God was not tempting Abraham to sacrifice Isaac; rather he was tempting him to do the ethical thing, to not sacrifice him. For truly, from an ethical standpoint Isaac’s death would not be sacrifice, it would be murder, plain and simple. And as Susan Anderson asks in her book On Kierkegaard, “could there be anything more wrong, from the ethical perspective, than that a parent – who brought a child into the world and therefore has the most solemn obligation to protect the child – would turn around and take the life of that child?” (Anderson 56). But Abraham, because his faith in God was so strong went along and did it. He prepared to sacrifice that which was most dear to him.
There are other stories of fathers sacrificing their children, and Kierkegaard brings up a number of these: Agamemmnon, Jephtha and Brutus were all tragic heroes called upon to kill a child. And they all did so. But their circumstances were quite different from Abraham’s. In each case the sacrifice was necessary in order to protect the community; Agamemmnon to appease an angry deity, Jephthah to fulfill a promise with God that the fate of Israel rested upon, and Brutus to uphold the principle of Roman justice. Their sacrifices made sense ethically: they gave up what they held most dear in the name of the universal. Furthermore, it is easy to relate and sympathize with these tragic heroes; indeed, we pray for that we would have the courage to do what was required in the time of crisis.
But Abraham? He was willing to destroy his own son to prove his faith in God. His act, by ethical standards, was totally unjustified. “It is not to save a nation, not to uphold the idea of the state that Abraham does it; it is not to appease the angry gods. If it were a matter of the deity’s being angry, then he was, after all, angry only with Abraham, and Abraham’s act is totally unrelated to the universal, is a purely private endeavor” (Philosophic 271). Not only would he be defying ethical morality, he would be actually destroying the universal, the potential for further generations, which was “cryptically . . . hidden, so to speak, in Isaac’s loins, and must cry out with Isaac’s mouth: Do not do this, you are destroying everything” (Philosophic 271).
Because Abraham had faith, God spared Isaac, but this does not change the fact that Abraham raised the knife and was ready to go through with what God had originally asked him to do. And yet “even at the instant when the knife glittered he believed . . . that God would not require Isaac” (Anderson 58). And even if God let Isaac be killed, Kierkegaard speculates that Abraham would have not despaired; he would have believed, “he did not believe that some day he would be blessed in the beyond, but that he would be happy here in the world. God could give him a new Isaac, could recall to life him who had been sacrificed. He believed by virtue of the absurd; for all human reckoning had long since ceased to function” (Anderson 58).
No one can understand Abraham, for the entire act occurred within him, between him and God. Kierkegaard writes “Abraham cannot be mediated; in other words, he cannot speak. As soon as I speak I express the universal, and if I do not do so, no one can understand me.” Abraham of course cannot express himself in the universal, ethical sense, because “he has no higher expression of the universal that ranks above the universal he violates.” Abraham performs the ultimate act of faith: he risks everything, and then by virtue of that risk, of his faith, he gets it all back. It makes no sense at all, but that is how religion operates, according to Kierkegaard. Even believing the story of Abraham requires an act of faith, for “the observer cannot understand him at all; neither can his eye rest upon him with confidence.” But while having faith is tremendously difficult, Kierkegaard stands in awe of it: “to be able to lose one’s reason, and therefore the whole of finiteness of which reason is the broker, and then by the virtue of the absurd to gain precisely the same finiteness – that appalls my soul, but I do not for this cause say that it is something lowly, since on the contrary it is the only prodigy (Anderson 60).” (Philosophic 271).
