The
question that animates my essay is a presumptuous one: where
does violence enter into monotheism? I am presuming that violence
does enter into it, not necessarily as its essential ingredient,
but not like a total stranger either. Monotheism seems to court
violence. Or that at least is the impression I would like to
test.
The
prima facie violence
of an abstract monotheism is its reduction of difference to
sameness. So far that is a very ethereal and not very violent
kind of violence. Any kind of conceptual articulation requires
that difference be brought under the purview of some sameness.
I note seven apples. My concept of an apple applies equally
to the seven I note. Have I done violence to difference by making
seven individuals answer to one concept? I have at least this
much reason to hope not: I can now speak of seven different
apples. When I move from the “mono” to the “theism” in monotheism,
I begin to notice a disconcerting difference between gods and
apples. I note seven gods. Six are classically Olympian—the
sort of god that is apt to show up in Homer and the Greek tragedians—and
the remaining god is the Jealous One, the god of gods, who will
have no other gods before him. If I am speak of these seven
gods in comparative terms, perhaps with some eye towards the
difference between Jealous One’s jealousy and the jealously
that standardly fuels rivalry among the Olympians, I need to
be able to use the word ‘god’ without too much equivocation.
But can I? The aspiration of monotheism in Western religious
thought has been towards the sublime, even inarticulate, uniqueness
of the one god. In keeping with this aspiration, I am required
to become hyper self-conscious not only about my use of the
concept ‘god,’ but also about how I write down or type the word.
It has been conventional to capitalize ‘god’ when speaking of
the one God, but slashes, dashes, and quotes are perhaps now
better suited to mark the uniqueness of this God—a uniqueness
taken to defy conceptualization.
Consider
now the difference between gods and apples. The concept of an
apple applies to apples. The concept of a god applies to gods
up until the point when the one God is invoked, and then the
concept applies neither to gods nor to the one God. The one
God escapes conceptualization by being sublimely unlike the
other gods, and the other gods, by virtue of their absolute
difference from the one God, lose their claim to legitimate
divinity: they get demoted to idol status. The concept of an
idol is a degenerate concept of a god. Since the degeneration
is here a function of the ineffable sublimity of the one God,
we are in the curious position of being able to say only what
the one God is not like. This kind of inarticulacy has been
a valued commodity to many a great theological mind, from Maimonides
and Aquinas to Kierkegaard and Marion. I am nevertheless going
to try to make it seem a little less valuable. Monotheism calls
for the sacrifice of the many gods to the one, but it seems
to forget that no sacrifice is ever total. There is always some
good that is not sacrificed, and that withholding is what gives
the sacrifice its point.
I
am going to collect my thoughts about monotheism around a story
of a sacrifice. You are no doubt familiar with the story, as
it is detailed in Chapter 22 of Genesis. Here are just a few
of the highlights. God makes a strange and terrible request
of his servant Abraham, the man destined to become the father
of a nation (Gen. 22: 2-3): “Take, pray, your son, your only
one, whom you love, Isaac, and go forth to the land of Moriah
and offer him up as a burnt offering on one of the mountains
which I shall say to you.”1 Although Abraham has
been known to bargain with God for a life or two, Abraham does
not bargain for Isaac. Instead he saddles up his donkey, splits
wood for the sacrifice, and takes his son to the place of God’s
choosing. Isaac is under the impression that a sheep is to be
sacrificed, and his father doesn’t disabuse him of his naïve
faith until the time comes for Isaac to be bound and placed
on the altar of sacrifice. With cleaver poised for slaughter,
Abraham’s hand is stayed by one of God’s messengers, with no
time to spare. “Do not reach out your hand against the lad,”
the messenger calls out from the heavens (Gen. 22: 12), “for
now I know that you fear God and you have not held back your
son, your only one, from Me.” Abraham looks around to see a
ram caught in a thicket by its horns; he sacrifices the ram
in Isaac’s place. The messenger of God speaks again, relaying
God’s words to a now much exalted Abraham (Gen. 22: 16-18):
“By my own Self I swear, declares the Lord, that because you
have done this thing and have not held back your son, your only
one, I will greatly bless you and will greatly multiply your
seed, as the stars in the heavens and as the sand on the shore
of the sea, and your seed shall take hold of its enemies’ gate.
