makes explicit here a fundamental aspect of Enlightenment modernity’s objection to traditional religious faith that is often overlooked. He dramatizes in a powerful way the extent to which the offense of traditional faith for the modern age was never simply faith’s opposition to, or difference from, Reason. In the wake of the Enlightenment, traditional religious faith was not only denigrated as absurd and rationally abhorrent, it was castigated as dangerous and ethically abhorrent. And the Hegelian understanding of faith presented by Johannes stands firmly in this tradition. It entails an uncompromising ethical condemnation, indeed, a criminalization of the faith of Abraham.
The particular criminal logic of Abrahamic faith that Hegel finds objectionable—that puts Isaac under the knife, that is inherently dangerous for the neighbor—is, in contemporary parlance, the logic of imperialistic violation of the other as described by Edward Said (and as we shall see, Levinas and Derrida). Said’s characterization of Orientalism as an imperialistic discourse of cultural and material domination serves as a key for translating Hegel’s “modern ethical desire” into contemporary categories, enabling a certain shock of recognition with regard to our own so-called postmodern and post-colonial ethical instincts. For example, the phenomenon of a “nexus of knowledge and power” in which the other is, “in a sense, obliterat[ed] . . . as a human being” can certainly be taken as an apt description of what is going on in Abraham’s relationship to Isaac.28 Consider: in the biblical story of Mount Moriah (and Johannes’s reading of it), Isaac appears to be a silent, represented object serving the interests of Abraham’s own relationship with God. When the assumptions of Abraham’s faith are imposed upon Isaac as the truth of Isaac’s own life, the reality of that life is reduced to that of an object to be sacrificed for the sake of the reality and fidelity of Abraham’s God-relation. To be so reduced seems awfully close to being, “in a sense, obliterat[ed] . . . as a human being.” Indeed, not even “in a sense.” For Isaac, it means the very material violation of being put under the knife.
And this appears to be just how the young Hegel understood those events on Mount Moriah. In his early theological writings, Hegel identifies Abraham as the origin of Jewish history, and his “spirit” as “the unity, the soul, regulating the entire fate” of that history. He then notes that “the first act which made Abraham the progenitor of a nation is a disseverance which snaps the bonds of communal life and love. The entirety of the relationships in which he had hitherto lived with men and nature, these beautiful relationships of his youth, he spurned.”29 Inherent to the Abrahamic religious spirit, then, as Hegel sees it, is the breach of the communal and even familial relations of love. With this breach, Abraham isolates himself over against “the whole world,” which he then regards “as simply his opposite,” and as “sustained by . . . [a] God who was alien to it.”30
In Hegel’s reading, Abraham trades in communal and familial ties for an exclusive God-relation that transposes the reciprocal, loving nature of those former communal and familial relations into a register of mastery. “Nothing in nature was supposed to have any part in God; everything was simply under God’s mastery. . . . Moreover, it was through God alone that Abraham came in to a mediate relation with the world, the only link with the world possible for him.” Consequently,
mastery was the only possible relationship in which Abraham could stand to the infinite world opposed to him; but he was unable himself to make this mastery actual, and it therefore remained ceded to his Ideal [God—“the product of his thought”31]. He himself also stood under his Ideal’s dominion . . . he served the Idea, and so he enjoyed his Idea’s favor; and since its divinity was rooted in his contempt for the whole world, he remained its only favorite.”32
Hegel sees this combination of contempt for and breaching of all communal and familial relations in which Abraham opposes himself to the world, together with the way in which he is simultaneously sustained in that isolation by loyal servitude to his divine “thought-product,” as constituting an extremely toxic cocktail of interpretive imperialism. And this interpretive imperialism inevitably plays itself out in the most intimate relationship in Abraham’s life. In Hegel’s reading, “even the one love he had, his love for his son” was not spared the consequences of Abraham’s essential “spirit,” a spirit of isolation from and contempt for all worldly relations mediated through absolute, privileged loyalty to an equally isolated divine Master. Abraham’s natural intimacy with his son, Isaac, could not help but “trouble his all-exclusive heart . . . to the extent that even this love he once wished to destroy.”33 Even Abraham’s love for his son must fall under the knife of Abraham’s essential religious spirit, the spirit of mastery through exclusionary opposition and absolute religious servitude.
Hegel sees the essential hostility and exclusionary violence of Abraham’s religious genius, then, as expressed paradigmatically in the sacrifice of Isaac. Abraham imperialistically subjects all natural and communal relations, even his relation to Isaac, to his own exclusive relation to God. All creaturely others, and the natural familial and communal webs of inter-relation they entail, are interpreted by Abraham through the particular lens of his own all-encompassing God-relation. And it is this spirit, this distinctive, Abrahamic religious genius, that Hegel sees animating and determining the entirety of Jewish history.
For Hegel, the violent and exclusionary logic of Abraham’s religious genius plays out in relation to the religious neighbor as well. Abraham’s God-relation is unique for Hegel in that it leaves no room for the religious genius of any other people or nation, or for the gods that their religious genius would symbolically express.
Hence, Abraham’s God is essentially different from . . . the national gods . . . a nation which reverences its national god has admittedly also isolated itself, partitioned what is unitary [i.e., human life], and shut others out of its god’s share. But, while doing so, it has conceded the existence of other shares; instead of reserving the immeasurable to itself and banishing others from its sphere, it grants to others equal rights with itself; it recognizes . . . gods of others as . . . gods. On the other hand, in the jealous God of Abraham and his posterity there lay the horrible claim that He alone was God and that this nation was the only one to have a god.34
And as the family of Abraham becomes a nation, acquiring the requisite means and resources, and discovering itself to be in a position of power in relation to its neighbors, Abraham’s religious genius plays itself out in a very material, e.g., bloody way. The children of Abraham, possessed by his spirit, “exercised their dominion mercilessly with the most revolting and harshest tyranny, and utterly extirpated all life.” For “outside” the relation to their god, which they assume to be the only God, outside that relation “in which nothing but they, the favorites, can share, everything is matter . . . a stuff, loveless, with no rights, something accursed which . . . they treat[ed] as accursed and then assign[ed] to its proper place [death] if it attempt[ed] to stir.”35
Hegel’s description of Abraham’s religious genius as a coercive imposition of his own particular interpretation of divine and worldly reality upon the neighbor (be it Isaac or the surrounding religious communities) that thereby reduces the neighbor to a silent, lifeless object, resonates strongly with the kind of imperialistic violation of the integrity of the other described by Said. It would seem, then, that the young Hegel understands the breach of the ethical by Abrahamic faith in terms resonant with contemporary analysis and critique of imperialistic discourse.
A final point of irony. The young Hegel believed, as did Kant and others, that Christianity itself was among the victims of Abraham. There was a strong modern consensus
