                           20020117.00

     I share with Alex Hancock, with Grammatophile and with Wanda
Warren Berry the revulsion from the human sacrifice that
unavoidably ensues from the absence of religious pluralism. I
respectfully disagree, however, with the assertion that religious
pluralism was a matter of indifference to Kierkegaard. Indeed it
is from Kierkegaard, above all other poets,  that we have the
last word on sacrificial slaughter. To see this, one need only
emend the catalogue of dramatis personae of Fear and Trembling,
replacing Abraham's name with that of Calvin and Isaac with
Servetus. Of Servetus' filial trust in Calvin I have no evidence,
but surely one must ascribe to Calvin paternal responsibility, if
only as a city father. The fatal difference between the two
plays, fatal both figuratively and literally, is that in the
Geneva production the stage hands goofed when they forgot to
lower the obligatory Ram ex Machina onto the proscenium in time
to avert a real disaster.

     The critics will argue whether or not the ram's timely
appearance on Moriah really made as much difference as the
tender-minded would like to assume. (I haven't opened Fear and
Trembling in four years and my memories may have become
adulterated in the interval, so I wouldn't be surprised by a
scholarly refutation.) What I remember most vividly is the
spiritual devastation that befell Abraham in the ensuing hours
and days and years, a death of the soul as frightening as the
potential exsanguination of Isaac averted by the ram.

     I was reminded of the lines in Goethe's Iphigenie auf Tauris
where Iphigenia, the priestess of Diana, trapped in a conflict of
conscience by her official duty to slaughter, as a sacrifice to
Diana, her own brother Orestes, prays to the Olympian Gods to
relieve her of this holy obligation, and thus to save her,
Iphigenia, from hating the gods and as she says, (with authentic
Teutonic idealism), to save the gods' image in her soul.
     O dass in meinem Busen nicht zuletzt
     Ein Widerwille keime! der Titanen,
     der alten Goetter, tiefer Hass auf euch,
     Olympier, nicht auch die zarte Brust
     Mit Geierklauen fasse! Rettet mich,
     und rettet euer Bild in meiner Seele!

     It is not too far-fetched to conjecture that not only
Isaac's survival, but the survival of Isaac's seed required the
sacrifice of a god on the pinnacle of Mount Moriah.  God sent the
ram to save Isaac, the ram's blood was shed.  Later it would be a
lamb's blood by which the sons of Isaac were saved. As the Divine
was slaughtered in the lamb, so it may be argued the Divine was
slaughtered in the ram, subsequently to be resurrected from the
burning bush, a god irrevocably subjective, a god whose name was
forbidden, a god whose subjectivity, to the extent that it was
sustainable, provided the ultimate protection against a
recurrence of the Moriah debacle.  May God be merciful to us and
save us from objective gods.

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