One of the great religious influences of the 20th century has been the rediscovery of the writings of Soren Kierkegaard. He has had a profound influence on such men as Karl Jaspers, Paul Tillich, and Reinhold Niebuhr, and he constitutes one of the primary sources of contemporary “crisis theology,” which emphasizes man’s insignificance and disabilities as contrasted with God’s all-powerful grace. Although “crisis theology” has been predominantly Protestant in its orientation, it has affected—to one extent or another—such diverse religious philosophers as the Catholic Étienne Gilson and the Jew Martin Buber. Generally speaking, however, Judaism has kept itself apart from this trend. In this article, Joseph H. Gumbiner attempts to define what he considers to be the basic Jewish attitude toward the beliefs of “crisis theology” as represented in Kierkegaard’s thought.
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One of the more agreeable novelties of these dreary times is the series of interfaith meetings that go on in every American city, reaching their climax during Brotherhood Week. Agreeable in their intentions, that is, for the sad fact must be recorded that they are generally flaccid in form and vacuous in content. Why is this so? Is it because of the unpalatable (to some palates, anyway) truth that actually the areas of disagreement between Judaism and Christianity are infinitely greater than the constantly asserted areas of agreement? When you disagree on so much and agree on so little, and your comments must be made in accents of perfect harmony and brotherly cooperation, on such occasions conversation must inevitably seem a lost art.
I discovered this for myself while traveling on my favorite train: the Yazoo and Mississippi Valley. The Yazoo and Mississippi is an Existentialist railway. That it exists in anxiety is proclaimed by long, throaty blasts sounded on the whistle as it jolts along towards each crossing. It makes the traveler conscious of the temporality of life by its habitual violation of the timetable. The round, honest face of its black engine reminds us of the time when machinery, before its refinement in the atomic warhead, was amenable to human purpose. The Yazoo and Mississippi Valley evokes the romantic nostalgia of contemporary men who long for a past time when the individual existed and counted for something.
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It was on such a train, happily bouncing along the Confederate roadbed through the South, that I read my first Existentialist book: Fear and Trembling, by Soren Kierkegaard. Since this volume by the eminent father of modern religious Existentialism was written in the form of a commentary on our akeda story of Genesis, chapter 22, I anticipated finding a great deal of homiletical material within its pages. When I had finished reading Kierkegaard’s drosh, when I had begun to realize what the Existentialist thinker had made of our father Abraham, I knew that brotherhood meetings would never regain their former innocence for me. I knew that on all such occasions I would be sorely tempted to rise out of turn, and say: “I am a descendant of the much maligned Pharisees. I too exist. I too am anxious. But I want to speak, not about our little areas of agreement, but about the deep chasm separating the Christian heresy from the pure ethical religion of Judaism.”
Of course, people who speak that way are not invited to interfaith gatherings in the first place.
In January of 1947, Will Herberg asked, in an article in COMMENARY, for a reconstruction of Jewish theology. I am not the man to give it to him, and, what is worse, I don’t know who can. But I share his insistence that this is the greatest intellectual need of our time and place: a reconstruction of Jewish theology, in literate English style, not written for Sunday school, but illustrating the complexity of Jewish tradition, and al the same time lighting up the highway, the main line of communication between God and man in Judaism. A late teacher of Jewish history at the Hebrew Union College used to say: “A volume that is brief but complete, well written, containing excellent notes and bibliography, an authoritative work in its field . . . such a book—such a book we don’t have.” Our failure to have this book is the most serious indictment that could be brought against contemporary Jewish scholars. The leaders of our seminaries are very busy: they must raise money, they write texts for Sunday school, they lecture at brotherhood meetings. Judaism remains an unknown discipline.
Possibly the following reflections, which are an effort to define the relationship of Judaism and Christian Existentialist thought as manifested in Kierkegaard and current “crisis theology,” may suggest a few chapter headings for such a work on Jewish theology.
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Soren Kierkegaard (1813-55), the 19th century Dame who has been called the greatest thinker in Protestant Christianity since the days of the Reformation, inhabited an intellectual climate filled with the fair weather of Hegelian mediation. What was, was good; provided that it could be defined and understood by Hegel; and provided that it was part of the upward spiral which culminated in the perfection of the Prussian state. Against this infinite capacity for effecting synthesis, Kierkegaard raised the storm signals of stringent disjunctives. Starting with man’s existence as an interested being in need, Kierkegaard asserted that the various spheres of life stood in absolute opposition to each other.
