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‘labour and be heavy laden’.
Matthew 11.28. ‘Come unto me, all ye that labour and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest.’
What is left out of the Abraham story is the anguish; for while I am under no obligation to money, to a son the father has the highest and most sacred of obligations.
The ethical expression for what Abraham did is that he was willing to murder Isaac; the religious expression is that he was willing to sacrifice Isaac; but in this contradiction lies the very anguish that can indeed make one sleepless; and yet without that anguish Abraham is not the one he is.
If one makes faith the main thing – that is, makes it what it is – then I imagine one might dare speak of it without that risk in this day of ours which can hardly be said to outdo itself in faith, and it is only in respect of faith that one achieves resemblance to Abraham, not murder.
The great can never do harm when grasped in their greatness. It is like a two-edged sword, bringing death and salvation.
It is said to be hard to understand Hegel, while understanding Abraham, why, that’s a bagatelle. To go beyond Hegel, that is a miracle, but to go beyond Abraham is the simplest of all. I for my part have devoted considerable time to understanding the Hegelian philosophy, believe also that I have more or less understood it, am rash enough to believe that at those points where, despite the trouble taken, I cannot understand it, the reason is that Hegel himself hasn’t been altogether clear. All this I do easily, naturally, without it causing me any mental strain. But when I have to think about
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Philosophy cannot and should not give us an account of faith, but should understand itself and know just what it has indeed to offer, without taking anything away, least of all cheating people out of something by making them think it is nothing.
incommensurable
incommensurable /ˌinkəˈmens(ə)rəb(ə)l ˌinkəˈmen(t)SH(ə)rəb(ə)l/ I. adjective 1. not able to be judged by the same standard as something; having no common standard of measurement • the two types of science are incommensurable. 2. [Mathematics] (of numbers) in a ratio that cannot be expressed as a ratio of integers. 3. irrational. II. noun — (usu. incommensurables) 1. an incommensurable quantity.
faith is convinced that God troubles himself about the smallest thing. In this life I am content to be wedded to the left hand, faith is humble enough to demand the right; and that it is indeed humility I don’t, and shall never, deny.
For he who with all the infinity of his soul, proprio motu et propriis auspiciis [on his own accord and on his own responsibility], has made the infinite movement and can do no more, that person only keeps Isaac with pain.
He climbed the mountain, even in that moment when the knife gleamed he believed – that God would not demand Isaac. Certainly he was surprised by the outcome, but by means of a double movement he had come back to his original position and therefore received Isaac more joyfully than the first time.
God could give him a new Isaac, bring the sacrificial offer back to life. He believed on the strength of the absurd, for all human calculation had long since been suspended.
But to be able to lose one’s understanding and with it the whole of the finite world whose stockbroker it is, and then on the strength of the absurd get exactly the same finitude back again, that leaves me aghast.
for he who loves God without faith reflects on himself, while the person who loves God in faith reflects on God.
Abraham I cannot understand; in a way all I can learn from him is to be amazed.
for our age does not stop with faith, with its miracle of turning water into wine;42 it goes further, it turns wine into water.
Would it not be best all the same to stop with faith, and is it not disturbing that everyone wants to go further?
faith does the opposite, having performed the movements of infinity it makes those of finitude.
He drains in infinite resignation the deep sorrow of existence, he knows the bliss of infinity, he has felt the pain of renouncing everything, whatever is most precious in the world, and yet to him finitude tastes just as good as to one who has never known anything higher, for his remaining in the finite bore no trace of a stunted, anxious training, and still he has this sense of being secure to take pleasure in it, as though it were the most certain thing of all.
It is said that the dancer’s hardest task is to leap straight into a definite position, so that not for a second does he have to catch at the position but stands there in it in the leap itself.
If a person lacks this concentration, this focus, his soul is disintegrated from the start, and then he will never come to make the movement, he will act prudently in life like those capitalists who invest their capital in every kind of security so as to gain on the one what they lose on the other – in short, he is not a knight.
His love for the princess would take on for him the expression of an eternal love, would acquire a religious character, be transfigured into a love for the eternal being which, although it denied fulfilment, still reconciled him once more in the eternal consciousness of his love’s validity in an eternal form that no reality can take from him.
He keeps this love young, and it grows with him in years and beauty. On the other hand, he needs no finite occasion for its growth. From the moment he made the movement the princess is lost. He needs none of this erotic titillation of the nerves at the sight of the loved one, etc., nor does he need in a finite sense to be continually making his farewell, for his memory of her is an eternal one, and he knows very well that those lovers who are so eager to see one another one more time to say farewell are right to be eager, right to think it will be the last time; for as soon as may be they will
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He has grasped the deep secret that even in loving another one should be sufficient unto oneself. He pays no further finite attention to what the princess does, and just this proves that he has made the movement infinitely.
dira necessitas;
‘cruel necessity of fate’.
