I. Abraham’s sacrifice of his only son Isaac is one of the most enigmatic stories in Genesis, and arguably in the bible as a whole, from a religious and moral point of view. After all, God appears to test his most prominent follower’s faith by asking that he travel three days to murder his only son—who is loved, and who has done no wrong—at a distant mountain. He does not give a reason for him to do this, he just commands it.
The King James Version of this story reads as follows:
1 And it came to pass after these things, that God did tempt Abraham, and said unto him, Abraham: and he said, Behold, here I am.2 And he said, Take now thy son, thine only son Isaac, whom thou lovest, and get thee into the land of Moriah; and offer him there for a burnt offering upon one of the mountains which I will tell thee of.3 And Abraham rose up early in the morning, and saddled his ass, and took two of his young men with him, and Isaac his son, and clave the wood for the burnt offering, and rose up, and went unto the place of which God had told him.4 Then on the third day Abraham lifted up his eyes, and saw the place afar off.5 And Abraham said unto his young men, Abide ye here with the ass; and I and the lad will go yonder and worship, and come again to you.6 And Abraham took the wood of the burnt offering, and laid it upon Isaac his son; and he took the fire in his hand, and a knife; and they went both of them together.7 And Isaac spake unto Abraham his father, and said, My father: and he said, Here am I, my son. And he said, Behold the fire and the wood: but where is the lamb for a burnt offering?8 And Abraham said, My son, God will provide himself a lamb for a burnt offering: so they went both of them together.9 And they came to the place which God had told him of; and Abraham built an altar there, and laid the wood in order, and bound Isaac his son, and laid him on the altar upon the wood.10 And Abraham stretched forth his hand, and took the knife to slay his son.11 And the angel of the Lord called unto him out of heaven, and said, Abraham, Abraham: and he said, Here am I.12 And he said, Lay not thine hand upon the lad, neither do thou any thing unto him: for now I know that thou fearest God, seeing thou hast not withheld thy son, thine only son from me.
What is perhaps most shocking about this story, at least by the way it’s told, is Abraham appears to take up God’s command with solemnity, but also apparently unthinkingly. There is no mention of his psychological state after being asked, of any torment over what he has been asked to do. There is no deliberation as to whether he should go through with what has been asked of him, or any questioning as to whether there is some purpose to it that he doesn’t understand. Rather, he effortlessly packs his things, his son, and is on his way.
Of course, you could argue that he is such a faithful follower of God that he simply does what is asked of him with stoical determination and without second guessing His commands. You could then argue that this is the ideal of faithful obedience that Christians need to strive towards (it is an act of faith, as God does not give Abraham reason for doing it). However, in my view this would rule out the possibility of there being a plausible explanation for the inclusion of the story in the Bible. Let me explain.
Read this way, there is nothing psychologically realistic about Abraham. We humans are frail, and finite. We waver in the face of adversity, take the path least resistance, and we doubt. We are fallen. Abraham’s unwavering surety (on this reading) is something constitutionally alien to us. Thus reading him this way, and thus as the way God wants us to be, is less likely to be inspiring than alienating. It is out of step with what we are. If this is how He wants us to be, and if this is the kind of thing I may have to do, why bother? Doesn't ought imply can? If there is to be a plausible teaching, a plausible human teaching, another, more subtle reading must be possible.
Søren Kierkegaard’s great work Fear and Trembling is an attempt to grapple with this chapter in Genesis, and in particular, it’s moral and religious implications, from a Christian point of view. It is an attempt to understand Abraham. He asks: why would God ask Abraham to commit such an act? What did he go through? In what sense is what he did right, if indeed it is? And what is this story supposed to teach us?
