Philosophy o f Religion 20:3-16 (1986) �9 Nifhoff Publishers, Dordrecht - Printed in the Netherlands

KIERKEGAARD, NIETZSCHE, AND THE FAITH OF OUR FATHERS

CHARLES LEWIS Department of Philosophy, Wake Forest University, Winston-Salem, NC 27109

The faith of our fathers is supposed to have survived what Rudolph Bultmann has called "the crisis in belief. ''1 Yet what we are to understand by that faith and that crisis has escaped too easily the attention it requires. Bultmann has learned much from Kierkegaard, if not also from Nietzsche, though he reveals the limits of his own understanding in the signal importance he assigns to the project of demy- thologizing. While the self-will of man is said to be the everpresent crisis in belief, the particular crisis of modern times is the displacement of mythological by scien- tific thinking. For Bultmann this calls for a new way of thinking about the task of theology and thus about the content of belief itself. Kierkegaard and Nietzsche, however, have provided what is at once a less 15rogrammatic and more penetrating way of thinking about this belief and the fate it has suffered in the history of the West. Moreover, at the core of their contribution is a deeper insight into the self- will of man, an insight which reveals a yet more profound transformation within the history of postbiblical times. Their uncommon ground and intentions not- withstanding, they have opened up an uncommon perspective into what it means for man's moral will and reason to possess the power to determine the true and the good.

Before and beneath this power is the faith of Abraham, the paradigm of faith in the biblical world, a disturbing problem for our own world. The good which Abraham possessed in Isaac, his son, even his special son of promise and greatness, was, without complaint, subordinated to a yet higher good. But Abraham - or his narrator - did not determine for himself what this higher good must be. For Abra- ham is a creature of "dust and ashes" (Gen. 18:27). He is characterized by his un- conditional obedience and faith in the salvific power of a God who reserves for himself the freedom to determine the true and the good. Abraham's highest good was thus the God of his faith and worship. But this God cannot be identified (sans

appropriate stipulations) with the highest good of an enlightened moral will and reason. For this highest good must be worthy of worship, a God who would com- mand the sacrifice of a human being only if it were justifiable on (rationally acces- sible) moral grounds. In the absence of such grounds, the enlightened believer can admire only the God who stayed Abraham's hand, not some demonic deity for

whom the measure of a man's faith consists in his determination to obey any of the god's commands, no matter what they may be. 2

Yet for Abraham the God who miraculously stayed his hand was also the God who commanded Isaac's death, and that disturbing fact is the reason why Abra- ham's determination to obey has become a problem - a problem, that is, unless one looks beyond the biblical account itself. The darkest shadows there disappear in light of a higher consciousness of what a true God can or cannot be. The problem exists, then, for those who believe the biblical account must be reckoned with as it is, even if the God of Abraham and the faith which established itself as a paradigm in both the Hebrew and Greek texts, even if it should mean thak this God and this faith stand in opposition to the highest good of man's most exalted moral will and genius. In that case the believer must confront the predicament of having two highest goods to reckon with.

It is just this problem which Kierkegaard and, from a quite different standpoint, which Nietzsche also confronts. It is in this confrontation that they have provided a more revealing horizon within which the religion of the biblical sources and the crisis in belief can be understood. And it is by means of an understanding of bibli- cal religion - as in the faith of Abraham - that the character of this crisis comes most clearly into view. In the foreground we see, not the ascendancy of scientific thinking but the power of man's reason and will to create and preserve its own "values," to decide and establish for itself the true and the good. Abraham's will to preserve the great good which Isaac was for him did not prevail over his com- pelling experience of the will of God. For his obedience and trust Abraham was honored as the father of faith. But his descendants, especially those who have survived beyond the biblical world, have not shared the same compelling experience of a Will which jealously asserts its unconditional authority to determine the true and the good.

It is here, in the arena of Western history, where man's ascending will confronts the Will of an archaic piety, that the most profound crisis in belief has assumed its distinctive character and proportions. This is, indeed, a crisis of identity con- cerning the true character of God, or the highest good. Hence the deeper problem is not whether this God is the objective reality of a mythological world-view. It is whether this God is the God who has emerged as the highest good and conscience of that moral tradition which is rooted in the intersection of biblical faith and Greek philosophy.

Kierkegaard was concerned, perhaps inordinately, about what he thought to be a tragicomic confusion of biblical faith, especially Christian, with metaphysical rationalism, but he has also provided us with a window into a deeper, and darker, interiority of this faith. His persistent confrontation with Hegel, which has the ap- pearance of being, above all else, an effort to dispell this confusion, has yet another motive and basis. It does not matter for the present purposes whether this motive had become for Kierkegaard an explicit project in his case against the purveyors of modern confusion about the ancient faith. It is significant, however, that he respected Hegel as the most advanced representative of the fundamental aspirations of modernity.

