Schleiermacher and the Sacrifice of Isaac

Helena Iara woke at about 3AM last night, and after eating well, had problems getting back to sleep.  An upset stomach, probably.  So I took her to the little hammock where she likes to sit and rock with me, and it seemed like it was time to talk about high German idealism.  Schleiermacher is the first thinker who entered my mind, and the subject interested Helena enough that she stopped crying.

Friedrich Schleiermacher attempted to merge Kantian rationalism with Christian Theology in the first half of the 19th century, but he may be most famous for his definition of religion as the sense of absolute dependence on God.  With those words, "absolute dependence," it might be a little easier to understand why I would want to talk with a baby about a philosopher who is hardly there in the first rank of famous thinkers.  Because if anything or anyone is truly and absolutely dependent on another, it is a newborn baby on her mother.  In spite of the myths of being raised by wolves like Romulus and Remus, if a baby doesn't have someone to give her milk and clean her bottom, she is not long for the world.

Personally, I have to say that I'm unconvinced by such a definition of religion, maybe just because it isn't the sort of thing I feel in my bones.  So Helena and I moved on to one of Schleiermacher's rivals in that time, Søren Kierkegaard (she had begun to cry a little as I questioned the idea of absolute dependence, so I had to rock harder in the hammock and try a new subject).  And if you're talking about Kierkegaard to a little baby, one subject has to come up: his analysis of the sacrifice of Isaac by Abraham in Fear and Trembling.

Kierkegaard's idea of religion is quite different, as expressed by the title of the book: it involved the sense of awe one feels before God, and the need to obey even the most absurd of commands because of the power of this awe.  Kierkegaard imagines what it must have been like for Abraham, after longing so long for a son, to hear God's command to go and sacrifice the boy on the top of a nearby hill.  Abraham heard and obeyed, in spite of the fact that ever fiber of his being, his ethics, his love for his son, his hope for his future... all depended on the life of Isaac.  That troubled and troubling obedience was, for Kierkegaard, the essence of religion.

Imagine the response of a baby, whether little Helena or little Isaac.  Tell the story from the perspective of the child, and it is even more perverse, disturbing.  It seems one of the best arguments to be done with religion, to embrace the happy atheism of the modern age.  I don't want to be anywhere near a God who would even play with such a terrible command, not as a test, not as a game, not as a joke.  And I certainly want to be a long way away when I have my six day old daughter on my lap.

So I started to talk about this history of religion in the Middle East, of the cults of Ba'al and El and the worship of the Hittites.  Human sacrifice played an important role in all of these religions, and priests often commanded their believers to kill their children as a test of a sign of their obedience.  In fact, Kierkegaard had his history wrong: Abraham lived in a world where sacrificing children had been normalized; itwas something that lots of people did, that he might have seen as sad, but hardly the "unthinkable absurdity" of which Kierkegaard talks.

Abraham's courage, then, was not to climb the mountain to sacrifice Isaac.  His courage was to listen to the second voice, when God said "Don't.  Don't kill you son."  It was at that moment that he broke down his expectations, obeyed the unexpected and terrible God instead of the laws of man.  At least that's what I needed to tell Helena Iara.  Otherwise, I wouldn't want her to do anything to do with Yahweh.