthetic basement and the ethical first
floor of his house with the logic of the neither/nor and
relating absolutely to the absolute, then in faith comes back
and is free to live on all floors of his house at once by
relatively loving the basement, first floor and the second floor.
II.2.6 The Absurdity of Ethically Suspending the Teleological
Silentio focuses on three major problems for Father Abraham.
He is called upon to murder, hate and lie in the worst way possible.
But, does not this make his faith absurd and totally unethical?
The ethical is the universal natural law and every individual,
as Hegel argues, should obey that law with a good conscience.
Socrates saw that we should care for our soul with good conscience.
While there is no mention of good conscience in the Hebrew Bible
it runs through Paul’s writings as an element of his Stoic heritage.
Kierkegaard in Works of Love highlights the practice of cultivating
a sensitive conscience as the single individual’s loving guide.
But here in Problemata I Silentio argues that faith is the paradox
that the single individual is higher than the universal and
that to respond to God’s call Abraham should suspend the ethical
for the sake of his absolute duty to the Horror Religiosus.
There is not only a teleological suspension of the ethical here
but