Abraham versus Agamemnon: The Knight of Faith versus the Tragic Hero - Assignment Example

Abraham versus Agamemnon: The Knight of Faith versus the Tragic Hero Søren Kierkegaard’s work Fear and Trembling, when published in 1843,was ascribed by the author to the pseudonymous Johannes de Silentio—and he attempted to make it clear that Silentio was not Kierkegaard. Whatever be the reasons behind this masquerade, (and Silentio was only one among a clutch of pseudonymous personae standing in, at various points in time, for their creator), the work highlights the author’s undying admiration for Abraham, the true knight of faith. This admiration is no identification—Silentio (as indeed, Kierkegaard) is under no illusion that he can make any more than a leap towards attempting to understand Abraham, aware that it would be impossible to emulate him. Moreover, he contrasts Abraham and his actions, in the context of a particular existential crisis in Abraham’s life, with several acknowledged tragic heroes and their responses to a similar situation. The point he makes is that the tragic hero’s thought and action are not as fraught with angst as those that are required of the knight of faith. Wikipedia notes that the title probably refers to Philippians 2: 12, “ . . .continue to work out your salvation with fear and trembling.” Kierkegaard examines the last two of his well-known three stages of quest—the aesthetic hero, the tragic hero, and the religious hero—and he contends that it is not humanly possible to go beyond the leap of faith required of the religious hero, the knight of faith. The ‘ethical’ is a concept relevant to all three categories, but in different ways. The aesthetic hero is rather narcissistic and not closely bound by ethical views. The tragic hero marks a progression of character in that he accepts the confines of the ethical—but does not and, perhaps, cannot go beyond the ethical. The question whether it is possible, let alone desirable, for a hero or a knight to ‘go beyond the ethical’ is answered in an interesting way by de Silentio. The ‘ethical’ is a social concept—but no theistic society can easily contradict the premise that the limits of the concept have been laid down by God rather than by Man. The rules that God has made can, presumably, be codified or modified by God with greater authority than by any man, magistrate or monarch though he may be. Silentio confines his argument to the breaking of the Sixth Commandment (codified, of course, in an age later than Abraham’s, but still relevant, after Cain)—“Thou shalt not kill”(Deut. 5:17). Numerous exceptions to this Commandment have been suggested and accepted by wisdom both divine and human. Moses himself has given detailed instructions relating to situations in which the breaking of this Commandment would be a religious as well as a social duty. It was also emphasized that in certain circumstances, the closest of kin should, dutifully, initiate, participate in, and accomplish the killing of anyone who has broken the first and most important of the Commandments (Deut. 5:7): “Thou shalt have none other Gods before me.” Society has accepted this duty to kill a guilty member of the tribe, and the hero who accepts the ethical has to accept this principle, even if it were to relate to him or to those closest to him. A man who has to sanction or command the execution of a close relation for a crime against man or God does not, per se, acquire the stature of a hero. Johannes de Silentio mentions a few individuals who can, with reason, be called tragic heroes, because of their ethical response to such situations in their lives. Brutus, the Roman Consul who gave orders that his sons be killed for crimes against the country was seen by his society as one who heroically exceeded the call of social duty, although there probably was no doubt that the accused were guilty as charged. Agamemnon is portrayed as the classic tragic hero who had, albeit reluctantly, accepted the advice of Calchas the seer to sacrifice his daughter Iphigenia, so as to ensure safe winds to guide his ship and crew into Troy. Iphigenia was guilty of nothing—nothing but being the victim of capricious gods who, according to the soothsayer, had decreed that she should be sacrificed. Agamemnon should have been acknowledged the guilty person because it was his arrogant challenge to Artemis that led to the displeasure of the goddess. However, in the context of his consenting to the sacrifice of his daughter, he is seen as someone who fulfilled his duty to his fellow men. That Artemis herself intervened to save Iphigenia by substituting a deer in her place, and that Agamemnon is cruelly murdered later, perhaps points to the gulf between human and divine conceptions of justice and the ‘ethical.’ Another ‘hero’ mentioned by de Silentio is Jephthah. He led his people (who had earlier ostracized him as an illegitimate outsider) to victory in war. He believed that only God could ensure his victory in war—and vowed that he would sacrifice to God whatever first greeted him on his victorious return home. It was, perhaps, unwise of Jephthah to have ignored the possibility that the first to greet him could be none other than the apple of his eye, his one and only daughter. It turns out that he has, with the utmost reluctance, to fulfil his oath by sacrificing his precious daughter. She accepts, with grief, that her father has to keep his promise to the Lord—she only asks for two months time to bewail her virginity with her friends. Isn’t she more of a tragic hero/ine than her father? Silentio does not need to raise this question because he knows the reader will. Against these heroes Silentio places the picture of a man who had captured his imagination and his admiration from early childhood—Abraham, the father of God’s chosen people. God chose Abraham to be the father of a mighty race—of a people like the sand of the seashore or the stars of the sky in multitude. Abraham