Drawing the Knife

[anorthite]

This was going to be part of an upcoming/still marinating "Things I Am Reading: Eschatological Terror Edition" but instead of relating to divine violence/John Brown/the monopoly of the state on law-making activity like I expected, Soren Kierkegaard "Fear and Trembling" is actually about something else ... at least, to Me.

This book is a meditation on the story of Abraham, who climbed Mount Moriah to kill his son Isaac, who “drew the knife," the phrase Kierkegaard repeats throughout. The central question, of course, is why one man murders in glory and another in sin. This is the part that relates to John Brown, but it’s not the part that I think is most interesting. I expected this to be very didactic but it isn’t; the author and by extension the reader are the ones who are enacting the title, not Abraham. An offshoot of the central question that haunts every chapter is: how can we know when we are the exception? How can, or can we avoid making horrible mistakes? The opening and best chapter is repeated examinations of the basic story of Abraham, cast in different lights and moods, the best of which concludes with this, following a scenario in which he does in fact kill his son:

“It was a quiet evening when Abraham rode out alone, and he rode to Mount Moriah; he threw himself upon his face, he prayed to God to forgive him his sin, that he had been willing to offer Isaac, that the father had forgotten his duty toward the son. Often he rode his lonely way, but he found no rest. He could not comprehend that it was a sin to be willing to offer to God the best thing he possessed, that for which he would many times have given his life; and if it was a sin, if he had not loved Isaac as he did, then he could not understand that it might be forgiven. For what sin could be more dreadful?”

This, I think, more than anything else, is the fear and trembling, the dread accompanying faith, of which this book speaks--a fear less theological than baldly human, of giving something, the most wonderful thing, up for nothing. My thinking on this book is obviously coloured by what I know: that Kierkegaard was preoccupied his entire life and career with the self-sabotaged collapse of an engagement to a woman he seems to truly have loved. He terminated the engagement seemingly due to the insecurities and feelings of deficiency that may have been part of a mental illness, but he sanctioned his decision by cloaking it as something done in receipt of a sign from God. A majority of his works deal, explicitly or implicitly, with this decision, and it seems clear that this is the case here too--that Kierkegaard is miserably prodding his own sacrifice of his “best thing.”

I think regardless of his conclusions, and whether they satisfied his doubts and unhappiness or not, Kierkegaard’s fixation on the story of Abraham and Isaac unintentionally exposes some important undergirding of religion itself. This is that whatever the historical importance of Abraham might be, the bringing-forward of this story to the present was Kierkegaard’s doing. Our need, our constant utilization of figures like Abraham to explain our present, to rationalize the irrational, is the mechanical motion through which scripture is enlivened, and in the year of Kierkegaard, it is not that he explains Abraham and pulls him apart, but rather that he and Abraham need each other, equally and terribly. The complex inextricable truth-and-fiction of scripture remains entwined in the future because it was formed and shaped in that manner as a response to a need it still fulfills, as an answer to the fears we hold outside of time and science that can be responded to en masse in no other way.

This is the purpose of stories, of course. I'm reminded of Auden's "Journey to Iceland": "And within the indigenous figure on horseback / On the bridle path down by the lake / The blood moves also by crooked furtive inches / Asks all our questions: where is the homage? When will justice be served? / Oh, who is against me? Why am I always alone?"

Of course, this isn't something exclusive to Kierkegaard/super-obvious psychoanalyses of his private life. I think I only found this so remarkable because I was reading it while reeling from a really disastrous and very sad family setback, and as with every time I begin another long spiral, I found myself thinking about the tremendous, life-sustaining power that meaning-making structures have in our lives--religion, mass movements, cultural or national identity, whatever it is. My brain isn't built to partake; I'm very much Weber's "religiously unmusical," but I'm fascinated and envious of whatever Kierkegaard is so desperately pursuing here. The heavier weight we assign to our actions, beyond the weightless default of a totally secular universe, the greater the chance of catastrophic failure--but also the greater chance of an outcome of glory/goodness that can somehow make order and sense out of all the suffering we went through. And so in a different way, as evidence of a long, fierce history of human reckoning with my problems rather than a biblical solution to them, Kierkegaard's Abraham means almost as much to me as it clearly did to him.