Infinite resignation is the last stage before faith, so that anyone who has not made this movement does not have faith; for only in infinite resignation does my eternal validity become transparent to me, and only then can there be talk of grasping existence on the strength of faith.
On this the knight of faith is just as clear: all that can save him is the absurd; and this he grasps by faith.
Faith is therefore no aesthetic emotion, but something far higher, exactly because it presupposes resignation; it is not the immediate inclination of the heart but the paradox of existence.
I can see then that it requires strength and energy and freedom of spirit to make the infinite movement of resignation; I can also see that it can be done.
Resignation does not require faith, for what I win in resignation is my eternal consciousness, and that is a purely philosophical movement, which I venture upon when necessary, and which I can discipline myself into doing, for every time something finite out-distances me I starve myself until I make the movement;
Resignation does not require faith, but it requires faith to get the slightest more than my eternal consciousness, for that [more] is the paradox.
Through faith I don’t renounce anything, on the contrary in faith I receive everything,
Through faith Abraham did not renounce his claim on Isaac, through his faith he received Isaac.
By my own strength I can give up the princess, and I shall be no sulker but find joy and peace and repose in my pain, but with my own strength I cannot get her back again, for all that strength is precisely what I use to renounce my claim on her. But by faith, says that marvellous knight, by faith you will get her on the strength of the absurd.
a soldier standing guard alone with a loaded gun by a powder magazine on a stormy night gets strange thoughts;
A lot is said in our time about irony and humour, particularly by people who have never succeeded in practising them but who nevertheless know how to explain everything. I am not altogether unfamiliar with these two passions,
IMPORTANCE of irony to K
What I intend now is to extract from the story of Abraham its dialectical element, in the form of problemata, in order to see how monstrous a paradox faith is, a paradox capable of making a murder into a holy act well pleasing to God, a paradox which gives Isaac back to Abraham, which no thought can grasp because faith begins precisely where thinking leaves off.
It rests immanently in itself, has nothing outside itself that is its telos [end, purpose] but is itself the telos for everything outside, and when that is taken up into it, it has no further to go.
For faith is just this paradox, that the single individual is higher than the universal, though in such a way, be it noted, that the movement is repeated, that is, that, having been in the universal, the single individual now sets himself apart as the particular above the universal.
as Boileau says: ‘un sot trouve toujours un plus sot, qui l’admire’ [‘a fool can always find a greater fool who admires him’].
Now the story of Abraham contains just such a teleological suspension of the ethical.
‘the lowly man who dares to weep’
Euripides, Iphigenia in Aulis, v. 448, in C. Wilster’s trans. Agamemnon says, ‘How lucky to be born in lowly station where one may be allowed to weep.’
none more gloriously than Brutus.63
While first consul in Rome, L. Junius Brutus put two of his sons to death for trying to restore the Tarquins. Brutus got his name by feigning idiocy in order to escape being murdered by Tarquinius.
The difference between the tragic hero and Abraham is obvious enough. The tragic hero stays within the ethical. He lets an expression of the ethical have its telos in a higher expression of the ethical; he reduces the ethical relation between father and son, or daughter and father, to a sentiment that has its dialectic in its relation to the idea of the ethical life. Here, then, there can be no question of a teleological suspension of the ethical itself.
It is not to save a nation, not to uphold the idea of the State, that Abraham did it, not to appease angry gods. If there was any question of the deity’s being angry, it could only have been Abraham he was angry with, and Abraham’s whole action stands in no relation to the universal, it is a purely private undertaking.
There is no higher expression of the ethical in Abraham’s life than that the father shall love the son.
Then why does Abraham do it? For God’s sake, and what is exactly the same, for his own. He does it for the sake of God because God demands this proof of his faith; he does it for his own sake in order to be able to produce the proof.
The unity here is quite properly expressed in the saying in which this relationship has always been described: it is a trial, a temptation. A temptation, but what does that mean? What we usually call a temptation is something that keeps a person from carrying out a duty, but here the temptation is the ethical itself which would keep him from doing God’s will. But then what is the duty? For the duty is precisely the expression of God’s will.
The tragic hero enters into no private relationship with God, but the ethical is the divine and therefore the paradox in the divine can be mediated in the universal.
The moment I speak I express the universal, and when I do not no one can understand me.
