GOD There is undoubtedly something heroic in Abraham’s willingness to sacrifice Isaac—the son for whom he had waited eighty years, and in whom all his hope of posterity rested But in ethical terms, is not his conduct monstrous? He is willing to commit murder, to violate a father’s duty to love his son, and in the course of it to deceive those closest to him Biblical and classical literature, Kierkegaard reminds us, offers other examples of parents sacrificing their children: Agamemnon offering up Iphigenia to avert the gods’ curse on the Greek expedition to Troy, Jephtha giving up his daughter in fulfilment of a rash vow, Brutus condemning to death his treasonable sons These were all sacrifices made for the greater good of a community: they were, in ethical terms, a surrender of the individual for the sake of the universal Abraham’s sacrifice was nothing of the kind: it was a transaction between himself and God Had he been a tragic hero like the others, he would, on reaching Mount Moriah, have plunged the knife into himself rather than into Isaac Instead, Kierkegaard tells us, he stepped outside the realm of ethics altogether, and acted for the sake of an altogether higher goal Such an action Kierkegaard calls ‘the teleological suspension of the ethical’ Abraham’s act transgressed the ethical order in view of his higher end, or telos, outside it Whereas an ethical hero, such as Socrates, lays down his life for the sake of a universal moral law, Abraham’s heroism lay in his obedience to an individual divine command Moreover, his action was not just one of renunciation, like the rich young man in the gospel abandoning his wealth: a man does not have a duty to his money as he does to his son, and it was precisely in violating this duty that Abraham showed his obedience to God Was his act then sinful? If we think of every duty as being a duty to God, then undoubtedly it was But such an identification of God with duty actually empties of content the notion of duty to God himself The whole existence of the human race is rounded off completely like a sphere, and the ethical is at once its limit and its content God becomes an invisible vanishing point, a powerless thought, His power being only in the ethical which is the content of existence If in any way it might occur to any man to want to love God in any other sense, he is romantic, he loves a phantom which if it had merely the power of being able to speak, would say to him ‘I not require your love Stay where you belong’ (FT 78) 295