Agape and Personhood. David L. Goicoechea
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of the teleological for Abraham
faces the loss of all meaning as God becomes self-contradictory.
In his duty to the Mysterium Tremendum of the Holy, Abraham
is willing to be tried and tested by God believing all the while that
God will suspend his own command or He will no longer be God.
Silentio further eulogizes Abraham by comparing him to Mary.
She needs worldly admiration as little as Abraham needs tears
for she is no heroine and he was no hero,
but both of them became greater than these,
not by being exempted in any way
from the distress and the agony and the paradox,
but became greater by means of these. (65)
When you read Silentio’s treatment of Abraham you see no
difference between Abraham and the God-man and that is why
Kierkegaard does not sign his name to this deceptive writing
which makes no distinction between the elder and younger brother.
II.2.7 Loving Abraham as More Important
In Works of Love after showing how love is a matter of conscience
Kierkegaard writes a chapter on “The Duty to Love the People We See.”
This takes us right to the heart of our duty to so love Love
that in praising Love we will be able to love each and every person.
To cultivate the conscience that sees why I should love every person
is the main point of Problemata II in which Silentio in order
to comprehend Abraham goes to Luke’s hard saying:
If anyone comes to me and does not hate
his father and mother and wife and children
and brothers and sisters, yes, and even his own life,
he cannot be my disciple. (Luke 14:26; see Problemata II, 72)
Abraham is pictured here as living out this highest command.
Kierkegaard through Silentio seems to love Abraham as even
more important than Jesus because Abraham seems to have been
the first to practice this strange love that hates in order to follow.
So what is this hard saying about hating each person we meet
in order to love them all about in its absurd paradoxical way?
Kierkegaard explains his usage of it in Works of Love by
showing why the Christian is called to love the enemy and to hate
the beloved and by explaining how the first depends on the second.
When I love my child, my friend, my beloved with the emphasis
on the my, I love with a preferential self love that I need to
suspend with infinite resignation if I am truly to love every
other person as they are in themselves and not as I see them.
So this hard saying is part of the cultivation process in which
I can come to love all persons in the very value of their personhood.
In accord with Kierkegaard’s existential dialectic after I stop
loving my beloved absolutely and I come to love Love absolutely
the I can love all persons as persons and then love my
beloved relatively in all of his or her unique differences.
According to Silentio Abraham is already called upon to do this.
II.2.8 The Abrahamic Blessing for All Peoples
Kierkegaard’s understanding of the strategy of the highest love
that is the gift and task to reconcile all peoples should let
the prodigal son, Jesus, go out to the elder brother, Socrates, the Greek,
and Abraham, the Jew, and begin by loving them as more important.
Just as Socrates in Søren ’s mind would nobly come to love Jesus
as more important in return so could Abraham also do that.
Abraham believes that the promise of being a blessing for all peoples
can be fulfilled through Isaac and his offspring and Jesus
could be the key person in that family line for blessing all peoples.
Silentio treats Abraham and Jesus as the same for the reader
could think that Abraham’s double movement leap is the same
as that of the God-man who as eternal came into the finite flesh.
They do both have universalist intentions even though in Jesus’
case the Son is sacrificed for every single individual person,
whereas in Abraham’s Isaac is not sacrificed for all peoples.
In Problemata III it is asked if it was ethically defensible
for Abraham to conceal his understanding from his family.
The main point is that Abraham did not have any certain understanding.
He acted as if he would sacrifice Isaac and believed as if he would not.
Abraham is trapped in a double bind that calls for the double
movement leap of faith and that makes him higher than other
heroes such as Agamemnon, Brutus, and Jephte who
did sacrifice their children for very clear teleological reasons.
They were Knights of Infinite Resignation, not Knights of Faith.
Silentio’s Abraham is already being loved as a blessing for the peoples
by helping us to love the girl and the young swain, Ephigenia in Aulis,
Aristotle’s bride and bridegroom, Axel and Valborg, Queen Elizabeth,
Agnes and Merman, Sara and Tobias, and Gretchen and Faust.
We must love Abraham as more important for he is greater than these.
II.2.9 Loving the God-Man as More Important
This pseudonym, Johannes de Silentio, is being used by Kierkegaard
to deceive us out of our self-deceit into the truth and he tells us
in the Epilogue at the end of Fear and Trembling the truth is that
the highest passion in a person is faith and faith is:
an honest earnestness that fearlessly
and incorruptibly points to the tasks
an honest earnestness
that lovingly maintains the tasks
that does not disquiet people into wanting
to attain the highest too hastily
but keep the tasks young’
and beautiful and lovely to look at
inviting to all and yet also difficult
and inspiring to the noble mind. (121)
Our highest passion is faith in the gift and task of reconciliation.
We can spend our life on this or we can become