Thus, while Kierkegaard promotes a living religious faith as the highest of all, his own texts reveal why such faith must be completely irresponsible with regard to any other concern. Having religious faith means not being responsive to anything that calls your faith into question, even if it is the cry of your child as you are taking his life.
The consequence of Kierkegaard’s argument may seem extreme, but it makes explicit something that is implicit in all religious ideals of being absolved from the pain of loss. Being responsive to Isaac’s fate requires that you are devoted to a life that can be lost. Only by loving Isaac for his own sake—while recognizing that his life is essentially fragile—can you care for him. And yet it is precisely such care that religious ideals of absolution demand that you give up. To achieve absolution you cannot love finite beings—including your own children—as ends in themselves, since all such love makes you vulnerable to loss. This is why Buddhists and Stoics, as well as religious mystics across many different traditions, preach detachment as the path to salvation. For example, the widely influential Christian mystic Meister Eckhart emphasizes that “the man who is in absolute detachment is carried away into eternity where nothing temporal affects him,” since “true detachment means a mind as little moved by what happens, by joy and sorrow, honor and disgrace, as a broad mountain by a gentle breeze.”83 The practice of detachment is a movement of infinite resignation, which requires that you sacrifice your care for the finite in favor of the eternal. In order to be unmoved by what happens, you cannot be responsive to Isaac’s fate. On the contrary, you must remain as insensitive as a mountain.
Even though Kierkegaard (unlike Meister Eckhart) does not want to be immobile and untouchable, the effect of his religious faith turns out to be the same. While Kierkegaard does not stop with detachment, his religious faith still demands the sacrifice of any care for Isaac in his own right. Thus, in Fear and Trembling he recalls the stern declaration by Jesus in the Gospel of Luke: “If anyone comes to me and does not hate his own 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). On Kierkegaard’s reading, Jesus here expresses how God demands an absolute love, for the sake of which all other loves must be renounced. That you should “hate” the ones you love does not mean that you should dislike them—in which case it would be easy to renounce them—but that you should sacrifice them for the love of God. Or as Jesus himself explains in the Gospel of Matthew: “Anyone who loves their father or mother more than me is not worthy of me; anyone who loves their son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me” (Matt. 10:37). According to the same logic, Abraham proves himself to be “worthy” by demonstrating in the most concrete way—through his readiness to sacrifice Isaac—that he loves God more than his son. This is the movement of infinite resignation, whereby Abraham gives up the finite for the sake of the eternal. And yet through the second movement—the movement of faith—Abraham is convinced that Isaac will be given back to him. In renouncing his care for Isaac, Abraham is at the same time ready to receive Isaac anew as a gift from God. The price of such faith, however, is that Abraham is completely insensitive to what befalls Isaac. Even if he turns out to have killed Isaac, Abraham is just the same.
V
The theological stakes are high, since the relation between Abraham and Isaac in the Old Testament is supposed to prefigure the relation between God and Jesus in the New Testament. The parallels between the two stories are striking and well established in the Christian exegetical tradition. A father (Abraham/God) sacrifices his beloved son (Isaac/Jesus). In the Binding of Isaac, the son is taken to Mount Moriah, where his father raises a knife to kill him. This prefigures the Crucifixion of Jesus, where the son is nailed to the cross on Golgotha and slowly dies in agony. In both stories the sacrifice is rewarded and praised as a holy act. Because Abraham was ready to kill Isaac, God blesses his descendants; because Jesus died on the cross, mankind is said to be redeemed from sin.
