Agape and Personhood. David L. Goicoechea

with some of the real concrete existential contingencies.

      Johannes de Silentio saw that Isaac could be devastated as he

      saw that he was to be the sacrificial victim and he could have

      taken offence at God, so to prevent that, Abraham could tell

      him that it was not God’s command but his own demonic will.

      That way Isaac could have kept faith in the God of Abraham.

      In contingency two Abraham could have become dejected

      and abject by wondering how God could be so monstrous to do this.

      In contingency three Abraham could have concluded that even

      to believe in God’s command was the sin of child murder.

      In contingency four Isaac could have lost his faith.

      Søren had these and many more unlimited voices speaking

      within himself and such complexity made logic absurd.

      II.2.4 The Absurd Contingency of Abraham’s Faith in the Promise

      In part three of Fear and Trembling, Eulogy on Abraham, Silentio

      laments that life’s unlimited absurd contingencies could bring

      us poor humans to the defiant defeat of doubt, dread and despair.

      Søren was so tempted when he felt called upon to break his promise

      as was Abraham when God seemed to be breaking His promise.

      But the challenges of complexities’ contingencies can become

      opportunities for heroes, poets and orators to become great.

      “One became great by expecting the possible, another by

      expecting the eternal; but he who experienced the impossible became

      the greatest of all” and, of course, that is exactly what Abraham did.

      God looked like an impossible contradiction of opposites as

      Abraham went forth in faith to do His will because Isaac

      was the means by which God could keep His promise and by

      demanding Isaac as a sacrificial victim God would be taking

      away the means by which the promise could be kept with honor.

      The promise was for this finite, temporal life in that it

      had to do with a very large family and a very prosperous land

      and somehow becoming a blessing for all of humankind.

      So Abraham believed that God was only tempting him and

      that if he went forth in good faith to do God’s will in sacrificing

      Isaac God would somehow give him back Isaac a second time.

      In his faith Abraham so believed and trusted in God that

      he reconciled the absurd opposites of God: God who

      promises good and wonderful things with God, the monster,

      who demands the sacrifice of Isaac and thus the end of the promise.

      But Kierkegaard had just as much to reconcile for he did

      identify with his father’s melancholia and he did feel like

      a hunched back, little creep whom all of a sudden Regina redeemed.

      But he felt called to leave her and never get her back in

      this life a second time, but that had to do with the new

      complexity of Christian faith in the sacrifice of God’s Son.

      II.2.5 The Absurd Contingency of Double Movement Leaping

      In his Eulogy Silentio writes that Abraham was the greatest of all

      “great by that power whose strength is powerlessness,

      great by that wisdom whose secret is foolishness

      great by that hope whose form is madness

      great by that love that is hatred to oneself.”

      This is the language or the logos of the Cross as Paul sees it.

      It is as if Silentio is quoting Paul here and this is the core

      of Søren’s philosophy of love and reconciliation which he

      now spells out for the first time in this Preliminary Expectoration.

      Søren first spits out his philosophy of double movement leaping by

      comparing the Knights of Infinite Resignation and of Faith.

      With all of his energy and passion Abraham renounced Isaac

      and was willing to give him up as a Knight of Infinite Resignation.

      But by faith which is God’s gift Abraham gets Isaac a second time.

      As Silentio puts it in thinking of Regina:

      By my own strength I can give up the princess

      and I will not sulk about it

      but find joy and peace and rest in my pain

      but by my own strength I cannot get her back again

      for I use all my strength in resigning.

      On the other hand, by faith,

      says that marvelous knight,

      by faith you will get her by virtue of the absurd.

      With Infinite Resignation Buddhists renounce all desire and

      Platonists renounce the shadows and images of the cave and

      Hegelians renounce each thesis with an antithesis. But Søren,

      while renouncing the aesthetic basement and the ethical first

      floor of his house with the logic of the neither/nor and

      relating absolutely to the absolute, then in faith comes back

      and is free to live on all floors of his house at once by

      relatively loving the basement, first floor and the second floor.

      II.2.6 The Absurdity of Ethically Suspending the Teleological

      Silentio focuses on three major problems for Father Abraham.

      He is called upon to murder, hate and lie in the worst way possible.

      But, does not this make his faith absurd and totally unethical?

      The ethical is the universal natural law and every individual,

      as Hegel argues, should obey that law with a good conscience.

      Socrates saw that we should care for our soul with good conscience.

      While there is no mention of good conscience in the Hebrew Bible

      it runs through Paul’s writings as an element of his Stoic heritage.

      Kierkegaard in Works of Love highlights the practice of cultivating

      a sensitive conscience as the single individual’s loving guide.

      But here in Problemata I Silentio argues that faith is the paradox

      that the single individual is higher than the universal and

      that to respond to God’s call Abraham should suspend the ethical

      for the sake of his absolute duty to the Horror Religiosus.

      There is not only a teleological suspension of the ethical here

      but