More the exemplar of these aspirations even than Kant, Hegel traced the evolu- tion of man's consciousness from its primitive origins to the perfected reality of a self-determining, rational Spirit, the culmination of the freedom and creativity at work in the history of human striving. Whereas for Kant God is himself a ser- vant of the highest good, and both are beyond the limits of our world, for Hegel the human spirit cannot rest until it finds completeness in the awareness that its own freedom and creativity, its own highest reason and will, are also the ultimate reality and highest good of the world itself. Or, without the metaphysical cast of Hegel's account, the history of human freedom and creativity is the history of man's assumption.of a sovereign will and power of self-determination once the ex- clusive preserve of deity alone. In either version this self-assured man who enjoys the knowledge of his spiritual supremacy has come a long way from the religious man who, like Abraham, exists as a creature in the presence of an overwhelming will and power.

Although Hegel pursued most exhaustively this conjunction of man's freedom and good with the highest freedom and good, Kant had prepared the way for him with greater care than anyone else. In his Religion within the Limits of Reason Alone it is reason alone that is the source of one's authentic duties. Religion, on the other hand, in its highest expression, is but the disposition to regard as divine commands those duties which reason itself imposes upon man. a Hence there should be no anguish for Abraham. His human duty to his own son is one and the same as his divine duty. The command to kill Isaac cannot be the word of God, since what God is or says cannot be incompatible with what is dictated by the constraints of reason itself. For Kant, then, the command to kill Isaac has no more status than a historical allegation or a visionary experience. Should a com- mand appear to come, he says, "from God Himself (like the command delivered to Abraham to slaughter his own son like a sheep) it is at least possible that in this instance a mistake has prevailed ,,4 With such there is always the possibility of error or confusion, whereas the clear deliverances of reason itself are, as it were, divine. It does not really matter whether the infamous injunction to Abraham is viewed as a biblical allegation or as an assumed command from God himself. In either case the possibility of error must be viewed in the clear light of reason alone. Reason's God, as with reason's man, is incontestably beyond such a dark and irrational command.

It is true that Kierkegaard has his Johannes Climacus portray faith as an "objec- tive uncertainty, ''5 yet the same author ridicules attempts to prove the existence of God as "the most shameless affront," that of proving the existence of one who is present. "One proves God's existence by worship," he says, "not by proofs. ''6 For the Johannes of Fear and Trembling it appears to be no less certain to Abra- ham that the God he worships has, in fact, commanded the death of Isaac. "The old man," he says, "did not doubt .... he knew that it was God the Almighty who was trying him, he knew that it was the hardest sacrifice that could be required of him.... ''7 Johannes thus precludes the possibility of demonic involvement in this case, despite his acknowledgement that the demoniacal does have a certain re- semblance to the matter at hand. 8

Thus, the Kantian maneuver is explicitly foreclosed by this account of Abra- ham's faith. Kierkegaard leaves little doubt that it is also his own account when he later says, under his own name, that "God you are to love in unconditional obe- dience, even if what he demands of you may seem to you to be to your own harm .... for the wisdom of God is not to be compared with yours.... ''9 And there is also the admiring review of Fear and Trembling provided by Johannes Climacus. For him, as for the other Johannes, "the ethical constitutes the temptation.... ''l~ Not the demonic, not the oneiric, not even some quite ordinary provocation of the passions, but his human duty to Isaac is itself that which tempts Abraham in this account. And there is no reason to think that this Johannes would gainsay the other's reading of the poignancy of Abraham's temptation to preserve Isaac's life: "'the ethical had for Abraham no higher expression than the family life. ''11

The Kantian recourse to the possibility of error - which becomes actual error when a clear imperative of reason is contradicted - is founded, of course, upon his antecedent requirement that a true God cannot command anything contrary to the ethical. It is this sovereign stipulation of the ethical standpoint which for Kierkegaard is the decisive point, the very point about which the story of Abra- ham turns.

Yet it is Hegel who forces the issue into its sharpest delineation. For in his at- tempt to provide the final and complete expression of the ethical, he presumes to go beyond the abstract formalism of Kant's moral philosophy and show why, in the course of concrete political existence, the actual duties which may apply in a given situation can come into conflict with each other. Kant had gone so far as to deny that a genuine conflict of duties can occur, since "two mutually opposing rules cannot be necessary at the same time. ''12 But for Hegel even the ethical per- spective of Sophocles' Antigone comes closer to reality than that. i3 Though neither Antigone nor Creon recognized the necessity of the imperative invoked by the other, they were both, because of their particular obligations, right. This awareness that both sides do, indeed, have justifiable claims is a higher achievement than the unreflective, tragic consciousness itself, of which, for Hegel, the Antigone is the pre- eminent portrayal.

