While the Nuer do indeed ‘trust’ in Kwoth, they do not have ‘faith’ in him, if that usage is meant to convey that they have deliberated a decision to believe in him. By contrast and for all the automatism of his response, there can be no doubt that the Akedah pictures Abraham as having to prove himself by making just such a decision. In view of the shocking and seemingly insane and perfidious imperative to murder Isaac, the credibility of the God of Abraham must have looked open to question to Abraham's redactional authors, at least to some degree. Accordingly, Abraham is pictured as having to decide whether he should take the imperative—and hence the mouth from which it issued—as true. For the Nuer, though, Kwoth's designs are not open to human prerogative at all. Instead, Kwoth and the order imposed by him are entertained as matters of perception alone: Nuer see and experience the world in terms of them. In other words, whereas in the Akedah God is presented, in part but critically, as a function of Abraham's faith or belief, for the Nuer, Kwoth, like the earth, wind, and water, simply is.
The phenomenological ramifications of this ontological state of affairs, wherein God is an indubitable presence, run deep. For one thing, logically speaking, the situation in which humans would need to prove their acceptance of God as true or existing cannot arise. And for another, although there is a need to establish especial identity between the self and the surrogate victim, there is no need to warrant the reality of this identity by rationalizing it. In the case of both the Nuer and the Akedah, this identity is made by causing the intended victim to suffer a terrible ordeal, thus linking him to the sacrificial beast. But whereas for the Nuer the resulting identity, surely conceived of as Kwoth's design, is really real, for us it presents itself as, although serious, a kind of fiction. For this reason the Akedah finds it necessary to back up the identificatory warrant for the substitution with the implicit thesis that what in reality has been sacrificed is Abraham's spiritual power. It is as if because the identity between Isaac and the ram must in the end be deemed merely symbolic, and therefore a kind of cheat, the act of surrogation is in need of rationalization by reference to a more genuine sacrifice. Thus, notwithstanding the overt attention of the narrative, the most innovative critical sacrificial substitution in the Akedah is not beast for man, but spirit for matter.
Blind Faith: A Dualistic Development
By comparison to ritual sacrifice among a people like the Nuer, then, the Akedah's theme of faith betokens nothing less significant than a different world, a different sense of reality. It might be said that Nuer reality is keyed more to perception and actuality than to commitment and choice. The fact that Kwoth is readily perceived by the Nuer as, although separate and distinct from man, also close to man and participant in his world suggests that for them the distinction between spirit and matter is as fuzzy as can be. In light of this comparison, the Akedah's theme of faith becomes conspicuous by virtue of the incipient way it treats matter as one thing and spirit as quite another. In effect, the difference in question projects the difference between a dualistic and a nondualistic ontology.
A critical caution is in order here, for as it obtains specifically between these two examples, this difference can easily be overdrawn. The forgoing analysis plainly suggests that there is a great deal in the Akedah narrative to indicate that, in relation to the way in which the reality of God was experienced in Abraham's world, that world had much in common with the Nuer's.16 We should not forget that the biblical story also blurs the boundary between spirit and matter, as in the identity it establishes between the finite figure of Abraham and the infinite figure of God. Nevertheless, the exegetically celebrated theme of faith in the biblical story, with its diacritical accent on the difference between spirit and matter, marks unmistakably a dualistic development. This development is further advanced and refined in the story of the sacrifice of Jesus, where the whole point becomes how spirit, in the figure of the creator, can save matter, cast as the creature, by offering itself up on the latter's behalf. In effect, then, the Akedah is on the road to dualism, a thesis crucial to my interpretation of the story and my willingness to credit Kierkegaard's Pauline reading in terms of blind faith.
Blind faith, in the sense of belief that is resolute but based solely on trust, is a servile attitude made possible by dualism. The Akedah's account of Abraham as self-sacrifice in spirit alone clearly implicates the dualism of spirit and matter as it revalorizes the very idea of obedience, away from obeisance or even reverence and toward sheer servility. This kind of sacrifice, wherein spiritual is substituted for material being, is recorded in the story as a supererogatory decision on the part of Abraham to obey God's abhorrent command. The surpassing nature of Abraham's decision rests with the nature of the risk: Abraham risks ‘his’ life, and all the promised life that his life includes, for God's sake. But the risk is brought to its critical edge by the fact that Abraham's decision is taken blindly, without knowing for what he is taking the risk. He knows only too well what he is risking, but he can have no idea of whether the risk is worth it or not. In effect, then, it goes wholly unmitigated, even by such knowledge as is standard in cases of risk-taking—the knowledge of whether the possible benefit warrants the risk.
Blind faith in this sense can emerge only where ‘sighted’ commitment is an option. In relation to faith, sightedness means having access to a reason for commitment. Abraham has no such access—he must commit in total intellectual darkness, on the basis of revelatory authority and obligation alone. God does not offer Abraham a ground for the command; he just issues it. The point is, though, that blind faith is blind, not because reason is not part of the picture, but because access to reason is denied under circumstances in which it is part of the picture. In point of fact, faith of this kind entails the idea of reason, which is to say, it supposes the clear differentiation of the intellect from the senses. For this reason, a Nuer cannot act in blind faith, at least in respect of Kwoth. True, he acts in the absence of any ground other than the perception of Kwoth, Kwoth being the certain ground on which everything stands and from which everything derives. For this very reason, however—that Kwoth for him is a matter of perception and not belief—the situation cannot arise in which the Nuer can conceive of a ground on which he can put the truth of Kwoth or his order to question. For under these epistemological conditions, any such ground would have to have as its ground the perception of Kwoth and his designs.
Put another way, for the Nuer, reason and the intellect, like spirit itself, are not clearly differentiated from the senses. As there can be, then, no reason qua reason that one can forgo in commitment, in such a world blind faith, the kind of faith Abraham's act is seen by Kierkegaard to epitomize, is simply not possible.
Total Risk
To return now to my value judgment, it seems to me that blind faith courts ‘stupidity’. By this supposition I do not intend that such faith is in error, but rather that as a mode of thought, it too readily entertains malevolence.17 On the explicit basis of revelatory experience and authority that goes not simply unquestioned but unquestionable, Abraham risks everything—not just his son's life, or even his own, but life itself. This global risk is occasioned by unalloyed faith, the presumption of which stands behind the command to Abraham to prove himself by sacrificing Isaac. As the story goes, the risk proved worth it, since it produced an extraordinary benefit—redemption so very substantial that humans were thenceforth effectively permitted to sacrifice themselves basically in spirit rather than in substance. This benefit amounts to a progressive movement—a veritable leap—in the direction of selfhood. The resultant differentiation of spiritual from material sacrifice and the story's thematic acknowledgment of Abraham's self, made implicitly but powerfully in the voluntary act of abnegation, indicate that what is gained is the superadded re-creation of the life of the self. It is paradoxically but precisely the spiritual power to choose and determine one's own world that gets expressed and redoubled in Abraham's decision to abdicate this power in the face of the Lord.
If Abraham had known beforehand that he had a world to gain as well as to lose, his faith would have been not blind but instrumental—a gambler's faith—and the risk, although still great, calculated.