With a peculiar fixation on the idea (in 22:1) that God tempts Abraham, Kierkegaard argues that God’s test is an explicit attempt to tempt him to do the ethical thing—i.e. not killing his only son—and in doing so contravening God’s will. For it would clearly be, morally speaking, wrong to sacrifice one’s only son whom you love, simply due to the arbitrary will of another. I say ‘arbitrary’ because for all Abraham knows, God’s command is arbitrary. He has not given him a reason why it should be done, he has just asked it. But on being asked this, what would be more tempting for Abraham, or any of us, than to flout God's command and save our only son? What could be more tempting than doing the moral thing?
He argues that the lesson must be that God’s commands supervene the dictates of morality, that if God commands you to do something wrong (in the moral sense), you—the Christian—must do it. He calls this the “teleological suspension of the ethical”, the lesson which the story of Abraham is to teach.
But—and this is the disconcerting part about faith—when and where the ethical must be suspended for the teleological is always an open question for us. In other words, where and when we must act not only without taking into account ethical considerations to bring about God’s wishes, is something we can’t actually know. Not knowing, we are wracked with doubt. Worse still, when we do decide to suspend our ethical duties to fulfil (what we have faith is) our duty to God, others mostly cannot understand us, as we do no understand Abraham. They see only one who puts themselves beyond the demands of morality for something which is, by its nature, inscrutable. As if it weren’t hard enough dealing with one’s own doubt, the uncomprehending expectations of others must be shouldered too. What must Abraham have felt, leaving his wife that morning, thinking that he would return to her without her son? What must he have felt upon Isaac question him? Suppose he revealed to Isaac in 22:8 the identity of the lamb, would Isaac have understood? How could he have?
The pressure is therefore both internal and external. One’s actions, when they are actions borne of faith, come to appear as unreason both to oneself and others. How one is to navigate and cope with this is no easy task for us. In this sense, Abraham is plunged into what would be one of the most difficult tasks imaginable.
This is all fine, but it does not fully address what I said earlier about Abraham’s psychological state, for it is not clear that Abraham felt this pressure. But the sacrifice, both the actions undertaken by Abraham and its inclusion as a story in the bible, may be unintelligible if Abraham carried out the orders of God as if he knew that they were a test, or as if he knew things were going to be fine the whole time. For his faith to be genuine faith, which is to say, for him to occupy a place relative to God that approximates our (human) relationship to God, Abraham cannot have known what would happen. But if he cannot have known what would happen, he must have suffered in the same way we, the faithful, would. Without this, we cannot really understand Abraham. With it, we can learn something deep about the nature of Christian faith.
Kierkegaard (or at least Johannes De Silencio) appears to take something like this view in Fear and Trembling. He begins with a short preface speaking of a religious man who becomes obsessed with this story, but does not understand it, or Abraham. He comes to wish more than anything to see what it was to be Abraham during this trial, to go alongside him as he took leave of his wife, and his son to Moriah.
This preface is followed immediately by four short and unsettling retellings of the sacrifice that largely stay true to the letter, but ornament it with specific details, and possibilities. Each story is, I think, meant to get us inside the characters themselves. They are meant to take us along with them on this momentous and horrifying day, to see what it was to live it, before, during, and after, to see its effects, and their anguish. This is particularly so for Abraham, but others too. The first has Abraham, in a kind of noble lie, pretend to Isaac that he intends to murder him in cold blood rather than for God, so as to spare him the thought that God had ordered his death, lest he lose faith. The second imagines Abraham irreparably blackened by the episode:
It was early in the morning when Abraham arose: he embraced Sarah, the bride of his old age, and Sarah kissed Isaac, who took away her disgrace, Isaac her pride, her hope for all the generations to come. They rode along the road in silence, and Abraham stared continuously and fixedly at the ground until the fourth day, when he looked up and saw Mount Moriah far away, but once again he turned his eyes toward the ground. Silently he arranged the firewood and bound Isaac; silently he drew the knife then he saw the ram that God had selected. This he sacrificed and went home. —From that day henceforth, Abraham was old; he could not forget that God had ordered him to do this. Isaac flourished as before, but Abraham's eyes were darkened, and he saw joy no more.
