True Fear, False Trembling

1.
In 1843, the Danish philosopher Soren Kierkegaard wrote a book entitled Fear and Trembling.  The primary focus of the book is the story of Abraham's attempted sacrifice of his son Isaac on Mount Moriah (Genesis 22), known in the Jewish tradition as the Akedah.  Kierkegaard begins his analysis by noting that sacrificing one's own son, or any innocent person for that matter, is unethical.  In the normal course of affairs, if someone asked you or told you to kill your own child or some other random person, you would of course reject that request.  In fact, you would be obligated, by any reasonable moral framework, to reject that request.  Your ethical duty is clear, and it says that you must not kill an innocent child.

But, in the Akedah, it is God who commands Abraham to kill Isaac.  As the creator of the universe and the ground of all being, God is generally seen as the ultimate source for all moral analysis.  If God is the ultimate measuring stick for what is moral, then there is an argument that anything that God commands is per se moral, and so there can never be a truly unethical act so long as it is following God's commands.  Kierkegaard wrestles with this idea (expressed by Hegel), but ultimately rejects it.  No, Kierkegaard says, killing an innocent child is unethical, full stop.  Instead, Kierkegaard argues that God's command to Abraham reflects what he calls the "teleological suspension of the ethical."  The duty to follow God's commands "suspends" the otherwise binding ethical duties, but it does not eliminate them or retroactively make the unethical ethical.  In this teleological suspension of the ethical, in this anxious conflict between ethics and divine command, Kierkegaard argues that true faith is found.  Abraham was, in Kierkegaard's reading, willing to do a thing he knew was wrong because God command him to do so, and in that willingness we find the ultimate expression of faith in God.

Now, there are other ways of reading the Akedah than the one offered by Kierkegaard--more on that in a bit.  But when I first read Fear and Trembling back when I was in the Dominicans, I was very much bothered by this idea of the teleological suspension of the ethical, and by extension bothered by the Akedah (which I hadn't really given much thought to prior to reading the book).  Notwithstanding a bunch of characteristic hand-wringing and angst, Kierkegaard ultimately endorses blind obedience to divine commands. . . . or what is perceived to be divine commands.  As someone who was wrestling with the idea of obedience to a church institution that claimed to speak for God, I was not prepared to accept the idea that I should abandon my own internal sense of right and wrong in favor of some teleological obligation.

My objections to the conclusion of Fear and Trembling have only grown louder and more insistent since then. 

2.
I never really believed it.  Not really.

I've told the story before of my act of resistance as an 8th Grader in religion class when encountering the pro-life activist.  As 8th Grade turned into high school, which turned into college, which turned into my time with the Dominicans, I encountered many, many more pro-life activists and a much more dedicated pro-life environment.  I jumped into that world willingly, to the point of stepping forward to volunteer as an ordained representative of the faith.  So, given the hardcore focus on the abortion issue in the life of the Roman Catholic Church, one who was aware of the incident in 8th Grade might presume that my views on the subject had changed.

Not really.

There were periods of time when I believed in the teaching authority of the Roman Catholic Church so much that I felt I had no choice but to concede as a formal matter that they must be correct in saying that life begins at conception.  I had no intellectual basis or framework to dispute that conclusion.  But was I personally convicted of the truth of that claim?  Did I feel comfortable with it on a visceral, emotional level?  No.  The abortion position, even at my most hardcore, was something that was shunted off to the "well, I guess I have to accept this whole package" category, along with things like LGBT issues.

The only person who ever pressed me on this question was my friend Jason.  Jason and I became friends in college, and we did (and still do) have far-ranging philosophical and moral discussions.  Based on our conversations, I know Jason was well aware that I was faking at endorsing the pro-life cause, but he was too polite, and too good of a friend, to call me out publicly.  Everyone else just made assumptions based on what they expected from me.  People who knew me as a Roman Catholic and then former seminarian assumed I was pro-life; people who knew me in other contexts (such as, say, law school) may have assumed I was not.

Frankly, I was well aware of this dichotomy, and intentionally encouraged folks to see what they wanted to see.  Such an intentional ambiguity represented the best of all possible worlds.  I could walk in Roman Catholic circles without penalty, and yet also walk in liberal social circles without penalty as well.  Plus, and this cannot be underestimated even if I was not necessarily consciously aware of it at the time, I knew deep down that there never would be any consequences for me on this issue no matter where I was located.  This privilege to speak without consequences comes first and foremost as a man who will never have to go through a pregnancy or an abortion, but also as someone with a high level of resources--educational, financial, and cultural.  If I found myself in a situation with a loved one where this issue came up, I would always be able to facilitate whatever decision seemed best at the time, without reference to any previously stated position.  None of this discussion would ever have any social consequences, no matter what I did or said.