And all the nations of the earth will be blessed through your
seed because you have listened to my voice.”
I
am going to sketch two traditions of interpretation of this
story of sacrifice, surrender, and paternity. The first I will
call the classical apologetic tradition, and its representatives
will be two medieval Catholic theologians, or if you prefer,
two very old Continental philosophers—the Frenchman Peter Abelard
and the Italian Thomas Aquinas, and one modern Protestant ironist,
Søren Kierkegaard. The other tradition is contemporary and unapologetic,
and its ad hoc membership includes the literary critic René
Girard, the anthropologist Nancy Jay, and the philosopher Luce
Irigaray. Obviously I am not trying to canvas historically cohesive
and culturally diverse traditions of Genesis exegesis; I am
simply trying a mark a contrast between readings of the binding
of Isaac that seek to obscure the apparent connection between
violence and monotheistic faith and those that are more apt
to find that connection definitive of Abraham’s legacy. The
apologetic readers are keenly aware of the scandalous appearance
of a fatherly God asking for innocent blood and asking it of
the very father of the boy designated for sacrifice. The unapologetic
readers just aren’t all that surprised that a supreme father,
bent on his paternal privileges, would ask for such a thing.
Kierkegaard’s
reading of the binding story, the Akedah, is both the culmination and the
reductio ad absurdum of the apologetic
tradition. The key to Kierkegaard’s reading is the categorical
distinction he makes, early in Fear
and Trembling, between a murder and a religious sacrifice.
“The ethical expression for what Abraham did,” writes Kierkegaard,
“is that he meant to murder Isaac; the religious expression
is that he meant to sacrifice Isaac.”2 Notice that
Kierkegaard is not distinguishing between a killing and a religious
sacrifice. Unless we are prepared to the read the commandment,
“Do not kill,” in an unqualified and absolute way, as a prohibition
against the taking of any life, no matter what the circumstances,
killing, in and of itself, has no ethical valence; it is neither
ethically positive, nor ethically negative. It is only when
we deem a killing unjustified that we call it a murder, and
it is the charged nature of the distinction that leads us passionately
to debate issues like abortion, capital punishment, and war.
Kierkegaard, however, is not inviting debate about the ethical
status of Abraham’s intended killing of Isaac: it is, ethically
speaking, an intent to murder. Readers of Abraham are cautioned,
however, not to be too single-minded in their point of view.
The murderer intends, without sufficient cause, to end a life;
the man of faith hopes for the miraculous reconstitution of
a life surrendered. Abraham falls under both readings. If he
is not to be a murderer, plain and simple, his reader has to
be able to suspend the ethical meaning of Abraham’s intention
while affirming the lawfulness of ethics: the spiritual equivalent
of defying gravity.
Perhaps
I have set myself up to misread Kierkegaard, in that I have
ignored the difference between Kierkegaard and his persona,
Johannes de Silentio, who may or may not be espousing Kierkegaard’s
own sense of faith. I concede the possibility, but someone whose
sense of irony is better than mine is going to have to negotiate
that particular thicket. My own, flat reading of Kierkegaard
leaves me with two basic conclusions. One is that it makes no
difference to Kierkegaard’s reading whether Abraham kills his
son or not. The real story lies in Abraham’s act of faith. The
other is that the essential difference between Abraham and a
murderer lies in the quality of Abraham’s intent. But Kierkegaard
devotes most of his ingenuity for irony trying to convince his
readers that they ought to be exceedingly anxious about identifying
what the quality of that intent is. It defies categorization.
Abraham presumably knows what he is all about, in kind of an
unknowing way, but he has no words to clue the rest of us in.
As
you may have surmised, both of these conclusions trouble me.
The first troubles me, not only because I think that the difference
between an intent to kill and a murder matters in all kinds
of ways, but also because it is a bad reading of the story to
imagine that the staying of Abraham’s hand is just a device
to frame Abraham’s intent. It is crucial to the story, as I
will argue later, that Isaac be returned to his mother’s side
safely. As for the second conclusion, it is worth remembering
that few if any murderers intend their killings to be murders.