By virtue of his own position within the era of unreflective ethical life, Abraham also would have experienced the conflicting imperatives of his situation as the mysterious necessity of tragic fate. Since the sacred command was his justification for the sacrifice of Isaac, he would not have experienced the claim of his father- hood, in this case, as an authentic imperative. Perhaps, like Kierkegaard's tragic heroes, the lower ethical relation, as between father and son, would be reduced to a "sentiment" or a "wish" in the presence of the higher claim of a people and its welfare. 14 But this is precisely where Hegel reveals his inability to comprehend the father of faith, for Abraham, like Antigone, knows no higher duty than the claim of family life. In his case there is simply no parallel to a competing ethical duty. That is why his experience of conflict is not tragic, why "one approaches him with a horror religiosis ?,~s

In Hegel's philosophy there is no place for a duty which cannot be compre-

hended within the overarching purview of good and evil. The ethical embodiment of the human spirit in political life - ultimately in the highest good of justice and freedom in a fully rational, constitutional state - is the limit within which con- flicting duties may impose themselves upon men. A duty from beyond the limit of good and evil makes no sense. That it could be a divine duty is no less incon- ceivable, for the divine here is no more, or less, than the highest ethical embodi- ment of the human spirit. 16 It does not matter for Kierkegaard whether the ethical is understood in a political or some extra-political sense ("the universal" is his typical way of referring to it); his point is that it assumes the status of deity, or, in this case, of that which is most worthy of man's respect and veneration.

The archaic, even reprehensible, God of Abraham cannot compete with what enlightened men regard as intrinsically good, and it does not matter if this good is taken non-theologically as an ideal of perfect and universal justice.

So the whole existence of the human race is rounded off completely like a sphere, and the ethical is at once its limit and its content. God becomes an invisible vanishing point, a powerless thought, His power being only in the ethical which is the content of existence.17

With Feuerbach, Kierkegaard sees that the power of this worthy God is not re- vealed through his presence to faith. Rather, this new God draws his power from the wellsprings of man's own most highly valued attributes - justice, wisdom, love. Without these attributes God himself would be, as Feuerbach puts it, "a defective being"; the idea of God, he says, "is determined by the qualities which have thus been previously judged to be worthy of the divine nature.... ''18 Judged by the enlightened standards of the postbiblical world, the God of Abraham, the father of biblical faith, is indeed defective. His power to issue commands from beyond the sphere of good and evil has been reduced to yet another "invisible vanishing point" of a man's deranged, if not demonic, imagination. More general- ly, this means that the very possibility of recognizing a religious revelation "in our age" is in question, as illustrated by the case of poor Adler, whose strange expe- rience led even Kierkegaard to concur in the judgment of the State-Church that the man suffered from "a confused state of mind. ''19 The experience of a revela- tion thus becomes part of the subject matter of the sociology, psychology, or psychopathology of religion.

Even some of Kierkegaard's most grateful apologists seem perplexed, if not troubled, by his account of the revelation to Abraham. Although otherwise deeply impressed by Kierkegaard, D.Z. Phillips draws the line at this point. "An atrocity," he asserts, "would not cease to be an atrocity if one put 'God commands' in front of it. ''2~ So he chides Kierkegaard for failing to place greater emphasis on "cri- teria of divinity." But we are assured that this is only a minor lapse, since in other works Kierkegaard repairs the damage by making God's commands internally re- lated to this nature. And God's nature is love, which means that " 'God commands the slaughter of the innocent' is nonsense. ''2~

In approaching the same difficulty, Gene Outka finds a different, less obtrusive, way of dealing with it. Kierkegaard's account is taken quite seriously and not sim- ply as an idiosyncratic lapse. Outka reminds us that there are significant similari- ties in the accounts of Aquinas 22 and, especially, of Augustine, whom Aquinas cites as an authority: "Augustine says, When God commands a thing to be done against the customs and conventions o f a people, though it were never done here- tofore, it is to be done. ''23 Although Aquinas tries, as it were, to dull the edge of Abraham's duty, Augustine himself, like Kierkegaard, has not interfered. For Outka the point is that "a religious duty still can conflict with an ordinary sense of moral duty. ',:4

But though Outka labors at length to find what is instructive and acceptable in the Kierkegaardian account, he also tries to find a way to assure us that the obedience of Kierkegaard's Abraham is not mere "slavish submission," that "there appear to be limits of a sort to what God can command. ''2s Kierkegaard's Abra- ham, he thinks, submits to a God who "will not, eo ipso, command what is un- loving. ''26 This is supposed to mean that God's commands always have the purpose of fostering a relationship with him; while it may seem unloving to require Isaac's death, Abraham nevertheless believed that it would foster communion with God.

The sort of limit Outka finds here may not be very reassuring, yet it seems clear enough that he goes, nevertheless, beyond what Kierkegaard wanted to say about the faith of Abraham. In Fear and Trembling, where Outka's point would seem to be indispensable, the weight and accent is placed, not upon Abraham's faith in God's love but upon his faith in God's fidelity and power, that God will keep his promise to bless the world through Abraham's seed even if Isaac is sacrificed. The conviction that God is love is central in the characterization of Johannes, who declares that Abraham's faith is higher than the merely tragic ideal to which he could attain. 27 As for Abraham, "this is his comfort, for he says: 'But yet this will not come to pass, or, if it does come to pass, then the Lord will give me a new Isaac, by virtue viz. of the absurd.'"28 This is not to say that Abraham takes no comfort in God's love; the accent falls, though, upon attributes without which it would not be possible to understand his love. The love of this God is inseparable from his fidelity to his promises; from his power to keep them, come what may; and, as well, from his power to inspire Abraham with a dread intensified through confrontation with the opposition between murder and sacrifice. 29