I am not particularly proud of being in this particular place for a rather long period of time.  While it is true that I did not have a full understanding of what I was doing, it is nevertheless a failure of integrity to consciously exploit the possibility of a non-position position like this.  My recent willingness to acknowledge that I do not accept the view that fetal life should be treated in the same manner as a born child is, whatever you think of that position, a move toward greater personal integrity, as I never really believed that fetal life was conceptually indistinguishable from a newborn.  The integrity comes in being true to my own conscience and moral intuition.

But as sub-optimal as it is to intentionally exist in that non-position position space, I never went to the full teleological suspension of the ethical.  I never allowed the outside judgment, presented as a divine command, to wipe away my own internal sense of the issue.  Whatever dissembling I did in public, I basically held on to what I really believed, even if I didn't take the time to fully work through it and process it and organize it and explain it.

I don't say that as some sort of boast or a claim that I am a moral superhero.  I'm not entirely sure why I never just fully accepted what I was being told on this issue.  But I never did.  I always held to my own sense of the ethical.

3.
Now, some of you might be saying, "your sense of the ethical is wrong on the abortion question, so what's the point?"  Obviously I don't believe that, but let's stipulate that you are right and that I am wrong about abortion.  I have come to believe that holding to your own sense of the ethical, even if your sense of the ethical is wrong or misinformed, is still better than suspending the ethical and going along with the purported divine command.  I have come to believe, in keeping with Aristotle and the scholastic tradition, that virtue--that internalized sense of right and wrong--is fundamentally a learned activity.  Like exercise, the more you strain your virtue muscles to hold on to some principle, especially in the face of resistance, the stronger those muscles will be.  Holding to what you believe to be virtue is work, and you must consciously develop the strength to be able to do that work.  By contrast, if you just foist your moral judgment off on some Other, those muscles will atrophy.  And, if you find yourself in a position where the Other has lost its way, or is not really the pure teleological voice you thought it was, then you will be left with no choice but to follow along with what it is telling you.  

Said another way, it's better to be strong in conscience and your own internal sense of virtue and wrong on the merits, than to be weak and reliant on outside marker of right and wrong, even if you think that outside marker is right.  Conscience that is your own and well fortified can be tweaked and improved and developed in response to new information and arguments.  But if you let it go to mush, then it is very hard to ever get back, and then you are at the whim of whatever Other you happen to be following.  You will go along with whatever it tells you, because you no longer have the faculty to do anything else.

4.
All of this is a prelude for what prompted this post, and that is the unending revelations of sexual misconduct generally and the Roy Moore story specifically.  But, actually, I am less interested in the people doing the horrible, abusive actions than the people defending those actions.




The responses from Riley Seibenhener and William Blocker are a good example of the teleological suspension of the ethical.  Here, we have a political teleology, a divine command to ensure that one party triumphs over another in a contested election.  This teleological command overcomes any sense of the ethical--notice that these individuals never attempt to argue that Moore is innocent of the charges.  Like Abraham in Kierkegaard's telling, they know what Moore did was wrong, and thus by extension they know that they are wrong for supporting and endorsing such a person.  But the higher law requires them to look beyond such ethical concerns in favor of the "bigger picture."

This is what happens when people don't exercise the muscles of individual conscience and virtue, and off-load the hard work or moral decision-making onto a pre-set ideological framework.  And this is not in any way a problem that is unique to the Alabama GOP.  Whatever your teleology is, whether religious or political or cultural or business or career or what have you, the teleological suspension of the ethical works the same way in a functional sense.  The more you rely on some external metric that sets what is right and wrong, important and not important, the less you become able to do anything other than rely on that metric.  Even if that metric pushes you toward insane or nonsensical conclusions.

The more you are willing to engage in the teleological suspension of the ethical, the easier it is to do it again.  Pretty soon, you won't even notice what is ethical and what is not as you become consumed with the teleological.  In a way, eventually, if you listen to Kierkegaard's advice, the existential conflict that he points to will take care of itself.

Roy Moore is for GOP the political equivalent of the Akedah.  They are being asked to sacrifice every ethical principle in a holocaust, at the command of a divine power that they can't even really name, and yet apparently utterly compelled to obey.  And it doesn't seem like any angel of the Lord is going to come to stay their hand.