Man’s quest for certainty may lead him to construct its illusion out of the passion of his immediate moods. In that case he lives on the level of the aesthetic. He may build such an illusory certitude out of the universal abstractions of the intellect, in which case he lives on the level of the ethical. According to Kierkegaard, there is an absolute disjunction between the aesthetic and ethical, both of which are something other than the religious.
Only the believer has the ability to make the religious choice, not between good and evil, but “the choice whereby one chooses good and evil or excludes them.” This choice can be made only through the category of faith, which is separate from and transcends both the aesthetic and the ethical. Faith is the highest passion of the soul. Through faith we come to understand and accept what is the fundamental thesis of Fear and Trembling: “the teleological suspension of the ethical.” This means that God, for purposes not disclosed, makes an absolute demand on the individual. This demand suspends or sets aside the universal imperatives of ethics, which have their source in human experience and the human mind. God’s demand may be in keeping with our ethical evolution, it may be unethical, it may even be anti-ethical. The man of faith awaits this demand, appropriates it with subjective passion, and obeys.
Such, we learn, was the case with Abraham. The normal ethical relationship between father and son was set aside by the divine command that Isaac be burnt as a sacrifice. Abraham is treated as a mythological character to show the essential nature of the knight of faith. No reference is made to the historical purpose of the akeda story, which is a prophetic tract designed to show that God does not demand and will not accept the sacrifice of a child.
Most scholars accept this conclusion of higher criticism for several cogent reasons. We know the approximate date of the composition of this narrative in the northern kingdom of Israel. The Bible itself yields ample evidence of the introduction, at this time, of foreign elements into the popular religious life of the kingdoms, even mentioning child sacrifice in the case of two kings: Ahaz and Manasseh. The prophetic party met this situation with the most strenuous opposition. Indeed, the attack on sacrifice in general is one of the major themes of the prophetic message. Here in the story of Abraham and Isaac we have a literary treatment of the same theme. Kierkegaard seizes upon the form of the narrative. He ignores the purpose of the author.
For Kierkegaard the locus of the ethical is in the will of the individual. As he observes in his book Either/Or: “I should like to say that in making a choice it is not so much a question of choosing the right as of the energy, the earnestness, the pathos with which one chooses. Thereby the personality announces its inner infinity, and thereby, in turn, the personality is consolidated . . . . As soon as one can get a man to stand at the crossroads in such a position that there is no recourse but to choose, he will choose the right.” It is thus the form, the manner of choosing, which is of greatest import in ethical decision. What effect the choice will have, what the consequences will be, is of minor significance to Kierkegaard. (It is of interest to note, on the other hand, that in the atheistic Existentialist thought of Jean-Paul Sartre, ethical consequence occupies a position of prominence.)
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For Kierkegaard, then, faith is higher than the universal ethical, even as the ethical stands above the aesthetic. Now, what is the nature of this faith? It is, of course, Christian faith. This came as no surprise to me as I rode along in the care-full railway coach. Kierkegaard attacked “Christendom” but his personal status as a Christian (or at least as a man who lived in daily dread lest God reach down, take him by the scruff of the neck, and make him a Christian) was never in doubt. Neither. should the nature of Christian faith have come as a surprise to me. Perhaps the interfaith meetings had glossed over the one central concept of Christianity: faith in the Jewish man, Jesus, as God’s only begotten son. Was it because of the annual stress on areas of agreement that I had pushed the whole business to the back of my mind: the brief appearance of God on earth in time; the vicarious atonement which destroyed individual responsibility; the elimination of Torah, which meant the removal of sound correctives for man’s propensity towards sin; and the whole mistaken notion of justification by faith and divine election?
Whatever the cause for failing to emphasize these fundamental concepts, they are still the basis of Christian faith. As Kierkegaard himself writes in his major work, Concluding Unscientific Postscript: “The absurd is precisely by its objective repulsion the measure of the intensity of faith in inwardness . . . . For the absurd is the object of faith, and the only object that can be believed.” The Christian paradox is admitted to be absurd intellectually. That is precisely why it is held as the only proper object of faith.
It is characteristic of this interpretation of religion that communication between God and man is one way. The transcendent God breaks through to man in revelation. Man is the recipient of God’s love and judgment in the form of agapé. There is little room here for immanence, for the upsurge of man’s spirit in aspiration, for the love of God known as eros. Man can do nothing by himself. When confronted by God’s demand, man’s will is set aside, and religion supersedes ethics.