Yet the story of Abraham that has been handed down to us may conceal an earlier version. As scholars of the Hebrew text have shown, there are strong indications that in the original version Abraham chooses to protect Isaac’s life in defiance of the divine command. In the official version (Gen. 22), Abraham is ready to kill Isaac when “an angel of the Lord” stays his hand. The angel relays a message from God, who explains that Abraham has passed the test and therefore can dispense with the actual killing of Isaac. In a second speech, the angel further explains that Abraham will be rewarded for his obedience. Because he has completed the sacrifice of Isaac in his heart—showing that he is willing to kill even his beloved son for the sake of following a divine command—Abraham is allowed to keep Isaac as a gift from God. There are good textual grounds, however, for regarding the angelic speeches as a later insertion. Both in terms of style and structure, they diverge in striking ways from the rest of the text. Most importantly, if one removes the angelic speeches one will find a consistent narrative where Abraham disobeys God’s command. The angelic speeches would thus have been inserted to cover up Abraham’s disobedience. As Omri Boehm has argued in a careful textual study: “A later redactor interpolated the figure of the angel, thereby shifting responsibility for interrupting the test from Abraham to the angel.”84
While these philological arguments were not available to Kierkegaard, he does imagine a scenario where Abraham disobeys God and chooses not to sacrifice Isaac. “If Abraham had doubted as he stood there on Mount Moriah,” we read in Fear and Trembling, “then he would have witnessed neither to his faith nor to God’s grace but would have witnessed to how appalling it is to go to Mount Moriah.”85 For Kierkegaard, this is the worst possible scenario. Kierkegaard’s entire argument depends on the assumption that Abraham showed complete devotion to God and had total trust in His promise. Otherwise Mount Moriah would not be the sublime site of religious faith that Kierkegaard celebrates but rather “a place of terror, for it was here that Abraham doubted.”86 In Kierkegaard’s account, then, it is not the killing of Isaac that would make Mount Moriah a place of terror. From Kierkegaard’s religious perspective, the terrible scenario is not that Abraham would murder his son but that he would lose his trust in God and not follow His command.
Yet what Kierkegaard laments as “doubt” with regard to religious faith can just as well be read as an affirmation of secular faith. If Abraham disobeys God, it is because he is committed to Isaac as an end in himself. Moreover, it is because he believes that Isaac can actually and irrevocably die. This is the core of secular faith: what you love is worth fighting for even though it is finite and calls for your care because it is finite. In contrast, the double movement of religious faith makes Abraham completely irresponsible with regard to Isaac’s finitude. Because Abraham believes that God can restore anything that is lost, he can sacrifice the care for his son. Indeed, because Abraham believes that God will return Isaac to him, he can kill Isaac without even thinking or feeling that he is compromising his fatherly love.
The ability to sacrifice his beloved son is displayed even more emphatically by God in relation to Jesus. Through the Incarnation, the eternal and immutable God becomes a finite human being: Jesus of Nazareth. He is born, he lives, and he dies. While Jesus claims to be the Son of God, he is recognizably human in being seized by doubts and hopes, insecurities and joys, longing and despair. Most dramatically, his last days lead up to an utterly painful and humiliating death. Persecuted by the authorities, he hides outside the city and cannot sleep at night. His disciples betray him and he himself vacillates in fear. He is arrested, beaten, ridiculed, and tortured. Finally, he is put to death in the most debasing way. A crucifixion in Roman times was the lowest and most quotidian way of being executed. Many times a day criminals were left to die hanging from a cross. That this should be the fate of the Messiah—the Son of God himself—was incomprehensible and shattering for those who had placed their tru
st in him. Rather than establish the Kingdom of God on earth, Jesus died alone and helpless on the cross.
On its own, the story of Jesus’s death is a wrenching story of abandonment. His disciples desert him and his own father leaves him to die on the cross. Yet the Crucifixion of Jesus is the most celebrated sacrifice in human history. On churches all across the world, the cross is held forth not as a sign of injustice and torture but as a sign of redemption. Indeed, the sacrifice of Jesus is held to be the key to our salvation. “For God so loved the world, that he gave his only son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life” (John 3:16). Why would this be the case? Why would salvation and eternal life require the sacrifice of a beloved son? As Jesus explains, we should follow his example and sacrifice our lives for God. “For whoever wants to save their life will lose it, but whoever loses their life for me will save it” (Luke 9:24). As long as we are devoted to our lives—including the lives of those we love—we can suffer from loss. By trying to protect your own life or the life of your son, you are all the more vulnerable with regard to what may happen, since “whoever wants to save their life will lose it.” However, if you renounce your care for what you love and put your trust in God, every loss will be redeemed, since “whoever loses their life for [God] will save it.”
