Mike Hornick writes:

> ... Push it farther, and you find places where this is inverted,
> and the Boss himself is the one retracted. Not taking, but 
> relinquishing. The Jewish tsim-tsum notion of creation might
> be an example. But I think esp. of the New Testament passion
> narratives. There it's God making the paradoxical move, with
> infinite resignation (Good Friday) *and* receiving Christ
> back (Easter).

I thank Mike Hornick for his comments, and for pointing out
that the Passion of Jesus may be construed as God's taking back
his only son. There is clearly an analogy between the miraculous
birth of Isaac and the virgin birth of Jesus. Jesus is God's
"only-begotten" son. Isaac, although Abraham had other sons, was
his only son by Sarah, whose maternal senility parallels in uniqueness
the maternal virginity of Mary. As Isaac trudged up the slopes of Mount
Moriah, bearing "the wood of the burnt offering ... laid upon him",
so Jesus "bearing his cross went forth ..." to Golgatha. And with
Isaac as with Jesus, the sacrifice was symbolic, in that the angel,
at the last moment, stayed Abraham's hand; while Jesus, on the
third day, rose from the dead.

If one interprets the Temptation of Abraham as God's symbolic taking
back of Isaac, then one might reconsider the story of Job as the
most explicit of the accounts of God's taking back his gifts to man.
I see an important difference between the temptations of Job and of
Abraham: Job was deprived of his wealth, his family and his health
by instrumentalities external to him, whereas Abraham was commanded
to sacrifice Isaac not only with his own hands, but more importantly,
with his own soul. One way of formulating Abraham's predicament is to
ask whether each of the steps that Abraham took on his path to the
summit of Moriah was an act of his own free will or an act of the
will of God; whether the awful injunction had fractured his soul
and driven him, like the hero of Greek myth, insane, the punishment
of a mortal who consorts too familiarly with the gods.

This consideration raises the possibility that the prospective
sacrifice of Isaac might have been not only in compliance with
God's command, but an act also of Abraham's secret volition,
that in sacrificing Isaac, Abraham would give back Isaac to God,
not from hostility to Isaac, but its opposite, because the gift
was too great, because Abraham loved Isaac too much, because,
in the colloquial wisdom, Abraham "loved Isaac to death."
Two secular literary references come to mind. The first is 
Herodotus' account of Polycrates the tyrant of Samos, a story
familiar to me through Schiller's ballad "Der Ring des Polykrates".
Polycrates, because he was supremely happy, was persuaded by his
friend, the King of Egypt, to cast his dearest possession, in this case,
a ring, into the sea, in order to propitiate the gods, who would not
tolerate the unalloyed bliss of a human being. The second reference
is from Thomas Mann's novel Dr. Faustus, where the crazed Adrian
Leverkuehn blurts out: "Ich will es zuruecknehmen." and on inquiry
by his sympathetic friend, it turns out that what Leverkuehn wishes
to take back is not only his own artistic creation, but also the
Ninth Symphony, and all else that is good and beautiful that man
has created, because "Es soll nicht sein," it ought not to be.

Implicit in God's taking back that which he has given to man
is the notion that all that comes into being must pass away:
When we are sane we know the taking is an act of God; when we
are crazed, we destroy by an act of our own. It is a fundamental
human experience that was enunciated by Anaximander in 550 B.C.
in the context of early Greek cosmology:

      "The origin of all things is chaos.
    From chaos things that exist have arisen,
   and into chaos things that exist dissolve,
          according to what they owe.
        Thus they requite to each other
      just penalties for their injustice,
      pursuant to the ordinance of time."

The temptation of Abraham, it seems to me, is an expression
appropriate to the culture of its time of the religious
truth articulated by Job: "Naked came I out of my mother's womb,
and naked shall I return thither: the Lord gave and the Lord has
taken away; blessed be the name of the Lord." The fear and trembling
which the taking back - and the giving back - of the gifts of the
Lord unavoidably occasions is what Kierkegaard described so
compellingly. I wish I had not written that I considered his
annotations sentimental and superfluous.

Ernst Meyer
review@netcom.com