The interrelated concepts of faith and sacrifice have remained, throughout my explorations into religion, matters of endless fascination. In the last work in this series, I adapted the story of the Binding of Isaac, as Kierkegaard had done, and took an overview of the history of faith and sacrifice, especially as they occurred in the Hindu religions. In this installment, I’ll be turning to the details of the views of two particular philosophers who wrote extensively on the subject of faith in particular, Søren Kierkegaard and Paul Tillich.

Søren Kierkegaard (1813-1855) was born into a large, affluent family in Copenhagen and lived a life marked early on by tragedy. By the time he was 25, both of his parents and five of his six siblings had died. He was a devout Christian and much of his work focuses on explication of his Christian faith, but he did not conform to the religious norms of his time nor place. He believed, much as I do, that religion is a valid and desirable enterprise, but that people in general are going about it the wrong way. He believed that attempts to rationalize religion and integrate it into rational philosophical thought, as Hegel did, were entirely wrong-headed, and that religion — which must ultimately be founded upon faith — must be fundamentally and irreconcilably an irrational enterprise.

For Kierkegaard, the truly religious were of two sorts. The first, the knight of infinite resignation, is the inferior of the two. Simple resignation to whatever what might be God’s will is a bare substitute for faith, because, for Kierkegaard, faith is what allows one to commune directly with God. “For in the temporal world God and I cannot talk together, we have no common language” (from Fear and Trembling, 1843).

Abraham was at the center of Kierkegaard’s questions concerning faith and religion. For those not familiar with the story, Abraham was the ancient, perhaps mythological patriarch of the Jewish ethno-religion. He was a devout servant of God, who at one point commanded him to sacrifice his own beloved son to Them as a burnt offering. God intervened only at the last minute, satisfied that Abraham had proved his faith.

Kierkegaard could only even speak of faith as an impartial observer, under a pseudonym such as Johann de silencio, John of the Silence, who himself does not even understand what is going on but who nevertheless appreciates its depth and mystery. That’s the only way that Kierkegaard was able to write of this at all. When one becomes a knight of faith, there are no words. This reflects what many have written of mystical experience, or personal religious experience: it is ineffable. It can be known and experienced, but words cannot signify it. According to William James, who writes extensively on such experiences in his book The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902), ineffability is definitive of mystical experience; for experiences to be considered mystical at all, they must transcend verbal discourse.

Faith, for Abraham, was not a matter of whether to believe in God. As God had spoken to him directly and intervened in his life on several occasions, belief would have been a non-issue. And as Kierkegaard explicated, neither was it a matter of mere obedience. When God commanded Abraham to sacrifice his son Isaac, Abraham needed to go beyond mere belief, and needed to go beyond simple resignation to the loss of his son. Abraham needed to believe, in faith, that God’s will would be fulfilled, and needed to believe, in faith, that his son would be saved.

The knight of faith believes the impossible, not despite the absurd but “on the strength of the absurd.” For the knight of faith, to believe so is to enter into God’s divine order, which created the world from contradiction and impossibility (cf. Genesis 1, or 10:129 of the Rigveda, the Creation Hymn, both of which are rife with contradiction). An ethical person — and Kierkegaard thoroughly repudiates the notion that Abraham was at all ethical in his actions, saying rather that, for him, ethics had been “teleologically suspended” in the service of faith and sacrifice — enters into this divine order through service to what is universal, but for Kierkegaard, ethics allow one to approach the divine only intermediately. The knight of faith, on the other hand, relates directly to the absolute, the divine, and relates to the universal only via this primary and direct relationship.

Kierkegaard examines the story of Abraham and writes of it…

…in order to see how monstrous a paradox faith is, a paradox capable of making a murder into a holy act well pleasing to God, a paradox which gives Isaac back to Abraham, which no thought can grasp because faith begins precisely where thinking leaves off. Fear and Trembling

We then have the following options: to accept this God to whom such an act is well pleasing, or to say “this is not enough. I need more.” There’s certainly more to be found. If we want to accept such a grand concept of God, are we to take what one book says about Them? When there are thousands at least?

