Agape and Personhood. David L. Goicoechea

of the teleological for Abraham

      faces the loss of all meaning as God becomes self-contradictory.

      In his duty to the Mysterium Tremendum of the Holy, Abraham

      is willing to be tried and tested by God believing all the while that

      God will suspend his own command or He will no longer be God.

      Silentio further eulogizes Abraham by comparing him to Mary.

      She needs worldly admiration as little as Abraham needs tears

      for she is no heroine and he was no hero,

       but both of them became greater than these,

       not by being exempted in any way

      from the distress and the agony and the paradox,

       but became greater by means of these. (65)

      When you read Silentio’s treatment of Abraham you see no

      difference between Abraham and the God-man and that is why

      Kierkegaard does not sign his name to this deceptive writing

      which makes no distinction between the elder and younger brother.

      II.2.7 Loving Abraham as More Important

      In Works of Love after showing how love is a matter of conscience

      Kierkegaard writes a chapter on “The Duty to Love the People We See.”

      This takes us right to the heart of our duty to so love Love

      that in praising Love we will be able to love each and every person.

      To cultivate the conscience that sees why I should love every person

      is the main point of Problemata II in which Silentio in order

      to comprehend Abraham goes to Luke’s hard saying:

      If anyone comes to me and does not hate

      his father and mother and wife and children

      and brothers and sisters, yes, and even his own life,

      he cannot be my disciple. (Luke 14:26; see Problemata II, 72)

      Abraham is pictured here as living out this highest command.

      Kierkegaard through Silentio seems to love Abraham as even

      more important than Jesus because Abraham seems to have been

      the first to practice this strange love that hates in order to follow.

      So what is this hard saying about hating each person we meet

      in order to love them all about in its absurd paradoxical way?

      Kierkegaard explains his usage of it in Works of Love by

      showing why the Christian is called to love the enemy and to hate

      the beloved and by explaining how the first depends on the second.

      When I love my child, my friend, my beloved with the emphasis

      on the my, I love with a preferential self love that I need to

      suspend with infinite resignation if I am truly to love every

      other person as they are in themselves and not as I see them.

      So this hard saying is part of the cultivation process in which

      I can come to love all persons in the very value of their personhood.

      In accord with Kierkegaard’s existential dialectic after I stop

      loving my beloved absolutely and I come to love Love absolutely

      the I can love all persons as persons and then love my

      beloved relatively in all of his or her unique differences.

      According to Silentio Abraham is already called upon to do this.

      II.2.8 The Abrahamic Blessing for All Peoples

      Kierkegaard’s understanding of the strategy of the highest love

      that is the gift and task to reconcile all peoples should let

      the prodigal son, Jesus, go out to the elder brother, Socrates, the Greek,

      and Abraham, the Jew, and begin by loving them as more important.

      Just as Socrates in Søren ’s mind would nobly come to love Jesus

      as more important in return so could Abraham also do that.

      Abraham believes that the promise of being a blessing for all peoples

      can be fulfilled through Isaac and his offspring and Jesus

      could be the key person in that family line for blessing all peoples.

      Silentio treats Abraham and Jesus as the same for the reader

      could think that Abraham’s double movement leap is the same

      as that of the God-man who as eternal came into the finite flesh.

      They do both have universalist intentions even though in Jesus’

      case the Son is sacrificed for every single individual person,

      whereas in Abraham’s Isaac is not sacrificed for all peoples.

      In Problemata III it is asked if it was ethically defensible

      for Abraham to conceal his understanding from his family.

      The main point is that Abraham did not have any certain understanding.

      He acted as if he would sacrifice Isaac and believed as if he would not.

      Abraham is trapped in a double bind that calls for the double

      movement leap of faith and that makes him higher than other

      heroes such as Agamemnon, Brutus, and Jephte who

      did sacrifice their children for very clear teleological reasons.

      They were Knights of Infinite Resignation, not Knights of Faith.

      Silentio’s Abraham is already being loved as a blessing for the peoples

      by helping us to love the girl and the young swain, Ephigenia in Aulis,

      Aristotle’s bride and bridegroom, Axel and Valborg, Queen Elizabeth,

      Agnes and Merman, Sara and Tobias, and Gretchen and Faust.

      We must love Abraham as more important for he is greater than these.

      II.2.9 Loving the God-Man as More Important

      This pseudonym, Johannes de Silentio, is being used by Kierkegaard

      to deceive us out of our self-deceit into the truth and he tells us

      in the Epilogue at the end of Fear and Trembling the truth is that

      the highest passion in a person is faith and faith is:

      an honest earnestness that fearlessly

      and incorruptibly points to the tasks

      an honest earnestness

      that lovingly maintains the tasks

      that does not disquiet people into wanting

      to attain the highest too hastily

      but keep the tasks young’

      and beautiful and lovely to look at

      inviting to all and yet also difficult

      and inspiring to the noble mind. (121)

      Our highest passion is faith in the gift and task of reconciliation.

      We can spend our life on this or we can become