The love which Outka describes, however, has another, less disturbing, com- plexion. We are assured that this love requires communion with men, that Kierke- gaard shares with Aquinas the conviction that God "cannot turn men away from himself. ''a~ Regarding this portrayal of Aquinas' position, it must be noted that a serious complication is created by his doctrine of predestination: whereas some are destined to receive God's blessing, others are not. Yet more mysterious and disconcerting is the belief that this division is not based on one's merits, since "why He chooses some for glory, and reprobates others, has no reason, except the divine will. ''31 As for the portrayal of Kierkegaard's position on this matter, it appears that Oukta's construction exceeds any decisive evidence. He does not offer

any such evidence, nor would such evidence find a comfortable place alongside the God of power and promise in Fear and Trembling. For the power of this God is beyond the limits of good and evil, and his special promise, his greatest blessing, is reserved for the "elect. ''32

It is also worthy of note that Kierkegaard follows the Apostle Paul in praising Abraham as the father of faith because of his steadfast belief in God's promise that he and his descendants "should inherit the world" (Rom. 4:13; cf. 4:16ff, Gal. 3:6ff). It is less clear, though the God of Fear and Trembling looks the part, wheth- er Kierkegaard's God " has mercy upon whomever he wills, and ... hardens the heart of whomever he wills," that he would say "'Jacob I loved, but Esau I hated'" (Rom. 9:18,13). Or, as perhaps the question should be p u t - would Kierkegaard's reading of such passages remove their offense? His reaction to a reassuring exegesis of another hard saying may provide a clue: "the doctrine which at the moment when it makes as if it would give utterance to the terrible ends by drfveling instead of terrifying - that doctrine is not worth taking off my hat to. ''33 In that case he might just take his hat off to Dante when the poet (perhaps recalling passages like Mt. 25:31-46) conjoins God's "primal Love" with those hard words inscribed above the entrance to the city of the damned: "Abandon every hope, you who enter. ''34

The natural inclination of his apologist may be to dismiss this supposition about what Kierkegaard is prepared to allow. Surely, it may seem, the "primal Love" of which Dante speaks belongs to a much lower order of magnitude than the love of Kierkegaard's God. Surely, it may seem, Kierkegaard would agree with John Hick's judgment that a God such as Dante's "would be nothing admirable, still less worthy of worship .,,35 But then there is the God of Fear and Trembling, who favors Abra- ham with a special promise and commands him to sacrifice his son. And rather than trying to turn this command into something morally admissible - whether by reference to the staying of Abraham's hand or to the restoration of Isaac, or to whatever else 36 - Kierkegaard purposefully sets it over against what he believes to be Abraham's highest ethical duty. So from the judgment seat of the ethical, Abraham's God commands murder. Such a God - or such a man - cannot escape the condemnation of a God who is "admirable" or "worthy" of worship. Abra- ham's unquestioning, unconditional determination to obey this God's command sets him worlds apart from one whose God cannot violate the sovereign dictates of man's highest moral conscience.

Abraham's confidence in his God's fidelity and in the power of his God to keep his promises is not to be confused with the confidence of one whose God, in order to be a true God, cannot command what is contrary to the standards of morality. This morally admirable God becomes, for Kierkegaard, "an invisible vanishing point, a powerless thought," whose power is "only in the ethical." He thus anti- cipates the imaginary deity or ideal of R.B. Braithwaite: the "magnified Lord Shaftesbury," whose "commands would not be obligatory in themselves," for "it is when the religious man finds that what the magnified Lord Shaftesbury com- mands or desires accords with his ow~_ moral judgment that he decides to obey

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or to accede to it. ''37 Kierkegaard would have appreciated Braithwaite's ideal or image of moral perfection as an especially lucid and highly advanced version of the Kantian and Hegelian conceptions of deity.

It is never more evident than at this point that Kierkegaard's judgment of these positions is allied with Nietzsche's critique of the Western theological tradition. In Twilight of the Idols Nietzsche says those "highest concepts," elevated to the status of deity, are but "the last smoke of evaporating reality. ''38 Drained of his once noble will and power, God "became an 'ideal' ... 'pure spirit,' the 'Absolute' .... the deterioration of a god: God became the 'thing-in-itself. '''39 The God thus raised to the status of the highest concept or being is the same God who serves as the highest exemplar of that moral conscience to which the religion of the West has given birth. Nietzsche has attempted to pursue the implications of this develop- ment beyond even the achievements of Kant and Hegel. With Feuerbach, though without his naive optimism, Nietzsche thinks that the most highly valued attributes of enlightened men have supplanted the old gods. Subjected to the standards of the rational and moral tradition of the West, the old gods have been sacrificed to the highest good, the God whose innermost nature has been revealed in the operations of human thought and desire .4o

