As becomes clear in the course of the analysis to follow, my argument is not an attack on faith when this term is used in connection with openness to what is new, different, and other. Rather, I mean to question the common doctrinal conception of faith, as when the term is used, dualistically, in absolute contrast to ‘reason’. This is the case when we speak, for example, of a ‘faith-based’ initiative and of the determinable religions as faiths. It is also the case when Kierkegaard interprets the Akedah, regardless of his express emphasis on act as opposed to belief and on the ineffable otherness of the figure of God. It is the dualistic opposition of faith to reason that makes possible a faith so complete as to be ‘blind’, a faith the perfection of which constitutes the measure of the damage it can do no less than of the devotion it demands.3 But this notion of faith goes well beyond the existential sense set out in the preceding paragraph. Indeed, considered in terms of our constituting limitedness, simply as a condition of human existence, faith defines self-hood as ever open and uncertain. It thus betokens a patently creative state of being, and so gives reason to welcome the otherness of difference and what is yet to come.
But blind faith seems scarcely welcoming in this way; on the contrary, it privileges closure. By juxtaposing Abraham's choice to rational decision-making, Kierkegaard, eminently an existential thinker, manages to paint the choice as exquisitely free. But in so doing he covers over the truth of a choice taken in response to a command that is no less determinable than it is utterly inexplicable, and he averts the gaze away from the telling fact that Abraham's zealous choice has served for centuries, in three different monotheisms, as the very model of dogmatic faith. With all due respect to Kierkegaard's genius, it seems to me that while Abraham's choice must count as horribly trying, it was not truly authentic: it did not exactly issue from ‘inside’ himself and ‘outside’ any rule. Rather, whether or not through a deep and ulterior motive of his own, his choice was in critical part born of a veritable rule of rules, an instituting power that could not be more sovereign and the patriarchal closure of which is as exemplary as can be.
Even if Kierkegaard's religious lesson betokens a sound interpretation of the biblical story, I must refuse the lesson as it stands. There is, though, a way to read the point of the story without having to take on faith this lesson about faith. This reading holds that, broadly in line with Shalom Spiegel's (1993) finding concerning an epochal shift from human to animal sacrifice, the story is most pointedly about the linkage between sacrifice and surrogation. In other words, it is basically concerned to bring into relief prescriptively the vital human significance of sacrificial economy. If this reading is sound, then the sacrificial ‘imperfection’ of surrogation is, rather than a basic design flaw, the very thing that makes sacrifice effective and good.
Identity and Substitution
Beast for Man
In view of the divine promise of Abraham's continuity as embodied in his son, the identity between Abraham and Isaac is even fuller than that between Abraham and himself. In other words, given the story's central emphasis on Abraham's mortal immortality in the generations to issue from his son, the meaning of identity in the story is defined by a relationship before it is defined by reference to either the one or the other of the two individual parties to that relationship. In effect, identity or selfhood in this story is defined primarily by difference or multiplicity rather than sameness or unicity—the logical scandal on which postmodern thought might be said to turn.4 In this light, from the standpoint of Abraham's worldly existence (in the main, the only kind of human existence Judaism has to offer), if God had allowed Abraham to proceed as originally instructed, then the act would surely have been in vain. Only in a religion that projects resurrection or ‘human’ life after death could such a sacrifice have proved life-giving. Indeed, the Akedah or the binding of Isaac is the biblical act of which the sacrifice and resurrection of Jesus are surely meant to count as a recursive perfecting.5
But in the case of the Akedah, by providing a beast in the place of Isaac, God at once makes the act of sacrifice as humanly vital as it is destructive and issues the warrant for surrogation. In doing so, God designedly identifies Isaac with the surrogate victim. On the one hand, because the victim is in fact a proxy, and thus truly victimized, there is reason for further sacrifice: guilt and indebtedness remain. On the other hand, the sacrifice works as sacrifice precisely because the victim is authoritatively identifiable with Isaac, and therefore with Abraham. In overall effect, the victimizing substitution of other for self is thematically incomplete. As a result, although murder takes place, abnegation remains the name of the rite. The story seems basically about how, in spite of the surrogation, the self is truly given.
Obviously, though, this sacrifice remains imperfect in that in the end what is given is not the self in the form of the son, but the son in the form of a beast. As a result, while it ensures the continuity of Abraham's seed and human life, it fails to put an end to guilt and the need for further sacrifice. By making the Son of God the Son of Man, and thus the Lamb of God, the sacrifice on Mount Golgotha seeks to redress this very imperfection.
The Son for the Father
There is yet another apparent imperfection in the logic of this paradigmatic scene of sacrifice from the Hebrew Bible, an imperfection that is, I think, no less deep and even more troubling—that in order to warrant the end of human sacrifice, God finds it necessary to command Abraham to take the life of another human being, his very own son no less, and that Abraham, although doubtless infinitely vexed by the contemplation of this horrible deed, sets out with unwavering determination to execute it. I speak here of imperfection because it is as hard to imagine any father in his right mind paying heed to such a filially violable order6 as it is to imagine a god, who is defined in terms of perfection, having recourse to it. Put another way, in ordering Abraham to sacrifice Isaac, God is demanding from Abraham—who, as the creature rather than the creator, is definitively imperfect—the gift of perfection.7 One might wish to take care here with the idea of perfection, and say that, in light of Isaac's part as the figure of Abraham's immortality, he is only the best Abraham has to give. But as such, from Abraham's perspective, a perspective that God's commandment to Abraham implicitly assumes, the gift of Isaac's death is indeed absolute, and in this sense the gift of perfection.
One evident explanation for this disturbing imperfection is that the warrant for surrogation presupposes the identification of Isaac as victim. This identification constitutes an indispensable condition for the establishment of sacrificial identity between the boy and the ram, such that the latter can take Isaac's place on the altar. And this identification cannot be made save for God's order to Abraham to kill his precious son and Abraham's active willingness to carry out the order, thus consecrating the boy. Indeed, in view of what Isaac undergoes in the story—bound stepwise to the altar, only to have his father's raised arm, knife blade in hand, stayed by the Lord at the moment of truth—it is no exaggeration to say that in a terribly meaningful sense the boy's life is taken and given at the same time.
This interpretation is generally consistent with Shalom Spiegel's classic Judaica study, in which the principal purpose of the Akedah narrative is seen as in all likelihood the establishment and justification of a great change in the character of ritual sacrifice, from a ‘pagan’ norm, according to which the victim is human, to a humanistic norm, in which a beast is substituted for a human (Spiegel 1993: 64). If this interpretation is correct, one might reasonably conclude (with Rad 1972a: 239; and Rabbi Leiner of Izbica, in Gellman 1994: 24ff.) that although Abraham and Isaac were made to suffer a terrible ordeal, God's order was a necessary deception (or, in Rabbi Leiner's usage, an “appearance”), and he never intended to allow Abraham to follow it to its final end. Of course, while this interpretation can thus clarify God's doings in the story, it leaves the motivation of Abraham's seemingly unconscionable conduct still to be comprehended.