5.

Christian commentary on the Akedah is mostly bad.  To the extent they engage with it at all, the majority of it narrowly reads the story as a pre-figuring of the Cross.  In doing so, the Akedah tends to promote substitutionary understandings of the Cross--the Akedah shows that God is not per se unwilling to order an innocent son to be sacrificed, and that principle is definitively demonstrated on Calvary.

Jewish commentary is far more willing to wrestle with the text and its difficulties, it seems to me.  There is a line of Jewish commentary (though, certainly not the only one) that sees the test of Abraham as primarily ethical, and one that Abraham failed.  Just as Abraham argued with God for the lives of the people of Sodom and Gomorrah (see Genesis 18), Abraham was supposed to argue with God for the life of his son.  

But there is another approach that reads the passage as a test of Abraham's faith in the ultimate righteousness of God.  In verse 7, Isaac asks his father the very reasonable question of "where's the animal for the sacrifice?"  Abraham's response in verse 8, that "God himself will provide the lamb for a burnt-offering, my son," is taken in this reading at face value--Abraham had faith that God would ultimately provide a way out of this impossible conundrum at the last moment.  Which is of course what happens in verse 13 after the angel of the Lord calls out to Abraham.  Abraham's faith was not found in some unthinking acceptance of divine commands, but in a belief that in the end God would "make a way out of no way," to use the phrase common in African-American Christianity.  Abraham's faith, in this reading, was grounded in the idea that God would never actually require him to engage in the teleological suspension of the ethical, notwithstanding what seemed to be an unambiguous command to do so.

It is this reading of the Akedah that moves it for me from a horror story to one of great comfort.  Abraham heard what he believed to be a divine command telling him to set aside everything he loved and everything he knew to be right, in order to appease a senseless and incomprehensible deity.  Whatever his outward impression, he knew deep down that he could never, and would never, do such a thing.  It would have been understandable, even reasonable, to just walk away from this God with his seemingly monstrous commands, to become the moral "lone ranger" that is in some ways held up in our culture as the true moral super hero.  But Abraham doesn't do that either--he walks along the road that he believes God has set out for him, but yet holding to both a belief in, and a committment that, that he will never go through with this monstrous act.  God will make a way, but if God doesn't, I will make that way myself.  Abraham holds back; he reserves a place within himself that contains an unshakable core that is resistant even to what appears to be divine command.

This holding back, this creation of internal space--I think that is where true faith is to be found.  We can only truly love and trust God if we have prepared a place within ourselves that is beyond even God's command.  We need this, not ultimately to protect us from God, but to protect us from our flawed and dangerous assumptions about God and what God is telling us.  Or, worse, from the flawed and dangerous entities and organizations that might as well be God in our lives, whether its a cause or an agenda or money or success or any other sort of idol.

As I said above, I take no credit for holding on to my doubts on the abortion question in spite of the concerted efforts to push me toward the opposite conclusion.  But I am now definitely grateful for it, whatever its source or origin.  Whatever dissembling I may have done, I held on to a personal sense of what I believed to be right, and a sense of resistance to what I was being told was right.  It was exercise for the muscles of conscience--perhaps not the most serious or intense exercise I could have been doing, but exercise nonetheless.  It reflected a certain skepticism about what I was being told, and it resulted in the development of that bit of internal space that Abraham found in one particular reading of the Akedah.  It was a blessing for me and my spiritual development, even if I come later to have a different view on the abortion question.

Kierkegaard's notion of the teleological suspension of the ethical is dangerous because we are far, far too credulous about what is truly the teleological.  It is far, far too easy for us to just accept at face value some external command or program as having transcendent significance. Part of us wants to turn over the hard work of keeping an internalized moral compass to someone or something else.  We have to fight the voices telling us to set aside our own lines that we shouldn't cross.  We may walk to the line, as Abraham did.  We may wait for God to make a way out of no way, as Abraham did.  But in the singular moment before the decisive act, when we are forced to choose between the dictates of an outside entity, even an outside entity that purports to operate under divine sanction, and that of our own conscience, the correct answer is always to trust our own conscience.  Whatever the flaws and limitations of our conscience, we are better trusting that metric than some outside source.

The notion of the teleological suspension of the ethical is simply too dangerous to be lauded.  Too much blood, too many horrors, too many fundamentally good people have been slowly sucked into abominations because they offloaded their moral compass onto an outside source, and then found they couldn't get it back again.

Teleological suspension of the ethical is not the doorway to true faith.  It's the doorway to the Abyss.

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