From the standpoint of this tradition, the most important question concerns the value of what is thus desired and thought to be highest. For Nietzsche this means that it is biblical morality - quintessentially Christian morality and its legacy - which must be questioned,. Whether or not God exists, he thinks, is just one of those "hiding places" wherein the most difficult and self-revealing question is concealed. 41 Whatever one's belief about the existence of God, the siren power to which modern men are subject is the vestigial shadow-God of biblical morality. Accentuated by the democratic, cosmopolitan theology of Pauline Christianity, this powerfully seductive moral tradition has set the limits of what is desirable and good. Defeat, exile, and the envy of power that grows out of weakness are the seedbeds of this new theology, for which the highest values are arrayed against the noble, self-enhancing, parochial, even unfair and pitiless gods of conquering men. These ineverted values find their ultimate expression in an all-seeing, righteous Judge, to whom all men are indebted, even for their very existence, and to whom the payment of suffering is unavoidably due. From the bad conscience of earlier, sinful men, modern men have inherited their own need to suffer. Hence their own religion, with its exaltation of egalitarian justice and pity: "The man of 'modern ideas,' this proud ape, is immeasurably dissatisfied with himself .... he suffers - and his vanity wants him to suffer only with others, to feel pity. , 4 2

As Nietzsche presents it, this latter-day expression of moral-religious conscious- ness is the culmination of a development within the history of religion. From the sacrifice of human beings themselves, perhaps one's own first-born, to the sacrifice of one's own most powerful, natural instincts and talents, this psychological drama then virtually exhausts itself in the penultimate sacrifice, that of the crucified God. Christianity thus points the way to the ultimate sacrifice of God for "the nothing," this "final cruelty ... reserved for the generation that is now coming up: all of us

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already know something of this. - ,43 The ignominious fate of once noble gods is playing itself out before us in the nihilism of weakness, in a self-diminishing morali- ty without objective authority or sanction, except that imposed by the external might of political or social powers. What is left is the subjective force of will, and therein a new perspective of uncharted magnitude - for Nietzsche a turning point of possibilities threatened by inbred and persistent weakness of will.

With this portentous scene of the dying and dead God, Nietzsche's portrayal of the fate of the biblical God converges with that of Kierkegaard. But what, then, of the faith of Abraham? Has Nietzsche provided us with a proper understanding, or at least the basis for such an understanding, of the innermost character of this faith? It is here that Kierkegaard's account reveals its fundamental opposition to the psychological and naturalistic categories of a Nietzschean understanding of religion. Nietzsche leaves no doubt about his admiration for the preexilic warrior- God of the earliest period of biblical religion, the God who "was the expression of a consciousness of power, of joy in oneself, of hope for oneself: through him victory and welfare were expected.,.. ''44 But Nietzsche also betrays no doubt that this God of the victorious Israelites was the God of justice because he was their God, that their morality was the ground and source of their theology. For whether the God of a noble or of a decadent people, a God is the objectification of the highest values of their morality. 4s So the God of Abraham and his people - or the God of the relevant biblical sources concerning Abraham - was the crea- tion of the morality by means of which they exercised their instinct to live and flourish.

If, however, Kierkegaard has understood the religion of Abraham, this cannot be a proper description of his faith. Morality is thought to be the sphere within which one enjoys the security of acceptance, respect, and community. For the tragic hero, despite his loss and suffering, "it is glorious to belong to the universal .... [to] rejoice in the security of the universal"; the knight of faith, on the other hand, "walks alone with his dreadful responsibility. ''46 Had Abraham's ethos re- quired the sacrifice of his son, he could have taken comfort in the regard of his people. Yet, for Kierkegaard, Abraham knew no higher moral duty than to his family and to Isaac.

That great good might account, at least in part, for what Nietzsche calls "the father in God, ''47 but no moral good could account for the uncanny in a God whose dreadful command required Abraham to sacrifice a respected moral good for a yet higher duty known only to him in his encounter with this God. The God of Kierkegaard's Abraham is father to his people and faithful to his promises, but he is also, paradoxically, the Lord of life and death. As with Job's God, he gives and he takes away. 48 He is a God who destroys and a God who also saves, a God who can take Isaac's life and a God who can, miraculously, restore it. It is true that Abraham's God is the familiar exemplar of the highest virtues (especially fidelity), even the ultimate source of moral duties themselves, 49 but he is, at the same time, a God whose will and ways are beyond human ken.

The recognition of moral duties, and of one's failure to satisfy them, may

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have, as with Kant or Hegel or Nietzsche, the aspect of religious experience, but for Kierkegaard the religion of the Bible, as with Abraham's religion, cannot be com- prehended within the limits of such an understanding of religious experience. Neither the experience of duty, nor of guilt, nor any other experience rooted in the soil of natural, human relations, can account for the peculiar character of that faith. Nor is the God of that faith to be confused with the apprehensible, morally perspicuous deity of the religion of immanence, which "has only human nature in general as its assumption. ''5~ The supreme good of this religion, which Nietzsche traces to the religion of the Bible, is not the God of Kierkegaard's Abraham, who is the God of an "absurd" faith. 51 We are even led to think that had the morality of Abraham required the sacrifice of children, the God of this faith was quite capable of commanding him to exhort his people not to carry out their moral duty.