Most kill out of a sense of entitlement, even if they are aware,
in varying degrees, that others are unlikely to credit that
sense of theirs. The fact that Abraham doesn’t intend to murder
Isaac does not, in itself, exonerate Abraham of attempted murder,
and Kierkegaard doesn’t claim otherwise. In fact Kierkegaard
never defends Abraham outright, as such a defense would have
to accede to the jurisdiction of ethics over faith. Instead
he sets things up so that a jury of Abraham’s peers would find
it an impossible task to determine mens
rea. Neither Abraham’s guilt nor his innocence would be
evident to anyone who could not imagine an imperative of faith,
and no one thinking merely ethically could imagine such an imperative.
A jury of ethically minded people would likely remand Abraham
to the State’s psychiatric facility for further evaluation.
And Abraham would be unlikely, given the impregnable uniqueness
that Kierkegaard credits to his faith, ever to leave such a
facility.
The
more classical apologists, less given than Kierkegaard to irony,
focus on God’s innocence rather than Abraham’s, whose innocence
will follow from God’s vindication. Abelard and Aquinas turn
out to have very different inclinations, however, when it comes
to theodicy. Abelard’s God never intends for Abraham to sacrifice
Isaac; he commands the sacrifice only to test the strength of
Abraham’s devotion to him. Aquinas’ God also lacks the intention
to see Isaac slaughtered, but he is unlike Abelard’s God in
one crucial respect: the God of Aquinas could have, without
fault, seen his command carried out to its bloody conclusion.
Abelard’s God does not have this option, for Abelard concedes
that it would be quite unfitting, not to say monstrous, for
God to tie faith to slaughter. Aquinas contends, on the contrary,
that no act of God’s, however perverse it may seem to us, is
other than natural.3
The
Akedah is a burdensome
story for any interpreter who begins with the assumption that
the one will of the one God fully determines what is good and
bad. Although both Abelard and Aquinas valorize Abraham’s faith,
it is hard not to notice what an ill fit his faith makes with
the monotheistic ambitions of their respective ethics. In his
Ethica, Abelard takes
pains to unify two conceptions of sin: consent to a vice, and
scorn for God.4 I consent to a vice when I give my
heart over to desires that my better self knows to be corrupt;
I scorn God when I assume that mere self-consistency—or faithfulness
to my own values—is all the goodness that is ever required of
me. To surmount sin in the conception that takes in both consent
to a vice and scorn for God, I would have to strive for unconflicted
obedience to God, since it is God’s will, not my own, that determines
what the true good is. But what if I were Abraham and I suspected
that God’s command to me to sacrifice my son was not God’s will;
that I was being baited by God to defy God’s will? My faithfulness,
under those circumstances, would be best expressed by my not
taking the bait. This is not, of course, how the story goes.
Abraham gets praised for his willingness to make the sacrifice.
Abelard is consequently compelled to imagine an Abraham who
is blind to the difference between the murder of a child and
a fit offering to God—a difference that Abelard expects every
reader of his Ethica to see. It is unclear what virtue is supposed to accrue to
Abraham for his not being able to see this difference. Unreflective
acquiescence to arbitrary authority (including one’s own) is
normally for Abelard a paradigmatic expression of scorn for
God.
Matters
aren’t any less dicey in Thomas. Abraham shows up in the question
94 of the Prima Secundae
of the Summa, specifically
in the article that considers, and rejects, the mutability of
natural law. The two basic imperatives of natural law are “seek
the good” and “avoid evil,” and as long as evil and good remain
abstract notions, the basis of natural law can hardly be imagined
to change. God is not going to command evil to be sought or
good to be avoided. To do so would be to destroy the natural
basis of law and with it a rational creature’s capacity to discern
divine purpose in the natural order of things. So what then
is God’s purpose in commanding Abraham to kill his son and seek
to do, what looks to be, a manifest evil? Aquinas is concerned
not so much to answer this question as to undercut the motive
for posing it. It is analytically impossible, he suggests, for
God to command a wrongful act, as it is God’s will that defines
the rectitude of any course of action. What’s striking about
this move is that it doesn’t rule out the possibility of a dual
will in God; it simply contents itself with reducing nature
to will. When set against an apotheosized will, nature becomes
a non-entity. Suppose that this will were to reverse itself;
there would be no natural perspective for framing the change.
