had been historically dominated by what was taken to be the foreign cultural symbols of an inherently violent Jewish religious genius, and that this cultural domination was at the heart of Christianity’s own violent, imperialistic legacy. Christianity, especially in its earlier history, was seen to have mistaken the particular Jewish religious genius as the proper lens through which to read the universal ethical vision of Jesus’ own, radically unique religious instinct (i.e., it mistakenly took Abraham as a model for faith). It thereby distorted Jesus’ religious vision of the “brotherhood” of all peoples into an imperialistic discourse of mastery. Hegel (by no means alone here) saw this imperialistic grip of Abrahamic faith upon the spirit of Christianity as the cause of Germany’s cultural impoverishment. His paradigmatic slogan of resistance against this cultural domination: “Is Judea, then, the Teutons’ Fatherland?”36 And for these moderns, Judea was no more the homeland of Jesus than it was for the Germanic peoples. Jesus was, in fact, taken to be closer kin to the modern German philosophical spirit than to Abraham and to Jesus’ own Jewish contemporaries.
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Let’s review. Hegel’s assumptions with regard to religious faith and the ethical can only characterize the internal logic of Abrahamic faith (as paradigmatically expressed in the sacrifice of Isaac) as a breach of the ethical. And it understands the nature of this breach to be essentially structured as an imperialistic—both interpretive and material—violation of the neighbor. Consequently, it seems clear that these assumptions do not allow for the possibility of a positive and respectful affirmation of Abrahamic faith as a viable alternative. There is no moment in which Abraham stands alongside Hegel, on a level playing field, as it were. He is simultaneously condemned and superseded as soon as Hegel (but as we shall see, not only Hegel) comes on the scene.
The Ethical is the Universal (as Context for the Particular)
And now we return briefly to the second consistent Hegelian refrain (according to Johannes) with regard to the ethical: the ethical is the universal. We have already seen hints of how the Hegelian concept of the universal represented in this context is rather distinctive. As the highest, Hegel understands the ethical to be the totality of creaturely relations constituting the communal whole. The universal, then, is not meant to signify a philosophically abstract category, as in the case, for example, of knowledge sub specie aeternitatis (under the aspect of eternity), wherein that which is true is universally true, in the sense of being true for any person at any time and in any place. This abstract notion of universality characterized Hegel’s early thought on the ethical, when he was still thinking largely under the influence of Kant. But the more mature work that Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling has in mind conceives of the universal in terms of the whole as opposed to the part, and as concerns the ethical, in terms of specifically concrete, historical wholes, such as a society or nation.37
For Hegel, the ethical possibilities of the particular individual, in relation to both God and neighbor, can only be fully accounted for in terms of the universal, that is, in terms of the individual’s proper and rational relation to, and place within the communal whole. Consequently, it is in placing oneself outside or above the communal whole, as Abraham does through his relation to God, that the particular individual transgresses the ethical. The imperialistic violence of Abraham’s religious genius lies in the extent to which the God-relation of faith distorts the proper relation of the particular to the universal whole according to which the former is assumed to be relative to and subsumed within the latter.
Having here noted the distinctive concept of the universal—as the concrete communal whole—within the context of Fear and Trembling, my analysis in later chapters of the modern assumptions funding Ruether’s theological remedy of Christian faith will look more broadly at various conceptions of the universal. We will find that the assumptions expressed here by Hegel with regard to the proper ordering of the particular to the whole, especially in relation to faith and the ethical, pertain to a variety of conceptions of the universal across the modern period, from Kant and Lessing to Hegel and Schleiermacher. As long as the particular is relative to the universal, any universal will do.
Conclusion: What if Hegel Is Wrong about the Ethical?
The pseudonymous author of Fear and Trembling has a nagging problem. While he initially admits assuming that Hegel is right about the ethical, the closer he looks at Abraham the more he finds himself driven to the conclusion that Hegel, or at least Hegelian Christianity, “is wrong in speaking about faith.”38 The question raised for the reader, then, but not rigorously pursued in Fear and Trembling itself: if Hegel is wrong about faith, perhaps the assumption that he is right about the ethical needs to be revisited. In a wider reading of his works, it is clear that Kierkegaard assumes that this is indeed the case. Specifically, it is the subsuming of the particular within the context of the whole that constitutes a substantial ethical problem rather than being the very possibility of the ethical, as Hegel assumes. And this, on two levels.
First, if the particular individual only understands themselves and the world from the comprehending perspective of the historical whole, then one is delivered from the ordeal of decision that besets one in “the confinement of a temporally situated angle of vision” when embedded within history. And it is this embeddedness—this rootedness in particularlity and its predicament of radical finitude—that Kierkegaard assumes to be constitutive of both the human person and the ethical predicament. Crites puts it nicely. From the Hegelian standpoint of the universal whole, one “comprehends the abundance of human possibilities as a many-sided unity rather than as a field of mutually exclusive alternatives.”39 The Absolute Knowledge of the Hegelian system, then, avoids, or stops short of Kierkegaard’s understanding of the ethical altogether, given that he understands the ethical—and the authentically human—precisely in terms of the inescapability of decision.
Second, Kierkegaard critiques Hegel’s subsuming of the particular individual within the universal whole as itself an unethical, imperialistic logic in relation to the particularity of the human person. He reverses the ordered relation of the particular to the universal. As Hannay observes, the truth of the particular individual for Kierkegaard can only be glimpsed as “independent of any specification one may give of what . . . is properly human in general.” The consequence being that, for Kierkegaard, “the universal becomes an expression . . . of a humanity pre-established, as it were, at the level of the particular and no longer the category in which humanity is established.”40 The particular determines the universal, rather than vice versa. It is just this kind of commitment to particularity in resistance to what is seen as the imperialistic maw of the abstract, the general, and the universal (in Hegelian philosophy, for example), that is interpreted as a fundamentally ethical movement in much contemporary, postmodern, and post-colonial discourse. And, as it happens, this commitment to the particular is also a central thematic refrain of Barth’s theology. Consequently, the possibility of this reversal of fortunes between Hegel’s universal and Kierkegaard’s Abraham with regard to the ethical and the nature of imperialistic discourse foreshadows the possibility of a similar reversal—or at least complication—between contemporary attempts to purge Christian faith of its imperialistic dynamic in relation to the Jewish neighbor and a certain evangelical inhabiting of that faith as exemplified by Barth’s theological assumptions.
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As I demonstrated briefly in the previous chapter, I am following the lead of Rubenstein, Ruether, and others in referencing Kierkegaard to frame what is at stake in the problem of Christian faith and the Church’s ethical obligation to the Jewish neighbor. Where I take the road less traveled is in recognizing the extent to which the characterization of Christian faith as constituting a breach of ethical obligation is a characterization necessitated by certain modern—and in the context of a Kierkegaardian