The third has Abraham wretched, despairing, doubting, and questioning his own actions and intentions. The fourth has Isaac silently lose his faith over the ordeal for the rest of his life.
As I read it, the purpose of including these retellings is for each of them to bring out the discomfiting elements of human faith discussed earlier that are latent in the telling of the sacrifice in the bible, but which are suppressed by the way it is written. The immorality, the alienation, the doubt, and the making of oneself unintelligible. Thus, on Kierkegaard’s reading, Abraham himself had faith, but for that reason did not know whether he was ultimately taking the right course of action, whether everything would be okay, whether God was really asking him to do this, whether he should commit an act he knew to be wrong, whether he should risk alienating all of those around him. Yet he pushed through regardless, and, in a kind of leap, acted on his perceived duty to God, and resisted the temptation to be moral.
Before and after his silent journey to Moriah, Abraham was tormented by the fetters of faith that all those who are faithful must be. But it was him and not us that went on, despite it all, intending to kill his son to fulfil his duties to God, duties which supersede all others. It was a difficult but, from a religious perspective, ultimately heroic act of faith. And that is why his story appears in the bible.
II. In the history of European painting this scene has, unsurprisingly, been depicted a number of times, especially after Caravaggio's painting of the scene in ca. 1603. What follows are some notable examples from around this period (only the first two came slightly before it):
Each of these go some way to depicting the psychodrama of the situation. However, none of them are able to fully convey a Kierkegaardian interpretation: the brutality of the act, the anguish, the doubt. Their focus is purely on the revelation that it was a test, as if the point of the story were merely that we must obey God and he will make everything okay in the end. Compare Caravaggio’s depiction of the same scene:
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The chilling Kierkegaardian vision of the sacrifice is on full display here. Neither Abraham or Isaac are depicted as ripped Greco-Roman demigods, but finite, even feeble humans, taken by their passions. We see an utterly forlorn, but doggedly determined Abraham, just as he has committed himself to this act of faith, despite not being sure of it. We see a physically prostrate Isaac, wretched at his father's (moral) betrayal. We see the urgent terror in the face of the angel who has come to stay his blade, as if they themselves are horrified both by this God-sanctioned act of brutalisation, and the subsequent brutalisation of Abraham’s character, who is right then taking a blade to his only son’s neck.
In contrast, the other paintings come to appear as unreal, even saccharine idealisations, even when they do capture some of the same intensity. It is as if the revelation that it was all a test has made everything okay, as it immediately alleviates any concerns, moral and religious. Surprise! Asking you to gather your things, travel three days and kill your only son was just a simple test of faith! And you passed! So everything is everything is, and always was, fine. In this regard, it is even more striking that in all but Caravaggio's painting the scene takes place at a moment where the fact of it being a test is coming to consciousness for Abraham. What makes the latter painting so striking is that it appears, to me at least, to be taking place at an ever so slightly earlier point than the others, a point when Abraham still thinks he is going through with everything, the angel's intervention not quite having come to consciousness. He almost seems frustrated that something has interrupted his course, a course that he had to have done so much to work himself up to in the first place. For Caravaggio's Abraham, it is not the revelation that is important, but the latter's brutal act of faith.
Caravaggio paints us a more realistic picture of the loaded tensions at play, and of faith as understood by Kierkegaard: as potentially socially alienating or immoral, as an effortful determination to act on our duty to God—whatever we take that to be—without proof, and despite any other consequences. If you are a Christian who accepts something like this vision, then the painting is a tragic but real depiction of the conditions of your own faith, of what your absolute duty to God asks, in the limit. While it is clearly not the only vision of Christian faith, nor of this story in particular, it is the one I find to be the most compelling and the only one to constitute a satisfying explanation of this enigmatic story. (It is easy to find interpretations which appear to me to just be cope about this, see here and here.) After Caravaggio, others may have thought so too. If you are not a Christian—as I am not—it remains a striking depiction of human finitude, but also of what we can therefore do to, and impose upon, one another.
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