In tlie Kierkegaardian account, the God of Abraham is not God by virtue of being valued above all other things, as though one's esteem or regard were neces- sary. Such a God would be the merely immanent deity of one's quite natural wish and will, one's highest value. But from the Nietzschean perspective, a God who is not worthy of worship by virtue of the esteem of his people, whether noble or decadent, is no God at all. For a true God is a reflection and expression of the highest values of his worshipers. It should be no surprise, then, that enlightened men from Plato to Braithwaite have approved only that worship which is motivated by reverence for an enlightened God, a God above the confining purview and defec- tive will of the gods of an archaic and parochial piety, s2

Unlike the old gods, the enlightened God, even the attenuated version of Braith- waite, is still capable of inspiring the admiration and devotion of modern men. Yet however different their motivations, neither Nietzsche nor Kierkegaard are in- spired by this God, though his appeal to intellectual culture is such that it extends further into their own souls than they may be prepared to say. From their vantage point it is possible to see that the crisis in belief generated by the confrontation between scientific and mythological ways of thinking is less impressive when com- pared with the decline of the old and the ascendancy of the new God. s3 This new God, who represents the highest values of Western man, is thus beyond the narrow- ness of favoring a special people or the willful exercise of power. He (or it) is a truly cosmic God, a God of all peoples alike, a God whose will and ways conform to the highest canons and aspirations of enlightened moral thought.

Although Nietzsche thinks this God had emerged long before speculative phi- losophy put down its roots, his lineage being traceable to the ressentiment of the exiled Jews, Kierkegaard thinks the God of these exiles, and even the God of the: New Testament itself, is the God of Abraham. But while there is evidence in the Bible to which both could appeal, the deepest currents of biblical religion can be found to run from the sources concerning the father of this faith to the texts of the evangels and apostles. 54 The God who commands Abraham from beyond the domain of good and evil cannot be very far from the God who favors his chosen people (Gen. 12:2f.; Deut. 4:7f.; Isa. 41:8f.; Ezek. 20:5; Amos 3:2; Zech. 8:23);

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who does what he will with what is his (Isa. 45:9ff.; Mt. 20:15; Rom. 9:20 ff.); who gives and takes away (Job 1:21 ; Ps. 90 :2 -6 ) ; who makes peace and creates evil (Isa. 45:7); who loves and hates (Mal. 1:2.; Rom. 9:13); and who "has mercy upon whomever he wills, and ... hardens the heart of whomever he wills" (Rom. 9:18, R.S.V.).

There is an unfathomable will and power here which Nietzsche sees only in those godlike men of the future who live beyond the self-imposed limits of weakness. Yet the God of this faith is the same value-creating God who imposes moral limits upon his creatures, especially upon his "elect," in behalf of their creaturely weak- n~ess and well-being. It is this power - even this jealousy of the God who will tolerate no other gods - which affords the most profound motivation for Nietz- sche's enmity. It is this God who must die if Nietzsche's risk-taking men are to rise above the horizon of creaturely limits.

For Kierkegaard the God who imposes his will upon the father of faith re- quires, by that act, that Abraham must be also a risk-taker, that in transgressing the limit imposed by his fatherhood he would fail his family and his people. So Abraham acts without the security provided by his social existence and its limits. His faith is defined by his trust and by his obedience to the sacred limit imposed on him by God's will.

Kierkegaard has his Johannes portray the dreadfulness of Abraham's situation in terms of an opposition between his ethical and his sacred duties. And, in other places, faith itself is portrayed as a "leap" or uncoerced act of a man's will. ss Yet in these portrayals the constructions of Kierkegaard's own intellectual culture are revealed in his contrast between ethical and religious duties and in the autonomous character of faith. But it appears that Abraham's fatherly duties - especially in the case of his child of promise - were as sacred to him as was the special duty which he alone was called upon to fulfill. It is we who have come to see the former, if not also the latter, as belonging to the sphere of man's own nature and possibili- ties. Nor was Abraham's world over-shadowed by doubt and proclamations that God is revealed, at tong last, to be only a lingering image of Man. The father of faith - as well as the apostle who praises him as such - was not a "knight" of objective uncertainty or a "self" whose faith was an act of his will (cf. Eph. 2:8f.). He lived in the overwhelming presence of the God of his people. He had no ques- tions to ask or consider and he set about a compelling duty known, so it appears, only to himself and his God. It is Abraham's kind of faith that is the faith of our fathers and that is supposed to have survived the crisis in belief.

NOTES

1. Essays: Philosophical and Theological, trans. J.C.G. Greig (New York: Macmillan, 1955), pp. 1-21.

2. The narrator may be grateful to Yahweh - and admire him - for not requiring human sacrifice, which apparently was required in earlier times. But the fact remains that his God may and, indeed, did command such sacrifice as a test of faith. And the same God

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did, in fact, accept Jephthah's sacrifice of his daughter (Judges 11:29-40). Abraham, however, and thus his son of promise, was spared. Even so, to obey only the command of a God who would never require one actually to perform any deed which cannot be justi- fied on moral grounds is just another way of identifying one's point of departure from the faith of Abraham. The very idea of worship worthiness simply precludes the worship of a god who is deficient in the requisite moral attributes. The assumption that Abraham (and his admirers) would worship only a worthy God is an imposition on the texts that is motivated by a disposition upon which Kierkegaard and Nietzsche have shed the most revealing light. On the concept of worship worthiness, see note 54.

