There are two kinds of people in this world. Slaves to circumstances and slaves to ideals, in religious terms we might call them slaves to sin and slaves to the law. The Slave to Circumstances lives his life in the immediate. When things go his way, he is happy. When things don't go his way, he is sad or angry or whatever. He lives his life like a boat carried by the waves and he is wherever they go. When I say the immediate, I don't mean that he doesn't make plans or have goals, maybe even "spiritual" goals, but his thoughts are all consumed with obtaining good and avoiding bad, meaning good circumstances and bad circumstances. Good things and bad things, good places and bad places, good people and bad people. Using good to refer to things that please us or make us happy and bad to refer to those which fail to do so. In other words, making ourselves the standard by which the world is judged.
I have looked down my nose at the Slave to Circumstance for a long time. You see, by the power of ideals, the concept of right and wrong, of justice, of appropriateness we can free ourselves from our circumstances. When something makes me unhappy, I can comfort myself with the knowledge that even if it doesn't please me it is right. I can sink all of my pain in the knowledge that a good God rules the universe and makes all wrongs right. And I mistake that for faith. The eternal is a pretty good comfort for the loss of the temporary.
And that is the way the world goes. The slaves of sin are carried about on their miserable destiny and the slaves of the law look and say "I thank you God that I am not a sinner like this publican." And as far as they go they are right. Slavery to the law is infinitely preferable to slavery to anything else. At least the law is just and good and holy. It will always look out for what is best for everybody and when that isn't what is best for me I can comfort myself by what Kierkegaard calls letting the particular(myself, my feelings, my good) find its expression in the universal(what is good for everybody). I can be happy under the law, as long as I am content to be happy in this way. I can watch the good things in my life go away and I can have peace and comfort.
And there is basically nothing in the world to contradict what I have said. Only a few tiny objections remain to be disposed of by the Slaves to Ideals and we can all go to our own Hells peacefully and quietly. If only Isaac hadn't come down from that mountain.
When someone chooses to follow the Way of the Law, they need to understand that it is the way of deadness, of sacrifice in the literal sense of killing. First the law killed my pain, then it killed my sadness, then it killed my happiness, then it killed my joy. I am left with a still deadness in the core of my soul, as ultimately I became dead to the law. Eventually the Way of the Law will require me to be dead to my family and even dead to myself. This might seem strange but the Way of the Law is the way of sacrificing the less for the greater. I sacrifice happiness for goodness, fun for peace, friendship for truth, my will for God's will, eventually I walk straight into Hell content that it is where I belong, having felt my sinfulness to its utter depths. When I say I do these things, understand that that is eternity's perspective. I can do these things if I have the courage to walk the Way of the Law. But when we see that the last term is the sacrifice of ourselves, we must learn from this that to follow the Law requires ALL that is in a man. There is nothing left to do anything else. I believe it was Robert E. Lee who said, "Do your duty. You cannot do more. You should not wish to do less."
And so we explain everything in the world with a few principles. And are left with a single unexplainable prodigy, a miracle in the fullest sense of the word, when Abraham gets Isaac back.
I haven't gone that far, who has but Abraham? But anyone who has sacrificed for the Law can imagine what it would be like. To sacrifice what is loved for something that is greater is a path I know very well. If Abraham had murdered Isaac, had sacrificed not only his love and his son, but his righteousness, his justification by murdering his own son the Slaves of the Law could well admire him. He would be the greatest of us. To sacrifice even justification because it is God's will is the highest expression of the ethical. As I said before, it is to walk into Hell with a just contentment. It would be on a level with Paul who would give up his own salvation for the salvation of his countrymen. But what actually happened I can't understand. I can't admire. I can't even accept.
"Resignation[what I have called the Way of the Law] by itself does not require faith. It has only to comply with the eternal. It renounces, but does not gain. Faith, however, does not renounce anything. On the contrary, in faith I receive everything. Herein lies the crucial difference. It takes a purely human courage to renounce the world of temporality in order to win eternity; but it takes a humble and paradoxical courage to take hold of what is temporal and to do so for the sake of the eternal. That courage is the courage of faith. Through faith Abraham did not renounce his claim on Isaac. No, through his faith he received Isaac"
So we have seen that the highest and best a person can reach is slavery to the Law, to eternal ideals. And I want to point out again, that slavery to a good and righteous master is far preferable to the situation most of us are in. And slavery to an eternal good doesn't sound so bad at all. But the Slave of the Law has to give himself entirely to that Law. There is nothing left. It requires all of his heart and soul and mind every second of every day. Therefore faith is a paradox. It is just when Abraham is saying with his whole heart and soul, "I will plunge this knife into Isaac." that he does something more. He says, "But I will get him back, even from the dead." But he can't. Every part of him is strained to the breaking point just to be a slave to the law, and at that moment the unthinkable occurs. There is something else, some alien presence, which is Abraham and is not. It is Abraham because it is his very heart, the true core of his being, that believes and not another, but it is not because if it was Abraham, that is any man, it would have to subject itself to the Law, it would be under the curse.
If there is one thing that we are certain of it is that dead men do not rise. The thought doesn't even occur to us. If I were to suggest that you might see one of your loved ones who has passed on today, not "in Heaven" not in a dream or whatever but walking down the street like everything is normal. I think you would freak out. You would probably be pissed off at me. It takes the distance of two or three thousand years and oceans of ink to make resurrection seem anything less than earth shattering. It might be the closest thing to a thought that our minds can't think that has ever been found. And so, when reason can find no place for hope, when like Abraham on Mount Moriah good has turned to evil, when God commands murder, when all the world is truly upside down, then and perhaps only then, are we ready for the foolishness of faith.
jc
When Christianity came into the world the task was simply to preach. Among “Christian nations,” however, the situation is different. What we have before us is not Christianity but a prodigious illusion, the people are not pagans but live in the blissful conceit that they are Christians. So if in this situation Christianity is to be introduced, first of all the illusion must be debunked. But since this vain conceit, this illusion, is to the effect that we are all Christians, it looks indeed as if introducing Christianity amounts to taking Christianity away. Nevertheless this is precisely what must be done, for the illusion must go.
--All quotations are from S. Kierkegaard, mostly from Fear and Trembling, which to a great extent is the inspiration for this post, the other quotes I will not trace their source right now.
