of the totality of relations constituting the concrete whole of one’s social (or, national—today we might say, global) world. In the words of Johannes, the ethical “rests immanently in itself, has nothing outside itself that is its telos but is itself the telos for everything outside, and when that is taken up into it, it has no further to go.”1 The ethical, having its telos within itself, is self-sustaining and self-justifying. “The whole of human existence is . . . entirely self-enclosed, as a sphere, and the ethical is at once the limit and completion . . . fill[ing] all existence.”2 In the words of Levinas’s critique of Hegel’s conception of history, the ethical conceived as the highest constitutes “a universal order which maintains itself and justifies itself all by itself.”3
Now what does this concept of the ethical mean for an understanding of religious faith? In as much as the Hegelian ethical is the highest (and the universal), Johannes says it “fills all existence” as the totality of relations. There is nothing outside of this relation that cannot be reduced to or remain in opposition to it, “except in the sense of what is evil.”4 He goes so far as to insist that, for Hegel, “the ethical is the divine.”5 The ethical constitutes the very end (telos) and content of the individual’s relationship to God. There is no relation to God outside of—or higher than—the ethical, for the ethical itself is the highest. Consequently, the individual is properly related to God when properly and rationally related to the ethical whole, the totality of ethical relations. As Hannay points out, there is simply “no duty to God that could not be found among those obligations.”6
The key point with regard to religious faith, then? On Hegel’s terms: the conception of the ethical as the highest does not exclude or oppose faith, but constitutes an expression of what Hegel believes to be essential Christian truth. It entails a specific understanding of the nature of faith as properly ordered to the ethical as its telos and proper content. Hegel understands the God-relation of faith to be fulfilled in one’s relation to one’s neighbor and, more specifically, in the totality of one’s ethical relations and duties. And here we can hear the echo of Rubenstein’s commitment to “human solidarity” as criteria and judge of religious faith.
All well and good. There is just one more dimension of the ethical as the highest that needs mentioning before turning to Abraham. Johannes points out that, “within its own compass the ethical has several rankings.”7 The individual, as the particular, is related to the whole at ascending levels of more and more comprehensive wholes, e.g., the family, the city, the state, and ultimately, for Hegel, Western civilization’s (and indeed, the World Spirit’s) pinnacle achievement, modern protestant culture. Therefore, it is possible that a suspension of one’s ethical obligation on a lower level, say the level of family obligation, may be justified, indeed, demanded, if it serves a higher level of the larger whole. This kind of suspension of the ethical would not be a breach, but rather, a tragic fulfillment of the ethical. Johannes gives a classic example. An entire nation suffers under a divine wrath. The deity demands a young girl as a sacrifice. In such a context, “it is with heroism that the father has to make that sacrifice,” and “never a noble soul in the world will there be but sheds tears of sympathy for their pain, tears of admiration for their deed.”8 The sacrifice of a particular ethical obligation at the family level, if for the good of the wider community, is an expression, not a breach, of the ethical.
Not so with Abraham. His particular relation to Isaac, ethically speaking, is the inviolate love of father to son. Johannes notes that, within the Hegelian ethical, it may be possible to “justify him ethically for suspending the ethical duty to the son” (in his decision to sacrifice Isaac), if thereby he did not exceed “the ethical’s own teleology,”9 that is, if his action had served a higher ethical purpose or goal for the wider community. However, this is clearly not the case. Abraham’s decision to suspend his ethical duty to his son by sacrificing him, in obedience to God, cannot be understood to serve or express a higher ethical good. “It is not to save a nation, not to uphold the idea of the State, that Abraham did it, not to appease angry gods.”10 Therefore, from the Hegelian point of view, Abraham’s breach of the ethical was not only due to the fact that he suspended his particular ethical duty to his son, but that he suspended the ethical itself. “In his action he overstepped the ethical altogether, and had a higher telos outside it [his own particular God-relation], in relation to which he suspended it (the ethical as telos).”11 Abraham behaves as if God, and his particular relation to God (the dimension of the particular and the universal is anticipated here), are absolutely distinct from and higher than the ethical, and are thereby absolutely determinative of the ethical and the totality of relations therein. How does Abraham’s decision of faith, then, place him in relation to the ethical as conceived by Hegel? He stands outside the ethical, in breach of it, and in contradiction to it.12
So, while Hegel’s conception of the ethical entails an affirmation of faith (when the latter is properly understood), it would seem Abraham’s faith entails a stark rejection of the ethical. And in doing so, it constitutes a grotesque disfiguration of the true nature of faith itself. That is, if we take Hegel’s word for it. But what if we take our cue from Abraham, or more accurately, from the confession that Abraham is the father of faith, rather than its most horrific profaner? What if we allow that confession about Abraham to determine our understanding of how his troubling decision is related to the ethical? This is precisely what Johannes tries to do, and what causes him so much trouble, given his initial willingness to give Hegel the benefit of the doubt with regard to the nature of the ethical.
Most people assume that the act of Abraham’s faith atop Mount Moriah consists in his willingness to give Isaac up for God. It is quite natural to assume so. It is, after all, what the available evidence suggests to the public eye of the neutral observer. However, according to Johannes’s reading of the story, this is not faith at all. Giving up Isaac for God, Johannes argues, would make Abraham a “knight of resignation” rather than of faith (the knight of resignation being exemplified by the king sacrificing his daughter to the angry god to save the nation). The “knight of faith,” on the other hand,
does exactly the same as the other knight [of resignation], he infinitely renounces the claim to the love which is the content of his life; he is reconciled in pain; but then comes the marvel, he makes one more movement, more wonderful than anything else, for he says: “I nevertheless believe that I shall get her [for Abraham, Isaac], namely on the strength of the absurd, on the strength of the fact that for God all things are possible.”13
What makes Abraham a hero of faith is not his willingness to give up Isaac. Rather, Johannes understands his special greatness to lie in the fact that “he did not doubt that he would get Isaac back . . . that God both wants and will be able to give him [Abraham] back his opportunity to exercise paternal love.”14 Not only did Abraham expect to get Isaac back—“through faith Abraham did not renounce his claim on Isaac, through his faith he received Isaac”—he expected, in getting Isaac back, to get the ethical itself back.15 The faith of Abraham, then, is a double movement. A giving up and a getting back. What is distinctive—and Kierkegaard, or at least Johannes, would say, great—about Abraham’s faith