Inconstancy of divine will has no bearing on natural law—which
is as much as to admit that natural law is an empty notion.
The
natural is effaced in Thomas, occluded in Abelard, and suspended
in Kierkegaard. By ‘natural’ I mean to refer to a source of
wisdom, distinct from God, that renders the sacrifice of Isaac
undesirable. The best that the apologetic readings can do is
to render the sacrifice unnecessary. Abraham’s single-minded
faith is made to stand security for a monotheism otherwise at
odds with itself. Kierkegaard, the last of my classical apologists
and the end of their tradition, insists on the paradoxical nature
of Abrahamic faith. It is absurd, but still somehow sublimely
good, for Abraham to have almost sacrificed his son. The ‘almost’
here is an adverb at the point of desperation. It is barely
holding on.
In
the unapologetic readings of the Akedah, an inconstant monotheism has had to resort to violence to
resolve its own inconstancy. There is no ‘almost’ about its
resort to violence. I begin with René Girard, who has remarkably
few words to devote to the Akedah in his influential set of essays,
Violence and the Sacred.
The little he does say, however, is enough to make the Akedah
emblematic of his bold theory of sacrificial violence. “According
to Moslem tradition,” Girard writes, “God delivered to Abraham
the ram previously sacrificed by Abel. This ram was to take
the place of Abraham’s son Isaac; having already saved one human
life, the same animal would now save another.” “What we have
here,” he continues, “is no mystical hocus-pocus, but an intuitive
insight into the essential function of sacrifice, gleaned exclusively
from scant references in the Bible.”5
Readers
of the myth of Cain and Abel may not immediately recall whose
life gets spared by Abel’s sacrifice of a ram. The story reports
Cain’s murderous jealousy of his brother’s favor with Yahweh,
his impulsive slaying of Abel, and Yahweh’s forbearance. Cain’s
sentence is not death but exile; he is to leave the soil he
has tilled and wander the earth a restless nomad. Cain complains
to Yahweh that exile leaves him prey to the first stranger he
meets. Random violence is apparently what Cain takes to be the
norm outside of Yahweh’s jurisdiction. Yahweh responds by marking
Cain and associating his mark with a warning: the slayer of
Cain is bound to suffer a vengeance seven times as severe. It
is never made clear by Yahweh how a would-be slayer of Cain
would be able to interpret Cain’s mark. The fundamental premise
of Girard’s theory of sacrificial violence is that human violence
in its natural or unritualized expression is reciprocal, contagious,
and self-fueling. I kill one of yours, you kill one of mine,
another of mine kills another of yours, and so forth and so
on, in endless permutations. Cain’s mark, read against Girard’s
premise about violence, is not a mark of protection, but a sign
of violence to come. The one who kills Cain will indeed unleash
a violence that multiples, but all the victims of that violence
will be Cains in their own right, marked by a naked, demythologized
human propensity for vengeance. The alternative to this fate,
the one Cain wanted for himself, is to stay in the presence
of Yahweh, whose potential for violence is sacrificially restrained.
But Cain somehow misses what kind of sacrifice would work: it
has to be an offering of blood. Fruits of the soil are just
too innocuous to rate. Girard’s reading of the Cain and Abel
myth sets up Yahweh as the reservoir of all brother-against-brother
violence. Because Abel vents some of his potential aggression
against Cain against an animal surrogate, he has less motive
to kill his brother than his brother has to kill him, and Yahweh
is relatively pleased. The sacrificed ram, in effect, saves
Cain’s life, and if we follow Girard’s gloss of an Islamic trope,
it saves Isaac’s life as well.
