On the Dignity of the Person: The Paradox of Sacrifice

Kierkegaard writes, “In ethical terms, Abraham’s relationship to Isaac is quite simply this: the father shall love the son more than himself.” (Fear and Trembling, trans. by Howard & Edna Hong, Princeton University Press 1983, p. 57)—-and yet, he writes that Abraham is a hero, a knight of faith, because he offered his son to God. He writes that the person who would do what Abraham did and offer his child to God “probably will be executed or sent to the madhouse”(p. 29)—-and yet, Abraham is a knight of faith.

There are several possible avenues of interpretation here. First, I think it does help to remember some background, some of which was known to Kierkegaard’s contemporaries and some which was not until his journals were published posthumously. His own “Isaac” was his engagement to Regine. He took this very seriously; a betrothal in those days was a much more serious thing than an engagement for our frivolous age. He believed he had an ethical duty to carry through on his promise of marriage, as well as wanting it personally. But he also felt that God had blocked the marriage. He could not explain this directly, possibly because he didn’t understand it himself, but all the analysis and questioning of his motives would still end up at the same point: that Kierkegaard believed he had given up his one true love because God had demanded it, and yet he also believed that somehow, miraculously, his faithfulness to God would be accepted and that he would in time be allowed to marry her after all, just as Isaac had been restored to his father. Simultaneous with Fear and Trembling he wrote Repetition, which deals with a young man who has broken off his engagement without explanation because he felt there was a divine veto and now waits for a miraculous restoration of what he has lost, just as Job received back double all he had lost. Part (only part) of what is going on is Kierkegaard’s wrestling with his own faith and trying to process his own experiences. But he thinks his experience points towards larger truths about faith, guilt, sin and redemption, so he is not merely self-analyzing; he is looking to find truths that will help others.

Second, please remember that he is writing pseudonymously. When Kierkegaard uses a pseudonym, he is creating a character; to say “Kierkegaard believes….” is much like saying “Shakespeare believes….” when you should be saying , “Hamlet says….” Johannes de silentio does not have faith. He is trying to understand Abraham and faith, but cannot because he does not have faith himself. Some of what he says may be untrue, or partial.

Third, Kierkegaard and de silentio are responding to Hegel. Hegel’s philosophy was tremendously influential in the Danish church at that time; Kierkegaard’s college instructor on Hegelianism, Prof. Martensen, went on later to become head of the Danish Lutheran Church. Hegel has said that religion is important, but ultimately only partial; it is a picture-thinking pointing towards the insights of his own philosophy. Three times de silentio writes an analysis of Abraham from the Hegelian perspective, which would put the ethical higher than the religious and the universal relationship to the good higher than the individual relationship to God; and three times de silentio concludes “in that case Hegel is right—-but Abraham is lost; and Hegel should have said this.” Right-wing Hegelians like Martensen have sought to have it both ways; they’ve tried to explain Hegel in universal ways and tried to keep him as a hero. Kant at least has the consistency, in_Religion Within the Limits of Reason Alone_, to say that Abraham or anyone else who would violate the ethical because of a purported command from God is simply wrong. If Abraham is special, de silentio is saying, it is his faith that is special; his actual deeds are quite unique and incomprehensible. What matters is the nature of his relationship to God; he does not relate to God merely as the lawgiver of the universe, but rather as one person to another, this particular creature to his Creator.

Kierkegaard’s exegetical approach is always imaginative but not metaphorical. As Nemo indicates, Kierkegaard does not raise doubts about whether the particular events are literally true or false; he is not demythologizing. But he also says that the literalist misses the point of the stories; what matters is not whether Abraham did this, but what the doing of this indicates about Abraham’s faith that we all should learn. If there were no greater lesson and this were merely an historical record, there would be no need to remember it. So I hesitate to follow Katherine and call it “metaphorical;” I think Nemo is right to remember that Kierkegaard did assume it was true while still asking, “What does it mean?”

If Hegel were right, we could forget Abraham and simply embrace modern theology; the full flower of Christian thought has come, the fruits are ripe for harvest, and the full meaning of stories like the Binding of Isaac and the Suffering of Christ has been expressed in the Danish Lutheran Church and modern Christendom, and in Hegelian philosophy which understands it all. But if Abraham truly is a hero, then faith is something that cannot be fully expressed in words, and certainly can’t be fully encompassed in a philosophy. It is more like love, that ultimately must be expressed indirectly because it is a unique relationship between unique individuals; a love story or a poem or even an historical record of the deeds of lovers does not tell you precisely what love is, though showing you love in action can give you insights and may help you weed out the counterfeits. De silentio’s Abrahamic meditations can’t tell you what faith is, and can’t even tell de silentio what faith is since he has never felt it himself, but they do point out false interpretations. It is not simply being willing to “give God the best;” it is not sacrificing for a higher good, the way Brutus sacrificed his sons out of patriotic duty, and it is not merely a precursor for the philosopher’s dialectical understanding of Absolute Spirit’s logical movement through history as the truths expressed mythologically in the Bible and other religions has unfolded into the explicit truths of philosophy.

So it is absolutely true that any parent should love the child more than self, more than anything; and it is absolutely true that anyone who would do what Abraham did should be locked up; Kierkegaard says this through de silentio, and yet says that Abraham is the hero, the knight of faith, whose example lights the way of every generation, each individual separately, as each seeks to have faith in God.

Finally, two points, one pointing backwards and one forwards. In Either/Or the first volume states that the pure sensuality of Don Juan must be expressed in music, because when you introduce words, language, you introduce reflection, which in turn introduces the ethical. To put anything into words is to universalize it, to put it into categories everyone can understand. The purely esthetic, pre-ethical life cannot be put into words because it is idiosyncratic; the person simply does what feels good to him or her and cannot explain further. Kierkegaard says that the religious is the “second immediacy;” that is, the human spirit which has acquired reflection and language and understood “good” in the universally comprehensible categories of morality has now moved into a new sort of life that cannot be fully expressed logically and literally. This is de silentio’s point also, when he discusses whether Abraham was justified in keeping silent.

And as Ron Green points out in Kierkegaard and Kant: the hidden debt, there is a covert topic here which only briefly appears but which is the most important part of the book: the discussion of sin (pp. 98-99 and particularly the footnote). All of us fall outside the ethical, because all of us fall under the judgment of the ethical and are guilty. Faith seeks to recognize this and restore the individual to a relationship to the good, not this time through righteousness but through a recognition of one’s own guilt and need for grace. There is more about this in _Kierkegaard on Ethics and Relgion (Continuum Press) in the chapter on the writings of 16 October 1834.

I hope that helps or was at least interesting.