3. Religion within the Limits of Reason Alone, trans. Theodore M. Greene and Hoyt H. Hudson (New York: Harper & Row, 1960), pp. 79, 142.

4. Ibid., p. 175. 5. Concluding Unscientific Postscript, trans. David F. Swenson and Walter Lowrie (Prince-

ton: Princeton University Press, 1941), p. 182; cf. pp. 53, 178, 188, 387,453. Cf. Phi- losophical Fragments, trans. David F. Swenson and Howard V. Hong (Princeton: Prince- ton University Press, 1962), pp. 54f., 101-106; The Concept o f Dread, trans. Walter Lowrie (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1957), pp. 140f.

6. Concluding Unscientific Postscript, p. 485. 7. Fear and Trembling and The Sickness unto Death, trans. Walter Lowrie (Princeton:

Princeton University Press, 1954), p. 36. 8. Ibid., p. 106. 9. Works o f Love, trans. Howard and Edna Hong (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1962),

p. 36 ; cf. Isaiah 55:8f. 10. Concluding Unscientific Postscript, p. 234. 11. Fear and Trembling, p. 121 ; cf. pp. 39, 67, 70. 12. From "Introduction" to The Metaphysics of Morals, in The Metaphysical Elements of

Justice, trans. John Ladd (New York: The Liberal Arts Press, 1965), p. 25. 13. The Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A.V. Miller (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977),

pp. 279-289. 14. Fear and Trembling, pp. 68 -70 , 88. In one of his early theological writings (on the spirit

of Judaism), Hegel takes a quite different approach to the one suggested here. There he treats the sacrifice of Isaac as indicative of Abraham's desire for freedom from the bonds of love. Such was his desire for independence and mastery that even his love for Isaac he wanted to overcome, indeed to destroy, through the confidence that he could kill his own son. See On Christianity: Early Theological Writings, trans. T.M. Knox and Richard Kroner (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1961), pp. 185-187.

15. Ibid., p. 71 ; cf. also Job's experience, Job 4:14. 16. CL Fear and Trembling, p. 70; also Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion, Vol.

III, trans. E.S. Haldane (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1962), p. 138; Hegel's Phi- losophy o f Right, trans. T.M. Knox (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1945), pp. 165 - 174.

17. Fear and Trembling, p. 78. 18. The Essence o f Christianity, trans. George Eliot (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1957),

pp. 21f. 19. On Authority and Revelation, ed. and trans. Walter Lowrie (New York: Harper & Row,

1966), pp. 91f. For two quite different approaches to Kierkegaard's treatment of the Adler affair, see Frederick Sontag's introduction to this edition (pp. vii-xl) and Stanley Cavell's essay in Kierkegaard, A Collection of Critical Essays (ed. Josiah Thompson (New York: Doubleday, 1972), pp. 373-393).

20. Faith and Philosophical Enquiry (New York: Schocken Books, 1971), p. 212. 21. Ibid. 22. Summa Theologica, I - I I , q. 100, a.8, ad. 3. See Outka's essay in Religion and Morality,

eds. Gene Outka and John P. Reeder, Jr. (New York: Doubleday, 1973), pp. 204-254.

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23. Summa Theologica, I I - I I , q. 154, a.3, ad. 2. The translation is from St. Thomas Aquinas: Summa Theologiae, Vol. 43, trans. Thomas Gilby, O.P. (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1968), p. 215.

24. Religion and Morality, p. 253. 25. Ibid., pp. 243f. 26. Ibid.,p. 245. 27. Fear and Trembling, pp. 44-46 . 28. Ibid., p. 124. 29. Ibid., p. 41; cf. pp. 84-90 . 30. Religion and Morality, p. 246. 31. Summa Theologica, I, q. 23, a.5. Cf. St. Anselm, who cannot find a "reason to explain

why, among men who are equally evil, thou dost save some and not others ... and dost condemn the latter, and not the former ..." (Peoslogion XI). The translation is from A Scholastic Miscellany: Anselm to Ockham, ed. and trans. E.R. Fairweather (New York: Macmillan, 1970), p. 81.

32. Fearand Trembling, pp. 32-34 , 42,108. See also note 55 below. 33. Ibid., p. 83. Cf. Concluding Unscientific Postscript, pp. 518f. 34. Inferno, canto ItI. The translation is from The Divine Comedy, Vol. t, part 1, trans.

Charles S. Singleton (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1970), p. 25. It should be noted that Kierkegaard does reject "the older works of theology" which defend a doctrine of eternal punishment that turns the subjective relation of the believer and God into a merely objective (and quantifying) moral or legal relation (see Concluding Unscientific Postscript, p. 472). Even so, Kierkegaard's believer may be separated "forever" from his own (unbelieving) father and mother (ibid., p. 519).