But
why read Cain into Abraham’s motives and imagine that Abraham
had some kind of bloodlust against Isaac? The anthropologist
Nancy Jay takes Girard to task for being so willing to turn
unanalyzed and presumptively natural male violence into a call
for ritualized violence. “Girard’s theory,” she writes, “is
itself a sacrificial ideology, legitimating hierarchical distinction
as essential for a social order maintained only by sacrifice
(and therefore only by males), a social order threatened everywhere
by what he understands as its only alternative: chaos.”6
It is not quite fair to Girard, I think, to accuse him of valorizing
sacrificial violence. He doesn’t believe that any mythology
of sacrifice, particularly when it takes the form of scapegoating,
can long survive reflective scrutiny, and even when it escapes
scrutiny, the violence that the mythology legitimates does a
very poor job of quelling revenge fantasies. Monotheism, as
an ideology of sacrifice, is doomed in Girard’s estimation either
to give way to the war of all against all or to cede its authority
to a system of law, where violence is State-mediated and closer
to revenge than scapegoating is. Be that as it may, Girard does
seem blind to the one aspect of sacrificial ideology that Jay
is so brilliant at delimiting. Abraham’s near sacrifice of his
son can be read as a symbolic effacement of Sarah’s maternity.
It is the boy’s father, authorized by the one father, who leads
his son through death and gives him new life—the only life that,
from then on, will count. Isaac returns to Sarah, on this reading,
wholly his father’s son, and so, in effect, he doesn’t return
to Sarah at all. Jay identifies the Akedah as one peculiarly illustrative example
of the essential connection between sacrificial religion and
the superimposition of patriarchal over natural social order.
The
philosopher Luce Irigaray agrees with Girard that societies
have been, by and large, sacrificially constituted, but like
Jay, she is disturbed by Girard’s lack of attention to gender
differences. Being virtually obsessed with the question of male
violence and its limits, Girard fails to notice the violence
that a sacrificial ideology does particularly to women. “It
would seem to me to be more appropriate to inquire,” Irigaray
ventures, “whether, under the sacrificed victim, another victim
is often hidden.”7 Although she never addresses the
Akedah in that thought,
it is fairly clear that she would identify Sarah as the hidden
victim of the story. Sarah loses more than her life; she loses
her life’s generative possibilities. They are taken from her
without so much as a memorial to mark their loss. Irigaray believes
that God is, as she puts it, “the other that we absolutely cannot
be without,”8 but she worries that monotheism has
become little more than an apotheosis of maleness, requiring
both men and women to separate absolutely from their maternal
origins. God’s image as both male and female, as a generative
God friendly to the ways of the flesh, is still, thinks Irigaray,
a God to be envisioned.
If
I had to pick my own path between two traditions I have been
sketching, I would try to put together the Janus-faced God of
Abelard, who loves both law and transgression, with Irigaray’s
God of sexual difference. That would involve me taking my cue
from Genesis 1:27, according Yahweh his share of a serpent’s
wisdom, and releasing God’s representation from confinement
to an elevated, if ultimately empty, maleness. Would there be
monotheism at the end of the journey? Let me put it this way.
I don’t think that the oneness of God should any be any easier
to commit to than the oneness that comes of our halting human
struggles to see the innocence of one another’s differences.
It hasn’t been my experience that commitment to such oneness
comes easy, but I can’t imagine the shape of my life without
it.
The
oneness that Aquinas and Kierkegaard give to Abraham’s God strikes
me as a ruthless simplification. Abraham, when faced with a
choice between his son and his God, finds that he has no choice
to make. In choosing God he will have chosen his son. Am I to
imagine, then, that it is possible to cleave love in two and
find oneness? Irigaray and Jay commend my attention to the difference
between a miracle of possibility and a fiction of dissociation.
I cannot find oneness simply by pushing aside and forgetting
my otherness. Does Abraham remember Sarah when raising his cleaver?
I can’t help but think that he does, that he is more knowing
than a knight of faith, that he is shrewder than an unquestioning
servant to a divine patriarch. He is an awakened Adam.
It
seems to me that the choice at the heart of the Akedah is finally not Abraham’s but Yahweh’s.
This God can claim his share in the life of his son by making
the woman’s share his own, or he can let the woman be his otherness
and have his son with her. When Abraham raises a cleaver and
forces the issue, it is not Abraham’s faith that keeps him from
becoming a murderer but his prescience.