What I wonder about is the faith of Kierkegaard himself. Again and again, his writings on faith turn towards an unresolvable paradox. Kierkegaard was undoubtedly a devout Christian, but I think that he was also a kind of Satanist, because he sought to individualize religion and he was as well a relentless and polemical critic of the Hegemon, by way of its manifestation in Kierkegaard’s particular time and place, the Church of Denmark. I have often heard it from others that the objective of Christianity is to become Christ-like, but this is a very different message from the Pauline Christianity that sprung up in the wake of Jesus’ death and came to dominate Christendom, in which the message of Christ is secondary, even irrelevant, to the implications of his crucifixion, death, and resurrection. Jesus was an individual in relationship with God. Different branches of Christianity have seen that relationship differently, but that some relationship existed is a necessary tenet of the faith. For those seeking a religion founded on the message, rather than the person, of Jesus, the notions of congregational orthodoxy and dogmatic doctrine seem antithetical, as these removes the individual relationship.

Kierkegaard’s work was a major influence on Paul Tillich (1886-1965), a prominent Christian theologian of the mid-20th century whose work, primarily Systematic Theology (1951) and Dynamics of Faith (1956), has been among my own most significant influences. I think that Tillich’s objective was to take Kierkegaard’s conclusions on faith and frame them in such a way that would not only make them relevant and approachable but which would also neatly refute an interpretation of faith that Tillich saw as being both inadmissible and adverse to personal spiritual development.

The notion of faith that Tillich is refuting is what he refers to as “idolatrous faith,” which is “an act of knowledge that has a low degree of evidence.” This is typically what people mean by the word “faith;” either that, or they take it to further extremes, which one might describe as belief in things for which there is no evidence or even strong evidence to the contrary. For young-Earth creationists, for example, belief that the age of the Earth is between 6,000 and 10,000 years, in spite of all of the available evidence to the contrary, is an act of faith. Belief in the traditional notion of God (the tri-omni conception: omnipotent, omniscient, omnipresent) despite the logical problems that arise from such a belief, would likewise be an act of faith.

But as Kierkegaard found, this understanding of faith is fundamentally inconsistent; Abraham, the so-called father of faith, would not have required it. In the modern world where evidence for such things as the old Earth hypothesis and the natural selection theory of evolution is already overwhelming even as evidence continues to mount, such a notion of faith becomes less and less viable. “Faith” becomes synonymous with “delusion.” But worse, in Tillich’s view, is that idolatrous faith removes something that he views as being critical to spiritual development: doubt. Idolatrous faith is obviously antithetical to doubt, but true faith as Tillich understands it requires risk and courage, and courage can only exist in the presence of doubt.

Tillich lays out his alternative — and, in his view, necessary and unavoidable — definition of faith without ambiguity: faith is ultimate concern. Faith is having a concern, an idea by which one is to some degree consumed, that is ultimate, meaning that it is last and final and that it trumps other concerns to such a degree that one dedicates the full inquisitive power of their being towards it. This is why it requires doubt: when we dedicate our full selves towards some idea, doubt is a necessary component, because that is one of our most powerful tools for relating ourselves to the world and we cannot come to know anything at all without it.

Tillich acknowledges a force in religion that he calls “the demonic.” “The holy which is demonic is still holy,” he says (in Dynamics of Faith), but here he and I disagree as to what’s what. He says that it is idolatrous faith that is demonic. I think that idolatrous faith has become or perhaps always was the norm, and the demonic is the proper response to that situation. But the point of the matter is that Tillich and I agree that there is a valid and perhaps even necessary aspect to religion that is subversive. One thing that Tillich posits as a consequence of doubt is the destruction of idols: “Faith risks the vanishing of the concrete god in whom it believes.” And this is necessary if the divine is our ultimate concern, because only such a process can reveal it among a plethora of deceptions like the traditional conception of God.

What Kierkegaard and Tillich (and I) agree on is that faith is not what the Hegemon is making it out to be. It’s something else, something that everyone (excepting nihilists, with whom we’re not concerned) has with regard to different concerns and different religious content. It may seem like an attempt to rescue the notion of faith from the flames of scientific advances in metaphysics, but given the story of Abraham and its relation to faith, it’s what faith must always have been. From the perspective of the Hegemon, the modern, popular notion of faith (believe in the absence of evidence) is entirely sensible: if you can get people to believe you without having to give them any evidence, you can exercise control over them. For those for whom doubt is a component of faith, brute control is more difficult or impossible, so it is understandable why the Hegemon would want to suppress this understanding.

The Satanist may scoff at the notion of faith, and if that notion is the modern conception — what Kierkegaard would call resignation and what Tillich would call idolatry — they would be right to do so. By definition of the word “reason”, there are no reasons to believe in things for which there is a low degree of evidence (or no evidence at all, or evidence to the contrary). But given a more internally-consistent understanding, it’s something that Christians (at least those who agree with Tillich) and Satanists unavoidably have in common. Only the content differs.

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