35. Eviland the GodofLove (London: Macmillan, 1968), p. 129. 36. See, e.g., Philip L. Quinn, Divine Commands and Moral Requirements (Oxford: Oxford

University Press, 1978), pp. 15f. and John Donnelly's essay in Kierkegaard's Fear and Trembling: Critical Appraisals, ed. Robert L. Perkins (University: The University of Ala- bama Press, 1981), pp. 115-140.

37. From An Empiricist's View of the Nature of Religious Belief, reprinted in The Existence of God, ed. John Hick (New York: Macmillan, 1964), p. 249.

38. "Reason in Philosophy," sec. 4. The translation is from The Portable Nietzsche, ed. and trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: The Viking Press, 1954), p. 481. Cf. Kierkegaard, Concluding Unscientific Postscript, pp. 277f.

39. The Antichrist, sec. 17;ibid., p. 585. 40. See, e.g., the preface and sec. 191 of Beyond Goodand Evil. 41. The Will to Power, sec. 251. The translation is by Walter Kaufmann and R.J. HoUingdale

in The Will to Power, ed. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Random House, 1967), p. 145. 42. Beyond Good and Evil, sec. 223; cf. sec. 202. The translation is from Basic Writings of

Nietzsehe, ed. and trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Modern Library, 1968), p. 340. 43. Beyond Good and Evil, sec. 55;ibid., p. 257. 44. The Antichrist, sec. 25; The Portable Nietzsehe, p. 594. 45. E.g., On the Genealogy o f Morals, II, sec. 23; The Will to Power, introduction to "Cri-

tique of Religion" and secs. 135f., 204, 245. For a critique of Nietzsche's claim here, see my essay in Studie~ in Nietzsche and the Judeo-Christian Tradition, eds. James C. O'Flaherty, Timothy F. Sellner, and Robert M. Helm (Chapel Hill and London: The University of North Carolina Press, 1985), pp. 69-85 .

46. Fear and Trembling, pp. 86, 90; cf. pp. 88f., 122f. and Concluding Unscientific Post- script, pp. 518f. Though following Kierkegaard in this characterization of faith, Mircea Eliade nevertheless has it that in Abraham's world child sacrifice was customary. For Eliade Abraham's act is absurd because he is prepared to sacrifice Isaac despite the fact that in this case the child was a special gift, a son of promise. See The Myth of the Eternal Return, trans. Willard R. Trask (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1971), pp. 108- 110.

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47: Beyond Good and Evil, sec. 53;Basic Writings of Nietzsche , p. 256. 48. Job 1:21; cf. Isa. 45:7, Ps. 90 :2-6 . See also Kierkegaard'sEdifying Discourses, ed. Paul

L. Holmer, trans. David F. and Lillian Marvin Swenson (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1958), pp, 67-86 .

49. Fearand Trembling, p. 78. 50. Concluding Unscientific Postscript, p. 496. 51. See especially Fear and Trembling, pp. 57-77 and ibid., pp. 196f. 52. E.g., Republic 364 B-C, 379 C-E, 391 D-E; Timaeus 29A, 30A; Laws 716A-717B;

Epinomis 977A. 53. This is not, of course, to say that the former etiology is unrelated to the latter. In fact, it

appears that the former transition is, to some extent at least, a development of the spirit and tendencies of a moral will for which a supernatural, yet rational, God of cosmic law and order would be the highest good. Belief in this universal and lawful God (made perfect through the convergence of the biblical faith in transcendence and the faith of the Greek philosophers in the power of reason) is for scientific thinking a natural ally, if not, indeed, a powerful motive. As for mythological thinking, its parochialism, its total reliance upon sacred and divinely inspired authority, its naive dependence on the power of magic or prayer and ritual are, in themselves, at odds with a truly mature and enlightened moral will. That Bultmann himself has not escaped the attraction of the younger, and beautiful, God of this enlightened will is revealed in his embrace of the philosophically inspired project to demythologize the faith of the biblical sources. Hence for him the crisis in belief is the occasion for a deeper, more "existential" faith in a God beyond the limits of mythological thinking.

54. See my essay, "Divine Goodness and Worship Worthiness," International Journal for Philosophy of Religion 14 (1983), 143-158.

55. E.g., Concluding Unscientific Postscript, pp. 15, 96f.;Philosophical Fragments, pp. 103- 105. This stress on the autonomous character of faith leads Kierkegaard's Johannes Cli- macus to reject (at least a "selfish" version of) the doctrine of predestination. Being "God's elect" is to enjoy "a certain resemblance to one who is fortunate through favor," yet it is also to suffer a "pathos of discrimination" due to the fact that the historical situation of "countless numbers" excludes them from blessedness because they do not encounter Christian preaching (Concluding Unscientific Postscript, p. 516; cf. also pp. 517-519) . Perhaps it is the mysterious blessedness of those who do encounter this preach- ing (and respond with faith) which prompts Johannes to say that "it is a thing so difficult to understand that for everybody but the elect it must be enough to drive one to despair" (ibid., p. 516).