Following this tradition, there is no reason to assume that God’s revelation will show an upward ethical way. This leads to the disjunction between faith and works. Even when the divine demand seems to violate previous revelations of an ethical nature, it must be unquestionably accepted and obeyed. Whatever else his many-faceted writing may mean, Franz Kafka has made interesting use of this viewpoint in his great novel The Castle. Directives come to the village from the castle. Sometimes they are in accord with human ethical understanding, sometimes they are cast in the form of practical jokes, sometimes they violate all human canons of decency.
Religious faith is thus divorced from ethical conduct. An outstanding exponent of contemporary “crisis theology,” Emil Brunner, writes of the nature of God’s love that “it follows that the new ethic can equally well be spoken of as a doing away with every ethic.” This explains why it is so difficult to smuggle the social gospel into the teaching of Christianity.
Other interpretations of the relation of Christian faith and ethical conduct have been made. The Kierkegaardian position, however, is part of a long line of Christian thought starting with Augustine, emphasized by Marcion, restated by Calvin, its dialectic spun out by Kierkegaard, and eventuating in contemporary crisis theology. With some modification it is also basic to the viewpoint of Reinhold Niebuhr. If the separation of religious faith from ethical conduct is not essential to Christianity, it at least finds a much more favorable theological climate there than in Judaism.
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In distinction to all this we have often heard Judaism described as ethical monotheism. Judaism also starts with faith, a faith held in the passion of inwardness. All of the pragmatic and rational arguments in the world will not create faith. But Jewish faith involves no intellectual absurdity and no aesthetic offense. It is simply faith in the one God who is the source and highest expression of the ethical values that are the content of his revelation to men.
There is agapé in Judaism, too. God revealed the Torah to men; it was not men who sought out the Torah. But there is also room for eros in Judaism, for the upsurge of the human heart after God, in the certain knowledge, also held in faith, that he is nigh to all who call upon him in truth. It is God in his transcendence who reveals his will in the midst of Sinaitic thunder and lightning. It is God in his immanence who bends down low to reward the silent worshiper with a glimpse of the glory more than human. As Rabbi Leo Baeck has expressed the matter: “If at first comes the searching query with its Whence, Whither, and Why, which took hold of man, there comes now the decisive answer with its Thou Shalt and Thou Canst. If religion showed in the beginning the way from God to man, it now shows the way from man to God. Secret and commandment become united; it is only both together which give the complete meaning to our lives. The unity of both is religion as Judaism possesses it.” The religious Jew lives in the spiritual tension created by God’s unfathomable character in the cosmos and the emancipating commandment given as a way of life for this world now.
In Jewish ethics it is the deed which is decisive. Right will is necessary to the perfectly good act, but the will must be exercised in the pursuit of goals which are good, which enhance human welfare. God has told man what is good, and what he requires of him: that he do justice. It is stated in the Midrash, “I call heaven and earth to witness that whether a person be non-Jew or Jew, man or woman, bondsman or bondswoman, according to the deed which he does the holy spirit rests upon him.” The word mitzvah means both commandment and, in common parlance, good deed. Torah is teaching and halachah a way in which one may walk. In Judaism ethical decision must issue in conduct which is good. In placing the locus of ethics predominantly in the results of action, Jews keep very good philosophical company. Most Western ethical thought has been of this kind, from the Greek hedonists through Bentham, Mill, and the other British Utilitarians.
Moreover, in Judaism a constant and very close relationship has been maintained between faith and works. By works we do not mean the ecclesiastical works of the church, but the good deeds, the righteous conduct, the ma’asim tovim of Judaism. It is the characteristic Jewish attitude to accept in faith the fact that God’s revelation is always in terms of an expanding ethic, of greater justice and righteousness and mercy, as man grows in spiritual stature. The other aspect of this relationship is the doctrine, first taught by the prophets, that the purest worship of God lies in carrying out the implications of his ethical revelation. As long ago as the 8th century B. C. E., the prophet Amos told his people assembled for festival observance in the city of Beth-el:
I hate, I despise your feasts,
And I will take no delight in your solemn
assemblies.
Yea, though ye offer me burnt-offerings and
your meal-offerings,
I will not accept them;
Neither will I regard the peace-offerings of
your fat beasts.
Take thou away from me the noise of thy
songs;
And let me not hear the melody of thy psal-
teries.
But let justice well up as waters,
And righteousness as a mighty stream.