never doubted the word of God, although Sarah, his wife, is said to have laughed up her sleeve when this story was told her even after she had passed, as she believed, the age of childbearing. Abraham continued to wait, never doubting the word of God, till he became the father of Isaac by Sarah when he was seventy. God had told Abraham about the multitude of his seed, and Abraham never doubted, that he would, through Isaac, become the great Patriarch that he did become. And he took great pleasure in this son of his old age. It was then—Silentio notes that Abraham was a hundred years old—that God ‘tempted’ him. He was asked to take his beloved son Isaac and to undertake the three and a half day journey to Mount Moriah—to sacrifice Isaac to the Lord there. Satan is the proverbial ‘Tempter’—but here the word is used to describe an action or command of God’s. Silentio makes clear the difference. When Satan tempts, the temptation to do the sinful action would be in conformity with the inclination of the tempted person. When God ‘tempts’, the human inclination would be towards the contrary action. And that would be the test. Abraham, however, needs no test. He knows what God wants him to do, and he will do it because he knows that it is his God who has required it of him. Since the person in question is his beloved Isaac, he does try to think of alternatives that could release him from this most painful of duties. God does not budge—God requires specifically the sacrifice of Isaac—the beloved son of Abraham’s old age, the light of Sarah’s life and his. Abraham knows that he should, indeed, that he will, accept the task God has given him. In that moment he makes the movement of infinite resignation or resolve. Silentio raises the question of the “teleological suspension of the ethical” in this context. None of the exceptions to the Sixth Commandment would apply to Abraham’s intention to kill Isaac, in the eyes of ethical society. If, like the typical tragic hero, Abraham were to consider himself bound to the ethical, it would not be possible for him to obey God’s specific command to him, to Abraham as an individual. Silentio justifies Abraham’s individualism in these words at the conclusion of the body of his essay, prior to the epilogue: “So either there is a paradox, that the individual as the individual stands in an absolute relation to the absolute/ or Abraham is lost.” Before the absolute, the individual should stand as absolute individual, not as the universal representative social/ethical figure. Abraham’s duty is to God and to himself, not to the ethical mores of the time, or even to those closest to him. Silentio is particularly impressed by the quality of Abraham’s silence. The tragic hero can express himself in words that express the depth of his feelings, in words that will assuage his feelings and those of others, in words that will make it easier for other people to assuage his feelings and theirs—but the knight of faith does not have recourse to that comfort. The knight of faith has the capacity to speak with as much eloquence as the tragic hero, but he has to be silent. His burden is an individual burden, and it is ineffable. If Abraham were to speak—to Sarah, to Isaac, or even to his servant Eleazar—they wouldn’t understand him, and his words to them or their words to him would break him and his faith. So Abraham maintains a silence that is unbroken except in answer to a question raised by Isaac. Isaac expressed his wonder at the fact that although everything else had been made ready for the sacrifice, there was no animal to be seen. Abraham replied, in surely an uncharacteristically laconic manner that God would provide the lamb. Silentio feels that Abraham’s leap of faith could have been made at this point. He hopes against all hope for the absurd solution—for with God the absurd or anything is possible. He becomes the knight of faith and is rewarded with the renewed promise of the Lord to assure him that he would, through Isaac be the Patriarch of a great and vast multitude of people. He is not only personally rewarded—he regains Isaac and gains the promise of greater glory for himself and his seed—but through him a Lamb is provided by God, in the conception of Christianity, to save the world from the narrow bounds of ethics and sin. Agamemnon, the tragic hero, activated by social consciousness, only lapses into greater tragedy after a purely temporary reprieve. His heroism and that of his society of fighters is crowned with victory but the victory is no more than Pyrrhic, accompanied as it was by all-round death and destruction on the field of battle, and followed as it was by his own tragic death and the tragic deaths of many other fellows of his ethical society, away from the battlefield. Abraham, on the other hand stood alone, as individual in relation to the absolute and to the other individuals closest to him, and gained an everlasting prize for all individuals. The tragic hero, even Socrates the intellectual tragic hero, can gain no greater prize for society than this. That is a feat that can only be attributed to the knight of faith. References The Holy Bible. King James Version. De Silentio, J. (1999). Fear and Trembling by Johannes de Silentio, 1843 (alias Søren Kierekegaard). Retrieved April 3, 2006, from Yggdrasil’s WN Library Web site: http://home.ddc.net/ygg/etext/fear.htm. Encyclopedia Mythica contributors (2005). Agamemnon. Encyclopedia Mythica. Retrieved April 03, 2006, from Encyclopedia Mythica Online. http://www.pantheon.org/articles/a/agamemnon.html Wikipedia contributors (2006). Fear and Trembling. Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Retrieved April 3, 2006, from Wikipedia’s Web site: http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Fear_and_Trembling&oldid=46481497. Storm, D.A. (2006). D. Anthony Storm’s Commentary on Kierkegaard. Retrieved April 3, 2006, from Web site: http://www.sorenkierkegaard.org/. Read More