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band, citizen and compassionate human being in order to carry out
his
absolute duty to God. This "teleological suspension of the ethical"
raises Abraham in Kierkegaard's eyes above tragic heroes like Aga–
memnon, Jeptha, and Brutus who sacrificed their children to the
common good. They were "tragic heroes," exalting the universal over
the particular. Abraham is no tragic hero. He must be regarded, says
Kierkegaard, as either "a murderer," from the ethical standpoint, or
a true "believer" from the standpoint of absolute religion. Kierke–
gaard's account is powerful and honest. He admits that Abraham
"acts by virtue of the absurd" and that although in ethics it
is
wrong
to subordinate the universal to the particular, in the case of one's
absolute duty to God "the particular
is
higher than the universal."
In serving God one is beyond good and evil. "Hence it is," writes
Kierkegaard, "that I can understand the tragic hero but cannot un–
derstand Abraham, though in a certain crazy sense I admire
him
more than all other men."
We can use this parable to point up the difference between the
approaches of Kierkegaard and Feuerbach. The latter would inter–
pret the story quite differently. First, he would maintain that despite
Kierkegaard there is no escaping the standpoint of morality, that we
are all responsible for our judgments, and for the consequences of
our judgments, no matter what we believe the external source of
our moral duty to be. Here the Feuerbachian view follows the Kantian
view. When Abraham, knife in hand, prepared to sacrifice Isaac, the
Biblical account says an Angel of the Lord commanded him to stay
his
hand. How did Abraham know that this message was a message from
the Lord and not from Satan, or that it was not the voice of
his
own longing, the expression of the anguished wish of a loving father
not to be bereaved of a son? The existential humanist answers that
Abraham attributes the source of this command to God, not to Satan,
because it is he who finds it good. Every statement which asserts
that the Good is what God commands presupposes that we already
have independent knowledge of what is good or bad in order to at–
tribute the good to God and the bad to Satan. The command from
the Angel of the Lord represents the birth of a new moral insight
in man, in Abraham according to which it is not necessary to sacri–
fice human life in thanksgiving to, or in fear of, the imputed author
of creation. The earlier injunction to sacrifice Isaac undoubtedly re–
flected a local religious practice.