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No thinker in the long tradition of the synagogue was more reserved with respect to claiming sure knowledge of God’s attributes than the philosopher Maimonides. Yet it was Maimonides who showed how men could deduce at least one positive attribute of God: his ethical will. In his Guide for the Perplexed, Maimonides wrote: “In a similar manner we have shown that the object of the enumeration of God’s thirteen attributes is the lesson that we should acquire similar attributes and act accordingly. The object of the above passage is therefore to declare that the perfection in which man can truly glory is attained by him when he has acquired, as far as this is possible for man, the knowledge of God, the knowledge of his providence, and of the manner in which it influences his creatures in their production and continued existence. Having acquired this knowledge, he will then be determined always to seek loving-kindness, judgment, and righteousness, and thus to imitate the ways of God.”
The idea of ethical monotheism thus becomes more than an academic or pulpit phrase. The “teleological suspension of the ethical,” of such fundamental import to the Existentialism of Kierkegaard, results in the divorce of religious faith from the practice of ethical works. The content of the religious life is emptied out. Each subjective thinker may replenish the cisterns from the vagaries of his own mind. There is no check on the quality of the inflow beyond the intensity of the individual’s appropriation. Moreover, if one chooses what is wrong with great pathos and earnestness, the psychological expectation would seem to be that one would therefore cling all the more stubbornly to the wrong choice. No matter how earnestly he chooses, the existing individual would stand in need of a method of determining what is worthy of being chosen.
Kierkegaard himself admits a further difficulty involved in suspending the ethical when the individual enters into an absolute relation with the Absolute. “The daemonic has this in common with the divine,” he writes, “the Individual can enter into an absolute relation with either.” When the ethical is divorced from the religious, the man of faith will have no way of distinguishing God’s demand from that of the devil. The consequences of such confusion are not difficult to imagine.
These problems do not exist in Judaism. Other problems, but not these. Judaism is founded on faith in one spiritual, eternal God who is the source of revelation and the object of aspiration. Jewish ethics, while taking the good will into account, is basically an ethics of ends and consequences. Religious faith and ethical conduct stand in the closest possible relationship. It is characteristic of such an ethical religion that God’s revelation is always evaluated, the truth of its divine origin tested, by the very mark which it always possesses: that of demanding greater ethical understanding and higher ethical conduct.
Considered in its most inclusive sense as the sum total of Jewish religious creativity, Torah has been the repository of this revelation. Many generations of scholars have obeyed the behest to “turn it over and turn it over, for everything is in it.” In the course of this exposure to the weathering of history many codes and cults have become dead letters. But the essential meaning of Torah has been distilled, purified, and put before the people in each generation with all the clarity at the command of Jewish scholarship. This essential meaning has always been concerned with God’s demand that men live the highest ethical life which they are capable of understanding and carrying out.
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It is the failure of Jewish religious scholars in this generation to discharge their obligation in mature fashion which has led to the disastrous ignorance of Judaism which marks our times. That is why we lose some of our most sensitive minds—to the Catholic church, an institution never lax in setting forth its philosophy of religion for all to learn—or to sheer apathy and indifference. Even among those affiliated with the synagogue, few of our people realize that in Judaism no suspension, setting aside, or dethronement of the ethical is possible. This fundamental aspect of Judaism holds true both because Jewish ethics carries its own telos within itself, and because the very source of the ethical demand is conceived of in Judaism as God himself, who will not set aside his own imperative call.
Like all of Kierkegaard’s works, Fear and Trembling is beautifully written, salted with great wit, provocative of much philosophical meditation. Yet I closed its cover with a deep sense of dissatisfaction. Whatever I had learned about Christianity, “crisis theology,” and Existentialist thought, I had learned nothing about our father, Abraham. Wheth-construed as an historical character or a mythological figure, I had learned nothing about Abraham.
The trial of Moriah had been a time of anguish for the character Abraham. As traditional commentators have pointed out, his faith was subjected to the most severe test that could be conceived. But the story had been told to demonstrate the fact that God did not demand the sacrifice, that men should understand that ethical conduct was the mode of worship demanded by God. The rabbis were right—at least poetically—when they held in Pirke Aboth that the substituted ram was of such import in God’s plan that it had been fashioned between the sixth day of Creation and the seventh, on which the Creator rested. Whatever else the history or myth of Abraham and Isaac meant, it did not mean a “teleological suspension of the ethical,” which is a Christian doctrine historically unfounded, dialectically unnecessary, and, from the Jewish standpoint, ethically and religiously impossible.
As my Existentialist train steamed leisurely through the South that night I nevertheless felt indebted to Magister Kierkegaard. It is his great service to reveal the basic religious issue of our time. He has shown that an either/or choice does exist in contemporary religion: either the “teleological suspension of the ethical,” or the obligation to perfect the world under the sovereignty of God.
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