Even faced with the death of what you love, you can renew your faith in divine salvation, as long as you renounce your care for the death that has actually taken place. This is the double movement of religious faith and the Christian understanding of the Crucifixion is a paradigmatic example. To look at Jesus on the cross and see an image of salvation rather than irrevocable loss, you must make the double movement. Through the movement of infinite resignation you renounce your care for the finite Jesus who died on the cross, while maintaining—through the movement of faith—that God redeems the loss. Following an established religious logic, giving up the attachment to mortal life is a step on the way to overcoming death. Jesus’s sacrifice—allowing himself to be crucified and then being resurrected in a movement of heavenly ascent—is supposed to show that we can be liberated from mortal life. “For if we have been united with him in a death like his,” Saint Paul maintains, “we shall certainly be united with him in a resurrection like his” (Rom. 6:5). The suffering of Jesus is thus taken seriously, but only as a necessary step on the way to salvation. The temporal finitude of Jesus is only an intermediary stage on the way back to the timeless infinity of God. Even though God became mortal, was humiliated and died on the cross, he is just the same. Nothing has impaired him and nothing has been lost.
To affirm such a double movement, you must sacrifice or repress the fate of the mortal beloved. Just as Abraham in Fear and Trembling can leave Isaac for dead by virtue of his living religious faith, the Christian can leave Jesus for dead by virtue of belief in the Resurrection. While Christ returns to God—with whom he has always been united in the eternal Trinity—the finite Jesus, the one who can suffer and be moved by the passions, must be discarded and left behind. Thus, in both the Gospels of Matthew and Mark, Jesus’s last words express a sense of utter abandonment: Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani? (“My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”). After repeating this cry, Jesus gives up his last breath and dies. While his death is held to be an expression of God’s pure love, it remains a brutal sacrifice for anyone who cares to see. God’s love (agape) is boundless and constant, but for the same reason it is unmoved by anything that happens. God does not love anything more than anything else. He loves those who kill his son as much as he loves the son himself. Since it is God’s nature to love, he loves everything regardless of any factors that are external to himself. In theological terms, his love is entirely spontaneous and “unmotivated,” since it has nothing to do with the qualities or the fate of what he loves. Regardless of who the beloved is and regardless of what happens to the beloved, God is just the same.
What the Crucifixion reveals, then, is the emptiness of divine love. The reason God has abandoned his son is that he could never care about him in the first place. It makes no difference to God that his beloved son is tortured and put to death. Curiously enough, he is eternally just the same.
Yet the emptiness and meaninglessness of divine love should not lead us to despair. Rather, it should recall us to finitude as the condition for any sense of responsibility and love. Only someone who is finite—only someone who understands what loss means—can care for the beloved. Only someone who is finite can allow the world to matter and only someone who is finite can take responsibility for anyone else.
The death of Jesus thus leaves itself open to being read in the light of secular passion. On such a reading, Jesus has to be finite—not in order to redeem us from death but in order to be someone who can love and be loved. Recall here the extraordinary sequence in the Gospel of John, when Jesus on the cross says “I thirst,” is given to drink, then says “It is consummated” and dies, with a soldier subsequently thrusting a lance into his side, water and blood pouring out.87 The Christian move is to distinguish this body that is subject to need, dissolution, and decomposition from the “glorious” body of resurrection that is exempt from death. Yet the moment of consummation—of fulfillment of Scripture—is here the moment when the body of the beloved is shown to be a body of flesh and blood. If this body is “resurrected,” it is not because it ascends to heaven or is transformed into an incorruptible body, but because it is commemorated by those who love him, compelled to remember him precisely because he died and thereby allowing him to live on, in a process of communion that itself is subject to dissolution and death.
