as functions of the story's narrative task: the establishment of identity between Isaac and the sacrificial ram depends on the establishment of Isaac's identity as victim.
However, while God's command and Abraham's response may be readily understood in this way, when these two figures are seen as subjectivities or persons rather than simply as agents of the narrative, their actions inevitably raise questions of motivation. These are the questions that Kierkegaard addressed. And if I am right about the story's principal purpose as a demonstration of the vital significance of surrogation in sacrifice, these questions of subjectivity must have vexed the story's redactors too.
In point of fact, as one might expect if the story's main thrust lies elsewhere, the narrative provides precious little to go on in answering these questions. When God issues his command, he provides no reason for it, and Abraham appears to be as much in the dark about his own conduct as he is about the order from above. Indeed, Abraham's response to the command is so immediate that it seems very much like one's response to an ‘order’ issued practically by oneself to oneself: While carving the Thanksgiving turkey, I ‘tell’ myself to raise my arm, knife in hand, and my arm goes up. Although we take for granted self-movement of this kind, in fact it exhibits all the mystery surrounding the connection between mind and body, or, more appropriately in the present context, between spirit and matter. For in truth, as I argued (on Wittgenstein's philosophical authority) in chapter 1, the connection is neither exactly immediate nor mediate.
The sort of response Abraham gives to God's order, not instinctual but nonetheless more bodily than mindful, is what one might expect of a time and place in which the existence of God (or of gods) is not quite yet a matter of belief but constitutes the implicit certainty on the basis of which any belief whatsoever takes flight. In other words, insofar as ‘faith’ implies ‘belief’ in the sense of facultative acceptance (as it plainly does in Kierkegaard's Pauline usage), Abraham's behavior seems to be both more and less than a matter of faith. Put another way, his behavior may be thought of in terms of a sense of faith other than the one in question here, a pre-predicative and fundamentally social sense. Indeed, his movement is so automatic it might almost be described as motivationless.8
Nevertheless, the story does not want for certain contents that betray a subjectivist perspective. The stunning horror of what Abraham is asked to do could not but introduce the wrench of self-consciousness into the automated works of the divine structure of command. Doubtless, like Kierkegaard, the story's redactors, in their capacity as readers, felt the need to arrive at some understanding of what God and Abraham could have been thinking. Hence, when Isaac, a pious son but no fool, seeing the sacrificial appurtenances asks his father as to the whereabouts of “the lamb for a burnt offering,” Abraham answers “God will provide.” This answer is truthful, prophetically so. And yet it is also exquisitely ironic, concealing the awful truth from Isaac. From this one may infer that Abraham was hardly acting in all innocence, but was only too conscious of the horrifying nature of what he was about to do. (Harking back to Lyotard's jarring comparison between God and Hitler, Abraham's answer could be seen to find a parallel in the well-documented attempt of the Nazis to conceal [e.g., Lang 1990: 41ff.], from both the victims and the world at large, what they were doing in the death camps.)9 Much the same may be said of Abraham's words to his two young helpers, when he instructs them to wait while he and Isaac go off to “worship.” Notwithstanding its plain truth, the statement does more to conceal than reveal what is about to happen. And when he appends to this instruction (my emphasis) “we will come back to you,” he is telling the servants (what had to appear to him) an outright lie, but which in fact proves to be yet another prophetic truth. Finally, in connection to the question of Abraham's and God's intentionality, the words of “the angel of the Lord” seem to leave no room for doubt. The angel informs Abraham (twice, no less) that he has been let off the hook because he did not withhold his son, “thine only son, from Me.” These remarks certainly give truth to the interpretation that in this story God is out to try Abraham's faith, and Abraham means to prove that his faith is more than equal to the trial.
Still, there is something off-center about this strand of the story. The theme that what is on trial is Abraham's faith is somehow not quite in keeping with the more immediate theme of the story—that of the trial of Isaac's life. From the perspective of human law, as Kierkegaard stressed, Abraham's conduct must be judged repugnant. But, strikingly, Abraham's great and blind faith may be seen to constitute a threat even from the perspective of his maker. Given the nature of God's final intervention, it is logically implicit in the story's upshot that in a substantial sense Abraham's behavior was dreadfully wrong. The sort of gift Abraham set out to give is simply not for humankind to offer. The gift of perfection or death, as is the theme of Golgotha, is God's prerogative, not man's. Hence, at the end of this story, God has to step in to make things right. All this follows from taking the story principally as, rather than a rationalization of blind faith, a warrant to economize when sacrificing.
A Perfect Sacrifice
Because it is our habit to think of substantive identity in terms of singular individuals, it has been usual to see Abraham's action as simply homicidal, the attempted murder of another, albeit his own son. But if I am right about the way in which identity is defined in the story, as a matter of the relationship between Abraham and his son before it is a matter of the (non-)relationship between Abraham and himself (“non-relationship” only because we mistakenly tend to conceive of the self in entitative rather than relational terms), then Abraham's act should be understood in terms of self-sacrifice. In which case, we are talking about a selfless act of attempted suicide.
As a rule, selflessness is a good thing. But, and this is the point that I want to develop here, the act seems so perfectly selfless that it registers as the ultimate suicide. In binding Isaac to the altar, Abraham sets out to do himself in, but so completely as to prescind even the possibility of living on in the supreme manner in which, according to the biblical imagination, it is given to humankind to do so: through the generations that issue from Abraham's seed. Moreover, in light of the fact that these are the generations of God's promise, a promise of great and mighty nationhood (Genesis: chaps. 17 and 21), it might be said that Abraham intends to give himself a death so round as to be matchlessly complete. To attempt such global perfection is to presume the exercise of total control in matters of life and death, and thereby to arrogate to oneself godlike powers. If we choose to say (with Wittgenstein 1971: 35) that “nothing is so dead as death,” then Abraham appears to be casting himself as the very substance and pure figure of death. In light of this picture, in acting as he did, Abraham exhibited not knightly faith but unholy desire.
One might be tempted to conclude, therefore, as against all received wisdom, that insofar as the command from God was a test, Abraham failed it alarmingly. As a god-fearing person, that is, one respectful of the infinite difference between humans and the Other, Abraham should have refused to comply with the command to offer his son as a holocaust, a perfect gift.10 Of course, the fact that at the story's end the angel of the Lord states plainly that Abraham is to be rewarded for his compliant behavior seems to rule out any such interpretation. But perhaps the words of the angel, which so credit God's command as gospel, themselves reflect a redactional loss of perspective or the failure to represent truly what is otherwise than representable.
Whether or not one thinks that the stories of Genesis are somehow god-given, there can be no reasonable doubt that they have been propagated by human hands, and that, in any event, they naturally and inextricably include a human point of view. As a result, in some substantial sense, the creational as well as the creatural principals in these scriptural tales cannot but present an earth-bound perspective, a view from somewhere rather than nowhere. I suggest that in the Akedah, God-Elohim, that high and mighty patriarchal figure, in ordering Abraham to make of his beloved and only son (by Sarah) a perfect gift, displays a disposition that is only too human. I have in mind the disposition to make everything come out even, which is to say, to bring everything to a final end or to seek perfection. I do not necessarily mean to imply that