Everything thus depends on how we apprehend the death of Jesus. Rather than celebrate his death as a pathway to heaven, we should recognize that Jesus died, as every beloved has always died, with no afterlife apart from those who cared to remember him. To behold the death of Jesus in this way is to acknowledge that every life, even the life of the most beloved, ends in death. The death of the beloved is irrevocable—it is a loss that cannot be recuperated—since there is no life other than this life. From a Christian perspective, this is the most devastating scenario. “If there is no resurrection of the dead,” Paul writes in his First Letter to the Corinthians, “and if Christ has not been raised, then our proclamation has been in vain and your faith has been in vain” (1 Cor. 15:13–14). Indeed, Paul emphasizes that “if for this life only we have hoped in Christ, we are of all people most to be pitied” (1 Cor. 15:19). If there is no life other than this life—a life that ends in death—then life is vain and futile, according to Paul. All that is left is to “eat and drink, for tomorrow we die” (1 Cor. 15:32).
Yet Paul’s conclusion is the wrong one. That life ends in death does not entail that our long-term commitments are futile, leaving us only with the physical pleasures of eating and drinking in the time that remains. On the contrary, the peril of death is an intrinsic part of why it matters what we do and why it matters that we devote ourselves to someone or something living on beyond ourselves. We have to take care of one another because we can die, we have to fight for what we believe in because it lives only through our sustained effort, and we have to be concerned with what will be passed on to coming generations because the future is not certain. This is the double movement of secular faith. You run ahead into the risk of irrevocable death—you acknowledge that everything will be lost—and yet you are resolved to make the most of the time that is given. You see that even the most beloved will die—that he actually can perish, that his life irrevocably can come apart—and yet you maintain your love for him. You see that death is utter darkness and yet you seek to maintain the light that will be extinguished.
Every time you care for someone who may be lost or leave you behind, every time you devote yourself to a cause whose fate is uncertain, you perform an act of secular faith. Through your passion, you apprehend that death is constitutive of life and yet you do not renounce your commitment to living
on. You do not give in to death but seek to prolong the life of what you love. You see that death is senseless and yet you seek to make sense of life.
Only through such a movement of secular faith can you be responsive to Isaac’s fate. In Fear and Trembling, Abraham closes his eyes to Isaac’s suffering by virtue of religious faith. With calm resolve he takes time to chop the firewood, bind Isaac, and sharpen the knife without a tremble passing through his body. While Kierkegaard wants us to behold this scene as a tremendous example of piety, we can see that it is a disaster and that the dream of a God for whom everything is possible is a nightmare. Through the double movement of religious faith, Abraham infinitely renounces his care for what actually happens, to make room for his faith that God can restore anything that is lost. Likewise, Christian faith transforms the vision of Jesus’s suffering: infinitely renouncing the care for actual bodily injury, for actual death, in favor of the belief that suffering is a path to salvation. But insofar as you maintain your secular faith, you can see that there is no life after death and that torture is not redemptive. You can still see Isaac’s suffering and respond to his impending death. You can see that his life is fragile—that he can die once and for all—but that does not diminish your love for him. On the contrary, the finitude you share is an essential part of why you love and care for him with all your heart. You would never take his life, even if God commanded you, because you understand that death does not make sense and does not redeem anyone.
The story of Abraham and Isaac thus reveals, with utmost clarity, that the sense of responsibility cannot be based on divine command. In The Brothers Karamazov, Dostoyevsky famously claimed that if God does not exist, then everything is permitted. But Fear and Trembling shows that the truth is the other way around. If there is a God for whom everything is possible, then anything can be permitted, even the killing of your own child for no reason other than God’s command. This is the truth that Kierkegaard forces you to confront. If you hold that your responsibility for Isaac is based on God’s command, then you are committed to killing Isaac if that turns out to be the command. Moreover, if you make the double movement of religious faith, you will not even be able to apprehend how Isaac is calling out for your care. If you believe that he can be resurrected—that he will live on in eternity or be restored on earth—you will fail to see his fate in being put to death. Whether Isaac lives or dies ultimately makes no difference to you, since you believe that everything you lose will be returned.
This Life Page 19